The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules—But Whose Hand Is It?

For most of the twentieth and well into the twenty-first century, nature and nurture were terms that stood in evident contradiction to one another. Nature represented the idea that human personality and behavior were heritable and immune to short-term change. Nurture, however, suggested the opposite: that they were the products of outside influence and primarily of education. Here nature was to nurture as biology was to culture, heredity was to environment, instinct was to intelligence, and fate was to freedom.

In the latter half of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century the idea that nature rather than nurture might be important in shaping personality and behavior appeared tantamount to justifying inequality, rationalizing prejudice, underwriting discrimination, discouraging humanitarianism, excusing violence, promoting privilege, disparaging women and stigmatizing minorities. Nurture was associated with liberal, left-wing humanitarianism, democracy, pluralism, and freedom. Consequently those who favored nature appeared to be authoritarian reactionaries, given to indefensible prejudices of all kinds.

Looked at from this point of view, support for nurture over nature was more than merely taking sides in a scientific controversy; it meant standing up for all that was right and decent in the modern world against much that was wrong and reprehensible. There seemed no contest: nature got all the bad publicity and came out on the wrong side almost every time. Nurture won by acclamation!

The result was that people were often ready to accept that nature may determine characteristics such as eye colour, handedness, or susceptibility to certain illnesses. But many balked at the idea that nature rather than nurture could affect much else about people’s minds, attitudes, and behavior. So nature became largely limited to the physical, and nurture was believed to explain most of the psychological aspects of development. People might be physically the creation of their genes, but psychologically they were the creatures of their culture.

As the extract from the following letter, signed by 50 scientists and published in American Psychologist in July 1972, points out,

Today … censure, punishment, and defamation are being applied against scientists who emphasize the role of heredity in human behavior. Published positions are often misquoted and misrepresented; emotional appeals replace scientific reasoning; arguments are directed against the man rather than against the evidence. And a large number of scientists, who have studied the evidence and are persuaded of the great role played by heredity in human behavior, are silent. It is virtually heresy to express a hereditarian view, or to recommend further study of the biological bases of behavior. A kind of orthodox environmentalism dominates the liberal academy, and strongly inhibits teachers, researchers and scholars from turning to biological explanation or efforts.

Part of the reason why the nurture side of the debate acquired such an aura of sanctity while the nature side acquired such evil associations may lie in the fact that the early twentieth-century and late nineteenth century views were very different, with nature enjoying a much more positive press and being directly associated in people’s minds with then-recent and revolutionary advances in biology—principally evolution and genetics—and with Social Darwinism and the then hugely popular Eugenics movement in particular. However, the further association of both with Fascism in general and Nazism in particular probably explains why the nature side of the issue became so controversial after World War 2.

Source: Image courtesy Elsevier

But this is politics—or, to be more precise, the mentalistic dimension of what you might call a cultural complex in the Freudian sense of "complex." Yet if you analyse the history of the nature-nurture controversy in detail and with the objective, mechanistic complement of cognition in mind, what you find is disturbingly different, as I report in a newly published contribution to The International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition (left). Indeed, what stands out more than anything else are the frauds, falsehoods, and fabrications perpetrated on the nurture side of the argument.

The previous post explained why mothers and their genes invested in their offspring have a vested self interest in nurture and why fathers and their genes have a contrary self interest in nature. Indeed, as I argued in the closing pages of Evolutionary Psychology as long ago as the turn of the century, there are good reasons for thinking that the whole controversy could be seen as an ideological expression of genetic conflict between maternal and paternal genes.

But what has emerged since with the publication and recent stunning confirmation of the imprinted brain theory is the damage that official psychology’s anti-nature, pro-nurture dogma has done to psychiatry. The hand that rocks the cradle and rules that a child should be autistic or psychotic is not the mother’s—“refrigerator,” “schizophrenogenic,” or however else she may be described. The hand that rocks the cradle is Mother Nature’s, and she does rule the world!