They are second-by-second active players, engaged in life's rough and tumble from the time of conception, and acutely alert to all that goes on around them.So life is not nature (symbolised by the genes) versus nurture (the environment) Nature operates through nurture. Each gene has the potential to do its thing; but what it does, within any one person (or mushroom or oak tree) depends in large measure on what it is allowed to do, by other genes, the rest of the cell, the body and the environment at large. Our nature is realised, made manifest, via nurture.The truth of this could be illustrated by a billion examples; Ridley provides a well-chosen score or so. Though twin studies have a slightly murky history, in modern hands they are highly instructive Thus people commonly speak of the "cycle of violence". Children who were beaten up by their parents tend to beat up their own children – and it is largely taken for granted in this still Freudian age that each generation simply learns its bad habits from the one before.But if one of a pair of identical twins from a violent home is adopted by kind, non-violent people, he or she is still likely to grow up as a child-beater. Yet the adopted twin is less likely to be violent than the one who stayed in the atmosphere of violence.
The propensity for violence is to some extent innate – "in the genes" is a shorthand way to express it. But the propensity is modified by upbringing; and if the innate tendency is not too strong, it may never be manifest at all.Such formal studies are costly and difficult Yet, as Ridley says, the results seem common sense. Who doubts that "nature" and "nurture" both play their part? The idea resounds through all literature. In many a folk tale, the noble's son's nobility shows through, though he be dressed in peasant garb; and in many a movie, the killer cowboy is tamed by the love of a good widow woman, and the admiration of her freckly small son. Stories are stories, but they are not lies.It's the task of experts and intellectuals to improve on folk wisdom.
They tend first to suggest that common sense is a very poor guide, and then to adopt some extreme position that flies in the face of it Society at large rewards extremism. But as extremism reigns, so humanity suffers.The 20th century in particular suffered mightily from extreme positions in the "nature-nurture" debate. The "nature will out" school manifested as "genetic determinists", who include the eugenicists who thought it was proper to improve the human "stock" by selective breeding, as cattle are bred. Hitler made the nastiness apparent, but in the early 20th century eugenics was modish. It was espoused by such socialist luminaries as G B Shaw and the Webbs, while H G Wells effectively proposed the elimination of almost everybody who was not middle-class Caucasian. Eugenics was opposed in Britain by Catholic and high-church gentlemen like G K Chesterton and Conan Doyle, but many other countries (particularly the US) sterilised thousands deemed "inadequate".As Ridley points out, the "environment is all" school can be equally violent.
