PLEASE BEAR IN MIND GUYZ THAT YOU NEED TO SUMMARIZE IT . you can write your own summary in a cartolina or if you want just report it in front. but be sure na hindi niu babasahin pu na buo yan . hehe kung feel niu pang mag research ng ibang info , ur free to do it pu. ung iba jan eeh meh pagkakatulad kaya much better kung babasahin niu .. please do ur own summary of it and cite examples if ever necessary THANKS !!!. =)) see yahhh 2m ,, **** 15 MINUTES PER GROUP so it means ung mga IMPORTANT NOTES LANG PU UNG KUNIN NATIN kxe limited lang pu ang time presentation.
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Keith
The nature vs nurture debate is one of the most enduring in the field of psychology. In the 17th century the French philosopher René Descartes set out views which held that people possess certain in-born ideas that enduringly underpin people's approach to the world. The British philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, on the other hand, took a more empirical approach emphasising the role of experience as fully contributing to behavioral development.
Some of the more revealing, and disquieting, findings of the Social Psychologists are considered through the works of Sherif, Tajfel, Asch and Hasdorf & Cantril. Social psychology seems to accept a number of principles the implications of which are fraught with consequence. If we accept the principles that:-
A) People construct their own reality.
B) Social Influence pervades all Social Life.
Judith Harris' most innovative idea was to look outside the family and to point at the peer group as an important shaper of the child's psyche. For example, children of immigrants learn the language of their home country with ease and speak with the accent of their peers rather than their parents. Children identify with their classmates and playmates rather than their parents, modify their behavior to fit with the peer group, and this ultimately helps to form the character of the individual.
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Arlene
The ³nature² school of thought came to the forefront in the early to mid 20th century among European ethologists, such as Konrad Lorenz. Their studies emphasized the roles of instinct, fixed patterns of behavior, and the influence of evolution on behavior.
The ³nurture² school of thought was championed by American psychologists, who, starting with simple models of learning, such as conditioning, argued that behavior is learned, modifiable due to experience, and not, at least in humans, constrained by evolutionary history.
Applying the nature/nurture question to human behavior nearly always generates trouble. Data interpreted to show genetic bases for differences among humans in intelligence, motor learning capabilities, criminality, and a broad range of other behaviors has, unfortunately, been used to support racism and other forms of bigotry. Because science is a stepwise progression of improvements of methods, scientists often avoid conclusions which may have harmful sociological or political effects on groups of people.
Sociobiology provided a major arena for the nature/nurture debate in the 1970¹s and 1980¹s. This discipline, championed by E. O. Wilson, integrates thought from ethology, ecology, evolution, and genetics in an attempt to develop a deeper understanding of the evolution of behavior. While this approach attracts many behavioral biologists, detractors, such as R. C. Lewontin, suspect that sociobiology (genetic determinism) http://www.animalbehavioronline.com/nature.htmlultimately supports racist or class-based justifications for inequities in human societies. This vituperative argument has ranged far outside the boundaries of science.
An example of a recent nature/nurture debate is the argument caused by R. Thornhill¹s argument that rape is an adaptive reproductive strategy in humans. This assertion challenges the notion that sex criminals can be rehabilitated. Some people think it raises the possibility that potential sex criminals could be genetically identified and segregated from society. These assertions are abhorrent to those who think that human behavior is shaped by experience and that all humans are capable of improvement and rehabilitation. Regardless of whether you agree with Thornhill or his critics, you should easily understand how volatile this question has become.
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Betong
http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/article.php?id=584
Massimo Pigliucci
The debate on the relative importance of nature (genetics) and nurture (environment) in determining human traits has been prolonged and often acrimonious. Great minds have engaged in it over the last 300 years, including philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and scientists Stephen Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Edward Wilson. The problem is that most of the debate has proceeded on the basis of either a simplistically dichotomous view of the question, or with a dearth of relevant empirical evidence. The controversy has in fact largely been solved when it comes to plants and non-human animals
While it is safe to say that humans have always investigated their own nature and have certainly done so since the onset of Greek philosophy, modern positions on the issue of nature/nurture may more or less clearly be traced to the works of two English philosophers, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Locke (1632-1704) was the founder of the school known as empiricism, holding that knowledge can be gained only through the use of the senses, as opposed to rationalism, according to which the mind can derive knowledge solely on logical grounds. On the question of human nature, Locke thought of the human mind as a tabula rasa (literally, a blank slate). On it, experience writes and moulds the individual throughout her life. Innate thoughts do not enter the picture, according to this view. Interestingly, Locke's theory of human nature - like the ones espoused by biologists such as Gould and Lewontin in modern times - was tightly coupled with his social theories. Locke thought that people are born
essentially good and with equal rights, and that an ideal society should reflect these fundamental assumptions.
Of course, modern philosophers and scientists readily acknowledge that human traits are in fact the result of both nature and nurture, but they are usually also quick to add that one of these two components takes precedence. For example, Gould, Lewontin and others think that the environment is the major determinant of human nature. Their position could hardly be summarised more concisely than by the title of one of Lewontin's books, Not in Our Genes. If the causes of intelligence, aggression, or whatever other aspect of our behaviour are not in our genes, they must surely be found in the environment. On the other side of the divide, Jensen, Herrnstein, Murray, Wilson (albeit in a category of his own) and many others are convinced that genetics and natural selection have shaped the physical as well as mental characteristics of all living beings, including humans. When Murray suggests (in the title of one of his articles) that 'IQ will put you in your place' he is assuming that IQ is written in stone in the DNA of each one of us.
Interestingly from the point of view of the sociology of science, the modern debate on nature/nurture has often been accompanied by unpleasantness, as in the case of E O Wilson being treated to a shower of ice cold water during a conference by somebody who disagreed with his opinions on sociobiology, and Gould being characterised as someone "whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticised because he is at least on our side against the creationists" by an esteemed British colleague. Clearly, the emotional stakes are much higher than in your typical academic debate.
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Tapawan
A solution to the nature/nurture problem has been at hand since the beginning of the 20th century, with the introduction in evolutionary biology of the concept of 'reaction norm'. Simply put, a reaction norm is the set of all possible morphologies and behaviours that a living organism with certain genes can exhibit whenever exposed to a variety of environmental conditions. Biologists have quickly come to realise that if one changes either the genes or the environment, the resulting behaviour can be dramatically different. The trick then, is not in partitioning causes between nature and nurture, but in what is technically known as 'genotype-environment interactions', the way genes and environments interact dialectically to generate an organism's appearance and behaviour. This dialectical relationship produces different outcomes when genes or environments change, and the precise shape of a reaction norm can only be found empirically.
The concept of reaction norms has dealt a fatal blow to a staple of nature/nurture discussions throughout the last century: the much vaunted (or criticised, depending on the author) measure of 'heritability' of a trait. When we hear (or read in newspapers, textbooks, and even technical papers) that the heritability of, say, intelligence (or homosexuality, or what have you) is 70% we tend to conclude that that is a major reason to believe that genes have a lot to do with determining the trait in question. Yet, biologists working on plants and animals have shown over and again that heritability changes dramatically (sometimes between 0 and 100%!) if one studies a different population of the same species, or even the same population raised in a different environment. Furthermore, we now understand that genetic influences do not imply rigid determinism: studies of reaction norms in a variety of organisms have shown that the genes only set the limits of what an organism can do, but that within such limits the degree of 'plasticity' of the organism - its ability to respond to different environmental challenges - can be very high.
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Ellaine
Perhaps one of the best examples of the true relationship between nature and nurture is found in classic experiments performed by Cooper and Zubek in the late 1950s. They compared 'intelligence', as measured by the ability to avoid mistakes in running through a maze, in two genetically distinct lines of rats. One line had been selected for high performance in the maze ('bright' rats), the other for particularly low performance ('dull' rats). When reared under a standard environment, comparable to the one in which the selection process occurred, the two lines showed a highly significant difference in their abilities (i.e., a high 'heritability' of the trait). Cooper and Zubek, however, also reared individuals of the two lines in two other environments: a situation in which the cage was entirely devoid of visual and tactile stimuli ('poor' environment), and one in which the developing animals were exposed to brightly coloured walls and toys ('enriched' environment). The results were simply stunning: under the poor conditions, the bright rats performed as badly as the dull ones, while under the enriched environment the dull rats did as well as the bright ones (and the heritability of intelligence plummeted to zero in both cases)! The inescapable conclusion is that maze-running ability in rats is very plastic, and that different genes may lead to similar behaviours depending on environmental conditions.
Examples of environmental, interactional, and genetic traits are:
Predominantly Environmental Interactional Predominantly Genetic
Specific language Height Blood type
Specific religion Weight Eye color
Skin color
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Herchel
Influential views of human nature
Many influential schools of thought have defended particular conceptions of human nature, and integrated those conceptions into their other ideas. Among these are Platonism, Marxism and Freudianism.
Plato
Plato took a conception of reason and the examined life that he learnt from Socrates and built both a metaphysics and, more to our point, an anthropology around it. The soul in Timaeus consisted of a rational propensity, resident in the human head, a spirited tendency, resident in the heart, and an appetitive beast, resident in the belly and genitals. The duty of the 'rational' was keep the other two natures tamed, a belief concording with Sophism, in order to parallel the goodness achieved by the demiurge in the beginning of the universe.
In one disguise or another, Plato's dualism between the soul and the body was immensely influential. It insinuated itself deeply into Christian theology — a process that began, perhaps, as early as the Gospel of John. Descartes' famous contrast between the soul that thinks and the body that is extended is a distinctive take on Plato, as is Kant's contrast between the noumenal and the phenomenal aspects of human nature.[9]
Aristotle
Plato's most famous student made some of the most famous and influential statements about human nature.
• Man is a' conjugal animal (Nicomachean Ethics), meaning an animal which is born to couple when an adult, thus building a household (oikos) and in more successful cases, a clan or small village still run upon patriarchal lines.
• Man is a political animal (Politics), meaning an animal with an innate propensity to develop complex communities the size of a city or town (see division of labor). As a political animal, in contrast to his family and clan life, man thrives in his rationality - most fully in the making of laws and traditions.
• Man is a mimetic animal (Poetics). In this case, Aristotle emphasizes human reason in its purest form. Man loves to use his imagination, and not only to make laws and run town councils.
It is clear that for Aristotle, reason is not only what is most odd about humanity, but it is also what we were meant to achieve at his or her best. Much of Aristotle's position is still very much worth considering, but it should be mentioned that the idea that human nature was "meant" or intended to be something, has become much less popular in modern times.[10]
Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau, writing before the French Revolution, and long before Darwin, shocked Western Civilization in his Second Discourse by proposing that humans had once been solitary animals, and had learned to be political. The important point about this was the idea that human nature was not fixed, or at least not anywhere near the extent previously suggested by philosophers. Humans are political, and rational, and have language now, but originally they had none of these things.
Rousseau still saw himself as a student of nature, and did not deny the existence of a human nature, but it was only now to be defined in terms of the instinctive passions of the original irrational and amoral human, such as those associated with self preservation. This has been seen as breaking ground for shocking political developments of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as totalitarianism and brain washing.[11]
He was an important influence upon Kant, Hegel and Marx, but he himself made it clear that he was partly developing the thought of Thomas Hobbes.
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Kath
(this is a continuation of INFLUENTIAL VIEWS OF NATURE)
Karl Marx
Karl Marx's conception of human nature has been the subject of much misunderstanding. It is often believed that Marx denied that there was any human nature, and said that human beings are simply a blank slate, whose character will depend wholly upon their socialization and experience. It is true that Marx placed enormous importance on the view that people are influenced and, in part, determined by their environments. But at least in one stage of his development he had a very strong concept of human nature.
In that stage, Marx discussed the concept of 'species-essence' (from the German Gattungswesen, sometimes also translated as 'species being'). He believed that under capitalism, we are alienated - that is, divorced from aspects of our human nature. He envisaged the possibility of a society following capitalism which would allow human beings to fully exercise their human nature and individuality. His name for this society was 'communism'. However, it is worth bearing in mind that, since Marx's day, this term has been used with several different meanings, not all of which have been compatible with Marx's original usage.
Marx's understanding of human nature did not only play a role in his critique of capitalism, and in his belief that a better society would be possible (as already indicated). It also informed his theory of history. The underlying dynamic of history, for Marx, is the expansion of the productive forces. In The German Ideology, Marx says that two of the three aspects of social activity which ground history is the tendency of humans to act to fulfill their needs, and thereafter, the tendency to generate new needs [3]. This human tendency, for Marx, is what drives the continuing expansion of productive power in human civilization.
After The German Ideology, however, mention of 'species-essence' as such is virtually absent from Marx's writings. Some major interpreters of Marx, such as Louis Althusser, dismiss 'species-essence' as irrelevant to Marx's "later" writings, while others, such as Terry Eagleton, believe it continues to be an important concept in understanding Marx.
The Austrian school
The thinkers of the Austrian school of economics, in the years around 1871–1940, developed their own views largely in opposition to Marx, and in opposition to a group of historicist scholars. In the process, they developed a distinctive view of human nature, though one which drew upon earlier philosophers, esp those of the Enlightenment. Like Descartes or Kant, these thinkers believed that there exists an invariant human nature, but that progress is possible in history through the more complete understanding of that nature.
Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis
During the same period of time, Austria also hosted the development of psychoanalysis. Its founder, Sigmund Freud, believed that the Marxists were right to focus on what he called "the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes." But he thought that the Marxist view of the class struggle was a too shallow one, assigning to recent centuries conflicts that were, rather, primordial. Behind the class struggle, according to Freud, there stands the struggle between father and son, between established clan leader and rebellious challenger. Freud also popularized his notions of the id and the desires associated with each supposed aspect of personality.
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