Isn’t nature caused by nurture?

Question

This seems like something that would have been asked already on the internet. However, I haven’t found it.

My understanding is that our biology is heavily influenced by the environment. Things like evolution and adaptation occur due to changes in the environment. I’m assuming that the idea of nurture is referring to things in the span of one person’s lifetime, whereas nature is something caused by the environment but takes effect over the course of multiple generations. Still, I feel like it would be better to put more emphasis on nurture since our nature does change. Perhaps this contradicts what ‘nature’ means. If nature means unchangeable, then I’m not sure what is something that would be considered nature. Perhaps someone could enlighten me on this subject. Or maybe I’m getting too philosophical and should post in the philosophy stack exchange.

Answer 1

I think you are too focused on the words "nature" and "nurture". These words are imperfect labels, chosen for alliteration.

The "nature vs nurture" "debate" or balance (as few people really debate nature vs nurture except for the degree to which each is influential in a specific case) specifically refers to hereditary and non-hereditary (non-hereditary sometimes called "environmental") contributions to some trait.

You cannot understand the debate better by dissecting the words "nature" or "nurture". The "nature/nurture" phrasing is just a label, it does not contain intrinsic meaning besides being a cute linguistic phrase in simpler language; it's a lot like "survival of the fittest" in this way. It could have been labeled completely arbitrarily and there would not be any biological or underlying change in meaning. You could call hereditary factors "purple" and environmental factors "triangle" and refer to the "purple vs triangle" debate.

Importantly, estimating the influence of hereditary factors does not depend on the history of the evolution of those factors. Heredity is simply the portion of variation in people/animals/organisms that is explained by genetics. Natural selection is often an important contributor to changes in species, but evolution is influenced by other factors as well, like genetic drift, and "nature/nurture" is primarily about variation among individuals while evolution occurs in populations. The heritable factors that cause individual differences do not need to be adaptive.

There are of course different ways of defining what exactly it means to be hereditary, with some gray area around epigenetic factors, for example, but these must be addressed with more specific language in defining what exactly is meant by hereditary; you can't work backwards from the labels "nature" or "nurture" to understand what the boundaries should be, as those are merely labels.