Heredity And The Environment

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How does heredity interact with the environment to shape human behaviour? Many favour heredity and believe we are born with certain talents and personalities. These determine who we are and what we become. In the other view, the focus is on the role of the environment. We learn to do things for which we get rewards and do not do things for which we are punished. To understand human behaviour we have to study the interaction between the nature versus nurture debate (heredity versus environment). Let us consider an example. A child is born with a talent for dance. In the child’s family, this talent is expressed by the child from an early age, through his activities of dancing around the house and watching dance programmes on television. The parents notice the child’s interest in dance and expose the child to more dance by taking them to dance lessons. The child’s interest in dancing grows further and his talent develops and make his parents offer even more dance experiences for example dancing on stage, going to watch musicals at the theatre. This would have a positive effect on the child’s talent and desire to dance. From this it is clear that both the child’s inherited talent and environment shaped his/her development. The child had the talent for dance, but this led to a change in the environment by making the parents provide more dancing experiences at home. Now these experiences in the environment further developed the child’s talent and motivation and made the parents introduce more dancing experiences to the child. This process would develop further. We often wonder about the reasons and forces which shape our personality and character. Our nature is formed from two major factors, they are the genetic make-up which we inherit from our parents and then the other influence comes from our interaction with our surrounding environment. They include all the things

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