The Nature-Nurture Debates

How is it possible that in more than one hundred years the nature-nurture debate has not come to a satisfactory resolution? The problem Dale Goldhaber argues lies not with the proposed answers but with the question itself. In The Nature-Nurture Debate Goldhaber reviews the four major perspectives on the issue - behavior genetics environment evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory - and shows that the classic reductionist strategies (behavior genetics and environmental approaches) are incapable of resolving the issue because they each offer a false perspective on the process of human development. It is only through a synthesis of the two holistic perspectives of evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory that we will be able to understand the nature of human behavior.