I was born in Memphis, Tennessee to a single parent. We stayed in Memphis for a while, and I was raised there in my beginning by my mother and her siblings. I spent the first few years of my life as the only child of my mother until my half-sister was born when I was four years old. I also have 2 half-sisters on my father’s side, but I never met them or my biological father until I was in my mid-twenties. I am also the firstborn offspring of my father. Shortly after I was born, my grandfather, my mother’s father, gave my mom a house in which she was to be able to raise me and not be hassled with paying rent.
What I remember most of my childhood was witnessing the violent battles between my mom and step-dad, and this probably caused me to develop into a pacifist. I do not remember much from before adolescence, because I suffered a traumatic brain injury at the age of 13. I was in a coma for eight days, but I healed quickly and returned to the 8th grade having missed only one semester. Therefore, my understanding of personality, sexuality, and gender was formed much in the celebrity like status I had coming back from the dead and the later, immensely, shrunken popularity status I experienced in high school. As sociologist, Dalton Conley of New York University says in his lecture “Breaking the Wall of Nature and Nurture: How Genes and Environment Combine to Affect Our Life Course” (n.d.), our character is defined not only by genes and an environment but also by the genes of others who share our environment, as was the case with me. I was really, very effected by such a traumatic event and the impact it had on my community.
The nature versus nurture debate is an attempt to calculate which has more influence on an individual’s state of being and action orienting (or lack thereof), genetics (nature) or the environment (nurture). One who argues that nature is the sole producer of a person’s stature are called nativist, and they point to evolution and human DNA as making each person have the character they do as unique individual’s with a specific genetic code. The other view is that nurture is the primary cause, and those who argue for this conclusion are called empiricists. Their notion is that the human mind is a blank slate that is gradually “filled” as a result of experience (McLeod, 2007). However, most would say that neither is the sole cause of a person’s condition but that both have substantial influence on everyone, albeit to different degrees.
Nature may have had more of an impact than nurture in my life, and I believe, measurably, in the whole of people’s life in this world. According to Frank Huguenard in his scientific documentary, Beyond Me (2011), there is a link to be explored between animal instincts and our personalities. For example, every year monarch butterflies migrate 2500 miles to escape the cold winters. What may be most amazing about this migration is not just the distance, but the fact that it takes four generations of monarch butterflies to make the trip and that the butterflies -- four generations apart -- use the exact same trees to winter each year (Heimbuch, 2012). This startling fact raises the question of how instincts are transmitted to offspring from ancestors. I mention this in this paper discussing my own understanding of self to explain the environment being an effect of genetic, karmic baggage that we have received from countless generations past via the cause, nature.
Nurture, as I identified, is somehow related to the genes of others in one’s immediate environment, their conditioning to respond to one as they perceive themselves, and it has an effect as mentioned in the Huguenard documentary of a typist on the keyboard of our programming. Nature would be the keyboard, and the environment inputs, or types instructions or suggestions. My understanding of self and gender was computed by much the same way as my peers were conditioned. We all grew up seeing images of glamour and excess in the majority of media. This caused quite the schism when it came to appreciating our necessary purpose, which has more circuity between people when it is humble and not founded on self-satisfaction, as was the case in my generation, at least in my perception.
In conclusion, hereditary transmissions do not change in a person, but people can, at will, change the environment in which they find themselves living.
In my case, economic security has always been an important factor in my family’s genetic code, as was the legitimacy of our place in the world. Therefore, for me personally, nature is the fixed system with which I must change my environment, and nurture is simply the ideology of an assumed freedom or an accepted servitude that I have to work with in this effort for change.
References
Conley, D. (n.d.) Breaking the Wall of Nature and Nurture: How Genes and Environment Combine to Affect Our Life Course. Films Media Group.
Heimbuch, J. (Nov. 22, 2012). Nature Blows My Mind! The Multi-Generation, 2,500 Mile Monarch Butterfly Migration. Retrieved from http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/natural-sciences/nature-blows-my-mind-multi-generation-tk-mile-monarch-butterfly-migration/
Huguenard, F. (2011). Beyond Me. Retrieved from http://beyondmefilm.com/index.php/beyond-me
McLeod, S. (2007). Nature Nurture in Psychology. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/naturevsnurture.html
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