The New Nature vs. Nurture

Ever since Hobbes and Rousseau started riffing on the state of nature and the noble savage a few centuries back, the nature versus nurture debate has been as much about politics as empirical research. Sure, scientists have their genome projects and their twin studies, and they talk a nice game about how extroversion or smoking is "20 percent heritable." But most people dont choose sides because the data convinced them; they lean one way or the other because their political views led them there - the patina of science just makes the biases easier to hide.Which team are you on? Figuring that out used to be easy. Conservatives believed in the power of nature. If you rose to the pinnacle of society or sunk to its depths, you had only yourself to thank or condemn. Society, much less big government, couldnt change your fate. Liberals, on the other hand, saw nurture in everything: The idea of human nature was itself proclaimed an ideological fiction, a blame-the-victim lie dreamed up by racists and imperialists to justify oppression. Historical conditions, not biology, determined your station in life. Society made you, and if you didnt like who you saw in the mirror, better to remake society.
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