Year: 2015
Type: book-review
Abstract: More than a decade ago, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker published The blank slate, a book that weighed in on the centuries--old debate about the contributions of nature and nurture to human psychological characteristics (Pinker, 2002).When the eminent British biologist Sir Patrick Bateson needed a title for his review of the book in Science, he chose to call it "The corpse of a wearisome debate," because by 2002, Bateson already considered this debate to be "tedious and increasingly irrelevant" (Bateson, 2002(Bateson, , p. 2212)).But the public's reaction was different: Pinker's book was a bestseller that was ultimately a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.Today, published studies continue to compare the contributions of genes and environments to complex human traits (Plomin & Deary, 2015;Polderman et al., 2015) even as numerous theorists insist that such comparisons are pointless and that the Nature--Nurture debate should be considered passé (Blumberg, 2005;Gottlieb, 1997;Moore, 2002 Moore, , 2013b;;Weaver, 2007).So the question is, why do some people continue to think the Nature--Nurture debate is still worthy of attention?Into this morass wades James Tabery, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, whose admirable new book, Beyond versus: The struggle to understand the interaction of nature and nurture, explains the persistence of this debate by pointing out how the two groups of disputants in the Nature--Nurture debate have been talking past one another for more than 100 years.As Tabery sees it, by failing to agree on what is meant by the phrase "interaction between nature and nurture," the disputants have found themselves separated by an "explanatory divide," whereby they disagree about what sorts of natural phenomena need to be explained, what qualifies as suitable explanations for those phenomena, and how one should go about studying them (among other disagreements).As a result, when one group claims that nature and nurture interact to produce a particular trait-a phenotype-the other group remains unconvinced, so the debate continues, even as more and more empirical data pile up, data that would otherwise have been thought sufficient to end the debate.So, Tabery's book is fundamentally about
Author: David S. Moore
Institution: Pitzer College
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2151279542