Nature Nurture Issue example essay topic

When I was a young child, people always used to squabble over whether I was more like my mother or my father. Some people swore that not only was the physical resemblance to my mother similar, but our personalities were eerily identical. Others argued that my father and I were carbon copies of each other, right down to our Scorpio wit. Then later in life I found myself assimilated more and more to my best friend, who I hadn't grown up with, but had begun to spend every waking minute with during my early teenage years. People swore we were sisters, and agreed that we were twins separated at birth.

So is the development of my personality mapped out before my birth, thanks to my parent's genes, or is my personality a result of my day to day experiences? This is the essence of the controversial nature-nurture issue. The nature-nurture issue is the longstanding controversy over the relative contributions of genes and experience to the development of psychological traits and behaviors. In my mind, heredity is without question a major factor in the development of people's personalities, and nowhere is this more apparent than in my life. Some of my similarities to my parents are so unintentional that I find myself a bit irritated when I realize that I am emulating them so closely.

An excellent example of this issue is my similarities to my father presently. Even before I was born, my father was always a good talker. He was the salesman type, the type that could sell anything to anybody. He is a fast talker, and also used his gift to get things for free wherever he went. God only knows where his gift came from (perhaps his father) but somehow I wound up with it. I was always the one that had that priceless ability to talk myself out of trouble under any circumstances, and we would often joke that I "got it from my dad's side".

As I have come to learn more about heredity and, specifically, the nature-nurture issue, I can't help but wonder if qualities such as the "salesman" quality are indeed passed down to me through my father's genes, or if it's just something that I picked up from him during my childhood. The nurture part of the equation suggests that I obtained this quality through watching my father and possibly even idolizing him on some levels. Of course all children imitate their parents, and that is one way that they learn many things that they weren't born with. The nature aspect, however, declares that this quality lay dormant in my genes until I understood how to use it. This would explain the reason that although we grew up in the same environment, my sister fails to possess this quality; it just wasn't in her genetic blueprints. Perhaps the nature-nurture issue will never be totally resolved, but in my opinion there's no urgent need to find a concrete answer.

As far as I can tell, a child is almost always made up of a balance of their own experiences and their parent's genetic makeup.