Issue 2 Identity

There are a lot of traits that siblings share, or that are learnt from environment (I will explain
more about this further on). As for saying that children in a classroom would be too young to
have had past experiences that would affect their personalities, this is ridiculous! At young
ages, children pick up more things, are much more impressionable and more likely to be
influenced by others, such as their parents or friends, as well as perhaps picking up more
negative traits from stimuli such as television and the internet, which are becoming ever
more present in domestic childhoods. We really become who we are during childhood, a
time that is so heavily influenced by parents and education. Everything you know now, you
only know because at some point you learnt it (aside from very basic abilities, such as smiling
and blinking). We create our identities at the same time we are learning how to walk,
talk and socialise.
If you need conclusive evidence for the nature argument, then look no further than the results
of some very interesting studies on twins. Twins are perfect for this kind of study, because
they are genetically the same, so any differences would be environmental. The
‘Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart’ was a study of the similarities and differences of
twins who were separated at birth. The research particularly focused on one set of identical
male twins (coincidentally both called Jim by their adoptive families) who shared remarkably
similar traits. The amazing results showed that when both twins finally met aged 39, they
learnt that they were both bad at spelling but good at mathematics; each took carpentry,
each had been married twice, once to women named Linda and then to Betty, and one twin
had a son called James Allan, whist the other had a son called James Alan (notice the missing
L). The twins both named their pet dog Toy, both chain smoked, and both had law enforcement
training, at some point both being the part time deputy Sheriff in Ohio. They even
went on holiday on the same beach in Florida! What more proof do you need, that the genetic
link between these two men had caused these similarities?
That is a very rare, coincidental case! The “Jim Twins” had differences as well. Their hairstyles
were very different, one twin was married to a third wife (called Sandy) and one twin
preferred conveying himself through speech whilst the other was more suited to writing.
In terms of research defending the nurture side of the argument, an investigation at the
Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology hospital in London has shown that the sense of
humour is learned from environment and influence, and thus does not originate from genetics.
The research looked at 127 pairs of both identical and non-identical twins. They were
shown 5 cartoons and then asked them to rate their wittiness (from one to 10; 1 being a
“waste of paper”, 10 being “the funniest cartoons they’d ever seen”). The results showed
that there was a similarity between a twins response to the cartoon, but because both identical
and non-identical twins showed this, the researchers decided that this was probably
more inked to growing up in the same environment, as non-identical twins share around
50% of their genes, making a significant genetic impact on the results less likely. They also
suggested that a person’s ability to understand a joke may depend on their intelligence,
however this was not measured before the test was carried out. If this is just one aspect of
the personality, then what else might be the result of a particular environment?
So, perhaps a person’s personality is more of a family heirloom, passed down through generations,
or is it learnt, taught or gradually picked up over time or maybe a person’s identity
comes from a mixture of the two, with the environment a person grows up in nurturing the
nature. There is no real answer to this debate, and, as is the same with so many philosophical
questions such as this, we may need to accept that we may never know.
Nature
Nurture