Developmental Psychology

        The question of Nature-Nurture can bring up a complex discussion when it comes to making points and having to prove why your "belief" is correct. It all depends on the topic and how passionate you feel about the debate between the two. Although there are good reasons to Nature or Nurture, they both could possibly be correct, there is no right or wrong answer. Three topics that really stir up a conversation would be studying aggressiveness in dogs, adoption study, and twin studies.

        The nature-nurture is a debate within psychology concerning particular aspects of behavior are a reason for either inherited or acquired characteristics.

• Nature - genetic inheritance and biological factors

       Example: Hair, height, color of eyes and certain diseases

• Nurture - the product of exposure, experience and learning of an individual 

          Example: Political attitudes, intelligence, personality,  and homosexuality

1.  Homosexuality:

        This is a highly debated topic that is always controverted over.  Some say that people have a choice of what and who they like as in their sexuality.  This is thought of as the older and more ignorant belief in today's society.  According to that thought of people being able to choose their sexuality, it would fall on the nurture side of the argument.  This is because it would be thought to be a product of how they were raised instead of how they are born.  The other side of the argument is that people are born either liking the opposite or the same gender.  This means that it is natural and the person does not have a choice; that one is simply born heterosexual or homosexual.  This is the more popular belief in this day and age. 

2.  Height and Weight:

        The side of the argument that is nature is that a person that has short parents will be short and a person who has tall parents will be tall.  The same goes for weight.  This is the more popular belief because it makes more sense.  A parent's genes get passed down to their children and their children usually end up getting those same physical features.  On the other side of the argument, the nurture side, it says that the lifestyle that the child is raised in could be responsible for height and weight appearances.  To put more simply, if the child is being raised by foster parents that are very slim, but the child's biological parents are more heavy set, the child could become a skinnier person instead of a heavy set like the biological parents.  This would be due to the fact that their diet could be different.

Height, in my opinion, is a little more of a stretch, but studies show that diet and the people around you might have an effect on how tall you become.

3.  Intelligence:

        Now I feel that this one could be the most controversial out of them all.  On the nature side of things, you get some of your ability to learn and pick up things faster from your parents.  This is the reason that a person would appear smarter because they learn things faster and easier like their parents did.  According to the nurture side, your parents could have been not so fast at learning things and not as good at just understanding all this knowledge.  Yet, while you were growing up they read to you, they made you study, and the friends you hung around picking up things very easily and you started to learn from them.  It could also stem from the child's educational background.

4.  Athletic Ability:

A persons athleticism from the nurture side of the argument is that no matter who the parents are, some one can be raised to become an athlete.  This has been proved many times.  Take some of the professional and Olympic athletes out there today.  In some cases their parents were not athletes at all.  I like to use the Ball family for example.  Their dad, Lavar, is not much of an athlete at all, or at least not anymore, yet his three kids are on track to all be in the NBA.  This is pretty amazing that this could be accomplished by just training and not very much on the genetic part.  The nature side of the argument can also be proven to be true because many professional athletes had their parents or other family to look up to.  One example would be Shaq and his son.  Both are very tall and very athletic. Shaq was a pro basketball player that made the hall of fame and his son is on a track to make it to the NBA.  He is playing extremely well at the high school level and is following in his dad's foot steps.

5.  Personality:

Personality from the nature side of the debate is when even if a child was adopted, they would exhibit some traits in their attitude and overall personality of their biological parents.  An example of this would be that their biological parents had some what of a temper and their foster parents where very relaxed and patient, the child would still have the same temper as the real parents.  On the other side of the argument, the adopted child would act and have the personality of whoever raised them.  Using the same example of the biological parents and the foster parents, the child would be calm and patient instead of quick to anger because that's how they were raised.  This is the nurture side of things.

        The debate is still ongoing because there will always be two sides to the situation and nature-nurture are interwoven with one another. It is like Nature is nurture (vice versa). It can be one or the other like I said before there could not be a right or wrong answer in some situations/debates.

         My personal in take to this topic is how interesting it may be to have so many posibillities to a reason why a chiuahaha may be so agressive or twin studies. It is so much to learn about, and the bright side is that it was a topic that really caught my attention during class earlier this week.

Sources:

Nature in Psychology | Simply Psychology

https://www.simplypsychology.org/naturevsnurture.html

The Nature-Nurture Question | Noba

http://nobaproject.com/modules/the-nature-nurture-question