Discussion Forum from Sociology

Discussion Forum from Sociology

Sociology

Paper instructions:

Choose a topic we went over in class and describe what we learned or how it impacted me. use quotes to support your ideas.

topic discussed in class: Nature versus nurture – about how they share within an individual that influence their behaviors, traits, appearance, etc.(over half page)

Also, please give a just short response for my other classmate forum below. (2-3 stenteces)

There are so many controversies going on about the probability of nature versus nurture that stays inside a person, some says 50:50 (biopsychosocial perspective), other argues nature > nurture (social perspective), or nature < nurture (biological perspective), or even undetermined.

Let’s take my cousin as an example: his parents got divorce after he was born and he spends his entire years with his mother (as my aunt) and he never gets to meet his father (as my uncle) for even once. Strangely, even with the influence of teaching through my aunt since he was a baby, he exhibits some behavior that similar as my uncle. Can we say he is more influenced by nature rather than nurture?

Go to further distance, (I cannot remember the name of this twin brothers), so, right after that, their mother died just after they (twin brothers) were born. Later, each of them was adopted from two different families in two different states of the States. Years after years, the older brother tried to find his younger brother through the internet and newspaper, and they finally united. Later an afternoon in a coffee shop, they had a long talk about how have each other been those many years, and they were so amazed of how common they both share about their hobbies, the first girlfriend they have had, etc.

The weird things here are: same biological parents but lived with different adopted parents (values that have been taught are different), live in two different places (environment must be different), never see each other… but they have so many common things of each other. Hence, it is nature or nurture?

The reason is quite simple: they are identical twins even though have non-shared living environment and adopted; they share nearly 99% of their genes, fingerprints are almost identical. Despite the fact, their personality (if get test using the Big Five Factor) must be different (such as, temperament, illness may have, order of who came out first and second…) Right in the bottom of my response is the page you would like to look at.

According to both of the examples I have presented to you above, one can’t work by itself and they may share equally in an individual. From both examples, the kids live with the mother or the adopted parents, they teach the kids different value systems, beliefs (politics, religion, ideas) but carrying inside all of them is the nucleus of spermatozoon of the father and the egg of the mother. So there is no reason why they can’t share similar thing within them and their biological parents.

Besides, socialisation also encourages them to adapt new ideas (that are not taught at home) which further influences their behaviors and temper. In a nutshell, they both have characteristics from their biological parents before they were born as well as characteristics which adopt from the outside world, and both of them equally influence the person.

For now, those ideas will keep the controversies in Science continue on, but as we progress to a future of more advance stage of technology, the answer of nature versus nurture will be revealed.