Nature-Nurture Debate

Nature versus nurture has been continuously debated throughout the world of human psychology. Since the 17th century philosophers have been trying to decipher this question through research and testing with no winning answer on either side of the debate. So what is the nature versus nurture debate? The nature-nurture debate focuses on whether human beings are born with all their personality characteristics or whether they are acquired via life experiences.
By now we all know human beings are born with certain characteristics such as skin tone, hair colour, eye colour and propensity to illnesses which are inherited genetically via our parents. This has led psychologists and philosophers to ask whether other factors such as personality and behavioural

Surely ones environment and interactions with others would have a profound effect on your personality. Through my research I came across a case study about feral children, namely Oxana Malaya. Oxana was a child born in the Ukraine in 1983 she was abandoned by her parent’s age 3 she then lived on a farm with wild dogs for approximately six years. During this time Oxana took on all the characteristics and behaviours of the dogs, walking on all fours, eating raw meat, barking etc. If the theories of the Locke and Descartes are correct and your personality traits and characteristics are there from birth why wasn’t Oxana unable to develop in the same way as a normal child? Where were her “innate qualities” at a time when her survival was of paramount importance?
This leads me to the other side of the nature vs nurture argument the 17th century British philosopher John Locke known “as the father of liberalism” who’s works focused on epistemological, political, and scientific philosophy, he rejected the ideas of the nature theorists and was famous for his theory that the mind of a child is that of a “blank

Nativism is the belief that some of our abilities are within us from birth (innate) built into our brains and that these structures help us to acquire knowledge. For example colour preference or moral values could be deemed as “native” or even language which is looked at as being instinctual and hardwired into our brains. Nativists such as Noam Chomsky who is the most well-known theorist on nativism also believes linguistics is an innate characteristic. He believed that we are born with a “built-in template” as such, for language, and that this “template” would be the foundation for which all language is developed. His studies of children brought him to this conclusion as he discovered they learnt new languages very