Nature Approach And The Nurture Approach example essay topic

The Nature Approach There are two ways in which sociologists study human behavior. The Nature approach and the Nurture approach. The Nature approach has many claims. One is; the whole universe is deterministic and follows unavoidable sequences of cause, leading to effect. What this generally means is that all the events in the world that occur are pre-determined.

By what you ask? Nature (laws of physics, for example). Another claim of the Nature Approach is that man is like a puppet on strings of nature. If one wants to control man, all one has to do is find the strings. This can only be done if it is for the well being of man. Anything that man is driven to do is because of mechanics of nature; there is simply no such thing as free will.

Above all, even human thought is caused and is mere epiphenomenon, which is a secondary and inconsequential effect of a main event. Any thought in which man has, are not their own thoughts, but just a part of nature. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the Nurture approach. For centuries, conventional wisdom has held that parental nurturing will definitively shape a human's personality and behavior.

According to believers of the Nurture approach, it's the assumption that what makes human beings turn out the way they do, aside from their genes, the environmental part of human development, is the experiences they have in society, and in particular the experiences they have with the people they encounter. The origins of the nurture approach are stemmed from the studies of Copernicus and Galileo. Galileo was an Italian astronomer, natural philosopher, and one of the central architects of modern science. In his Two Chief World Systems, he set forth the idea that the sun was the center of the universe, rather than the earth. Forced to recant and forbidden to teach or talk about his views, Galileo is said to have muttered in the stillness of his room, 'Still it turns' in reference to the rotation of the earth around the sun. Galileo de centered the earth and by extension all theology which holds that the earth and creatures upon it were a special act of creation.

Now, let's say we were examining an experiment performed on a set of identical twins. Twins are born with the same genetic makeup, which has been shaped by this world. According to the nature theory, they will have certain genes that cause them to experience permanent objects the same way. If, however, one of the twins were raised in some other galaxy where objects were not permanent, would that child grow up confused as to why the objects continued to spontaneously change, or would their brains adapt to the new environment?

In retrospect, either nature or nurture influences all of human experience. Although it may seem as though one or the other is completely responsible for specific aspects of human nature and our actions, both contribute equally. This is not simply a black and white discussion where nature controls our desires, and nurture, our reason and intellect.