According to
Records of the Grand Historian (94 BC) by
Sima Qian, during
Chen Sheng Wu Guang uprising in 209 B.C.,
Chen Sheng asked the rhetorical question as a call to war: "Are kings, generals, and ministers merely born into their kind?" (). Though Chen was obviously negative to the question, the phrase has often been cited as an early quest into the nature versus nurture problem.
John Locke's
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is often cited as the foundational document of the
blank slate view. In the
Essay, Locke specifically criticizes
René Descartes's claim of an
innate idea of
God that is universal to humanity. Locke's view was harshly criticized in his own time.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, complained that by denying the possibility of any innate ideas, Locke "threw all order and virtue out of the world," leading to total
moral relativism. By the 19th century, the predominant perspective was contrary to that of Locke's, tending to focus on "
instinct."
Leda Cosmides and
John Tooby noted that
William James (1842–1910) argued that humans have
more instincts than animals, and that greater freedom of action is the result of having more
psychological instincts, not fewer. The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" was of some importance in the discussion of
free will in
moral philosophy. In 18th-century philosophy, this was cast in terms of "innate ideas" establishing the presence of a universal virtue, a prerequisite for objective morals. In the 20th century, this argument was in a way inverted, since some philosophers (
J. L. Mackie) now argued that the evolutionary origins of human behavioral traits forces us to concede that there is no foundation for ethics, while others (
Thomas Nagel) treated ethics as a field of cognitively valid statements in complete isolation from evolutionary considerations.
Early to mid-20th century In the early 20th century, there was an increased interest in the role of one's environment, as a reaction to the strong focus on pure heredity in the wake of the triumphal success of Darwin's
theory of evolution. During this time, the
social sciences developed as the project of studying the influence of culture in clean isolation from questions related to "biology.
Franz Boas's
The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) established a program that would dominate
American anthropology for the next 15 years. In this study, he established that in any given
population,
biology,
language,
material, and
symbolic culture, are
autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that none of these dimensions is reducible to another.
Purist behaviorism John B. Watson in the 1920s and 1930s established the school of
purist behaviorism that would become dominant over the following decades. Watson is often said to have been convinced of the complete dominance of cultural influence over anything that heredity might contribute. This is based on the following quote which is frequently repeated without context, as the last sentence is frequently omitted, leading to confusion about Watson's position:During the 1940s to 1960s,
Ashley Montagu was a notable proponent of this purist form of behaviorism which allowed no contribution from heredity whatsoever: In 1951, Calvin Hall suggested that the dichotomy opposing nature to nurture is ultimately fruitless. In
African Genesis (1961) and
The Territorial Imperative (1966),
Robert Ardrey argues for innate attributes of human nature, especially concerning
territoriality.
Desmond Morris in
The Naked Ape (1967) expresses similar views. Organised opposition to Montagu's kind of purist "blank-slatism" began to pick up in the 1970s, notably led by
E. O. Wilson (
On Human Nature, 1979). The tool of
twin studies was developed as a research design intended to exclude all confounders based on
inherited behavioral traits. Such studies are designed to decompose the variability of a given trait in a given population into a genetic and an environmental component. Studies using twin neuroimaging methods show that genetic elements explain more of the variation in cognitive processing than emotional regulation which indicates that environmental factors play a greater role in shaping affective traits. Twin studies established that there was, in many cases, a significant heritable component. These results did not, in any way, point to overwhelming contribution of heritable factors, with
heritability typically ranging around 40% to 50%, so that the controversy may not be cast in terms of
purist behaviorism vs.
purist nativism. Rather, it was
purist behaviorism that was gradually replaced by the now-predominant view that both kinds of factors usually contribute to a given trait, anecdotally phrased by
Donald Hebb as an answer to the question "which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?" In a comparable avenue of research, anthropologist
Donald Brown in the 1980s surveyed hundreds of anthropological studies from around the world and collected a set of
cultural universals. He identified approximately 150 such features, coming to the conclusion there is indeed a "universal human nature", and that these features point to what that universal human nature is.
Determinism At the height of the controversy, during the 1970s to 1980s, the debate was highly ideologised. In
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (1984),
Richard Lewontin,
Steven Rose and
Leon Kamin criticise "
genetic determinism" from a
Marxist framework, arguing that "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology ... If
biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." The debate thus shifted away from whether heritable traits exist to whether it was
politically or
ethically permissible to admit their existence. The authors deny this, requesting that evolutionary inclinations be discarded in ethical and political discussions regardless of whether they exist or not.
1990s Heritability studies became much easier to perform, and hence much more numerous, with the advances of genetic studies during the 1990s. By the late 1990s, an overwhelming amount of evidence had accumulated that amounts to a refutation of the extreme forms of "blank-slatism" advocated by Watson or Montagu. This revised state of affairs was summarized in books aimed at a popular audience from the late 1990s. In
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998),
Judith Rich Harris was heralded by
Steven Pinker as a book that "will come to be seen as a turning point in the
history of psychology." However, Harris was criticized for exaggerating the point of "parental upbringing seems to matter less than previously thought" to the implication that "parents do not matter." The situation as it presented itself by the end of the 20th century was summarized in
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) by
Steven Pinker. The book became a best-seller, and was instrumental in bringing to the attention of a wider public the paradigm shift away from the behaviourist purism of the 1940s to 1970s that had taken place over the preceding decades. Pinker portrays the adherence to pure
blank-slatism as an ideological
dogma linked to two other dogmas found in the dominant view of human nature in the 20th century: • "
noble savage", in the sense that people are born good and corrupted by bad influence; and • "
ghost in the machine", in the sense that there is a human soul capable of moral choices completely detached from biology. Pinker argues that all three dogmas were held onto for an extended period even in the face of evidence because they were seen as
desirable in the sense that if any human trait is purely conditioned by culture, any undesired trait (such as crime or aggression) may be engineered away by purely cultural (political) means. Pinker focuses on reasons he assumes were responsible for unduly repressing evidence to the contrary, notably the fear of (imagined or projected) political or ideological consequences. ==Heritability estimates==