Nature Versus Nurture

I suppose I am partly interested in the “nurture versus nature” argument because I had, in effect, two mother-figures.

“Nature versus nurture” poses this question: are we the way we are because it is in our innate nature? Or is nurture – our upbringing, our formation – as great an influence?

The jury is still out on the definitive answer.

I relate it to my own life because I am physically almost a clone of my mother. People who knew my mother and meet me at some extended family gathering gasp: “It’s Ita!” Every aspect of my anatomy, down to my hands, are an exact replica of dear Ita’s.

But when I was about seven, for complicated family reasons – my family was nothing if not complicated – I went to live with an uncle and aunt. And from this point, my “primary carer”, as the jargon of childcare calls it, became my aunty Dorothy. Dorothy was my uncle’s wife, so there was no kinship link. And while strangers greet me with the phrase “It’s Ita!”, I catch myself in certain attitudes and reactions, thinking, “that’s pure Aunty Dorothy.”

Ita and Dorothy were two very different characters. Ita was a charming, adorable bourgeois-bohemian; in Ita’s delightful scale of values, it was always important to go to Paris: not so important to go to the dentist.

Dorothy was a good-looking woman of firm views and an Anglo-Irish background: that is, her family had been Cromwellian Protestants who had converted to Catholicism over a matter of a Tipperary farm. (Change religion for the rich acres of the Golden Vale? You bet!)

Dorothy had all the admirable values of her background and class: honest with money, ordered in domestic affairs, upstanding and decent. She loved animals and gardens, disliked people playing cards on the Sabbeth, and was kind to neighbours. But she couldn’t stand what she called “Nonsense” of any kind. She would read the paper and exclaim at the antics beginning to appear in the 1960s - “the Nonsense of it!” She called a lot of things “nonsense”, notably softness towards crime and punishment. She often wished yearningly for the return of Borstal for delinquents and more than once expressed admiration for the birch administered to lawless juveniles in the Isle of Man. “That’ll larn ‘em!” she’d cry.

I often hear Aunty Dorothy’s voice in the back of my head, exclaiming “the Nonsense of it!” at much of what goes on today.

Ita, on the other hand, was more inclined to be easy-going and romantic – although her easy-goingness was much dented by a particularly heartless burglary she experienced in later life. But in general, her mind was more on dreamy nostalgia than on everyday practical matters, and she would rather think about Byron or Oscar Wilde than about the grocery bill.

Nature or nurture? Which influence is greater? Do we inherit our values, as well as our biology, or are these formed by other factors?

The studies on twins are revealing about the debate. The most comprehensive study of twins separated at birth was published in the United States a couple of years ago by Nancy L. Segal, called “Indivisible by Two”. Segal had access to the Minnesota archive on twin studies – of thousands of sets of identical twins – as well as conducting her own interviews.

The broad conclusion is that nature certainly defines our biological characteristics: our bodies, faces, colouring, even vulnerability to disease. But social influences have a big impact on our minds, attitudes, values and even characters.

The most dramatic example that Segal cites is that of a pair of twins, Jack and Oskar, born in 1933 and separated at six months old. Oskar was raised in Germany, and came under the full blast of the Third Reich. Jack was raised in the West Indies, as a very British little boy – and as a practising Jew.

Oskar became a Nazi supporter, while Jack went to Israel as a 16-year-old sailor. They met when they were 21, and although they were bemused by how physically identical they remained, they could never really get along because of the differences in their background. They had “identical genes, but opposing minds”.

My own experience is that nature and nurture interact and interweave in our lives. I see my mother’s face in the mirror, and often hear her voice: but I perceive that many of my aunt’s expressions and values remain strongly with me. I try to combine the best of both: I try to keep going to Paris and the dentist.

Irish Independent Magazine. 3 March 2007.