Nurture strongly influences early human development In the human development history, there did have existed a lot

of theories which discuss how the nature or nurture factors have influenced the human development. Not only in the past, but nowadays, many people as well as countries also debate which factor has more impact on humans. In laymen's term, while nature means nature processes and some inheriting characteristics which can not be changed. Nurture means processes caused by surroundings and some characteristics which can be changed by outer environment. So in this essay, I will talk about the degree of nature and nurture influence on early human development. Most obviously, early development is determined by nature. People's gender, the complexion, eyes and hairs' hue and general physiques all decided by human genes and growing cells, they decide human born as a person not a fish. All infants have abilities of seeing, smelling, hearing and tasting after born. For example, infants can tell differences tastes. They will show different responses when they taste different tastes, newborns prefer sweet taste, when they taste sour they will purse their lips and noses, bitter can make newborns open their mouths and stick out their tongues. Moreover, the fetus develops within the mother's body according to a fairly fixed time schedule, this is decided by genes. While nature factors influence early human development, the nurture ones also have a lot to do with the development. They are as follows: First, as for motor behavior, all the children go through the same train of motor behavior in the same step. Rolling over, sitting without support, standing while holding on to furniture, crawling, and then walking. But children go through these in different rates. For example, according to Zelazo and Kolb's research, if a baby is held in an upright position with his/her feet touching a solid surface, his/her legs will make stepping movements that are similar to walking. The child who is asked to do this can grasp walking earlier than others. Secondly, the development of speaking also proves the nurture environment influence in the children's growth. Though all human beings learn to talk, children reared in an environment in which people talk to them and reward them for making speech like sounds talk earlier than children who do not receive this attention. Let's take some real cases in Kagan's research as an example. A child who was reared in middle-class American homes begins to speak at about one year of age. But the other one, who was brought up in San Marcos, had little verbal interaction with adults and does not utter his first words until he is two years old. In conclusion, nature and nurture both have influences on early human development. Nature decides human's dispositions and nurture can change these personalities. Nature gives human born abilities and nurture help human to develop the abilities. Nature gives innate attributes to human and people are almost the same when they are born. Then nurture makes the innate attributes change and result in people having different lives. So nurture strongly influences early human development.

http://www.essayforum.com/writing-feedback-3/nature-nurture-both-have-influences-earlyhuman-development-50235/

Abstract In this essay, I explore what social science might contribute to building a better understanding of relations between nature and nurture in human development. I first outline changing scientific perspectives on the role of the environment in the developmental and behavioural sciences, beginning with a general historical view of the developmental science of human potentials in the twentieth century, and then reflecting on a call to arms against toxic stress issued in 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics. I suggest that such post-genomic programmes of early intervention, which draw on emerging scientific theories of organismic plasticity and developmental malleability, raise significant social and ethical concerns. At the same time, such programmes challenge social scientists to move beyond critique and to contribute to new developmental models that deconstruct the old divide between nature and nurture. I conclude by describing efforts that posit new terms of reference and, simultaneously, new kinds of research interests and questions that are not founded upon, and are not efforts to resolve, the naturenurture debate. Introduction In this essay, I explore what social science might contribute to building a better understanding of relations between nature and nurture in human development. I outline a general historical account of changing scientific perspectives on the contribution of environment in the developmental and behavioural sciences, before reflecting on a recent call to arms against toxic stress issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). I suggest that such post-genomic programmes of early intervention, which draw on emerging scientific theories of organismic plasticity and developmental malleability, raise significant social and ethical concerns. At the same time, such programmes challenge social scientists to move beyond critique and to contribute to new developmental models that dismantle the old divide between nature and nurture. I point out the difficulties of this endeavour, even in the process of writing and reimagining naturenurture relations. In examining these difficulties here, I use the language of higher and lower systems and functions where previously one may have used environmental and biological. Other terms, used by myself and others, are micro and macro or inner and outer. Although all these terms signal a start towards a different framing, they are of course vague and unsatisfactory, particularly because they fail to represent the fundamental inseparability of most entities that we have tended to divide with this sort of language. In concluding, I describe efforts to overcome such problematics of language. These efforts posit new terms of reference, as well as research interests and questions that are neither founded upon nor efforts to resolve the naturenurture debate. Throughout the essay, I focus mainly on early child development, in part because this is the area that interests me most, and in part because it is an area in which social scientists have not recently examined the problem of the naturenurture divide. Although the arguments here may be obvious to some multi- and inter-disciplinary scholars, I hope for others they will provoke constructive thinking about the constraints of some more familiar critical and analytic orientations in the life sciences and social sciences. The NatureNurture Problem

Around the turn of the twentieth century, many countries in the West developed social programmes that aimed to develop human fitness and potential in line with ideas derived from plant and animal breeding. Various forms of social Darwinism sought to encourage good habits personal and mental hygiene, alcohol and drug abstention, and other forms of positive social practice. However, good habits were not seen to be effective for managing inherent causes or pre-dispositions to bad behaviour. Eugenicists saw a person's social and moral status as a direct measure of their hereditary endowment: poverty, race, gender, crime, mental illness and addiction were the result of innate faults determined, fixed and passed along through multiple generations of a family. For this reason, the social environment was to be directly managed through genetic or biological manipulation: programmes of imprisonment, to prevent the feebleminded from reproducing, sterilization of active criminals and preventive sterilization of their families became acceptable (Goddard, 1912; Dugdale, 1969 [1877]; Lombroso, 2004 [1876]). Such social programmes later developed on a multi-national scale, with some of the most devastating human and ethical consequences of the past century. The emphasis on nurture in the developmental sciences most recently came into force in the twentieth century, with the mental hygiene movements, behaviourism and psychoanalysis emerging more or less at the same time (though with different impacts at different times) in the Anglo-American context. Among behaviourists, a formal interest in the environment was seen as providing a correction from years of interest in the inner life, and a corresponding negligence of technical analysis of the environment's impact on behaviour. Psychoanalysis, as conceived by Freud, had a different interest in the environment, as both the embodied space where the inner workings of mental life could be read, and as a ground for resolving and healing trauma, through the externalization of past experiences. Mental hygienists, drawing on medical ideas about prevention of illness as well as theories of child maladjustment, saw the school and the family as key environments for learning and activities that would prevent poor emotional and mental health. The excision of the biological realm was not complete, however, among behaviourists or among early psychoanalysts. Behaviourism, as espoused by B.F. Skinner, was based in a belief that biology was the ground of the structure of human behaviour and the human psyche. Because the inner world was then unobservable, Skinner worked on developing systematic ways of researching and manipulating the effects of environment on human behaviour (Skinner, 1938). Freud suggested that the development of hysteria was associated with an area of biological weakness, such as a neurological lesion, and that this biological weakness played a role in the articulation of early trauma. The insights his neurological training gave him to the possible interactions between behavioural symptoms and deep trauma were largely forgotten as American psychoanalysis grew up to emphasize the nurture aspects in Freud's developmental theories, such as the Oedipus complex (Sulloway, 1992). Although behaviour modification and psychoanalysis are today considered to be most useful as individual therapies and are hardly comparable to the genetic management of populations, both behaviourism and psychoanalysis have been used to support social programmes that develop human fitness and potential. Skinner himself envisioned a utopia he called Walden Two, in which systematic behavioural conditioning of all individuals would create a fully egalitarian and free society that required no laws or governance (Skinner, 2005 [1948]). Ego psychology and maladjustment theory came into fashion in American society after talk therapy was used to

manage shell shock among soldiers in World War II. Thereafter, psychoanalytic theory was one foundation for US educational and national defence programmes that sought to develop young boys into stronger men more capable of withstanding the stresses of war.1 The heyday of psychological, social and behaviourist theories of human development faded midcentury with the discovery of chlorpromazine, an effective, though highly unpleasant, antipsychotic. This inspired a surge of pharmaceutical research and development in psychotropic treatments and a concurrent rise in the proportion of psychiatric drug users (Healy, 1999). One important response to these developments was the anti-psychiatry movement, which in the 1960s and 1970s raised awareness of the problems with psychiatric nosology and the growing links between the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry. Anti-psychiatrists tended to believe that the causes of mental suffering were not biological but social, and argued for renewed attention to environmental factors, such as families and dysfunctional society (for example, Szasz, 1961; Laing and Esterson, 1970). Yet late in the last century, the Decade of the Brain and the human genome project rang in a fresh emphasis on nature. As a consequence of these projects, the divide between nature and nurture has become materially more real in recent decades, as scientific capabilities have investigated and visualized the molecular, cellular and genetic dimensions of life. Through a variety of bio-technopolitical forces, the reduction of human behaviour to biological trace elements, functions and structures has become an accepted way forward to understanding not only the root causes of aberrant human behaviours, but also the mechanisms underlying those behaviours. To a greater extent than ever before, claims are made that it is possible to see the root causes of complex human behaviours, from shyness to criminality, and to posit in a preliminary way the biological pathways along which these behaviours may develop. For some time, these investigations have ostensibly been carried out at a level so far distant from the social realm (and it has seemed as though the relation between inner and outer is one of linear distance) that life scientists and clinical researchers have struggled to articulate the relation between bench and bedside, lab and clinic despite pressures to do so from funders and policymakers interested in translational science. This is most likely not because life scientists disagree with the importance of the social dimensions of human behaviour. It is probably because biology has for so long been seen asa priori to the social dimensions of human behaviour: genotype structures phenotype; phenotype can reveal something about underlying genotype. Yet this blinkered attention to the biological may be shifting. Discoveries that pre-date the human genome project, but have matured as a result of its failure to discover the promised human blueprint, are transforming our understanding of the very idea of the gene, and of how human behaviour develops and persists across time. At the very least, these discoveries have already brought new metaphors into the scientific language of human development, new understanding of the boundaries of human development and new targets of interest in the fundamental matter of human development. I will briefly outline two recent metaphors that have been deployed in developmental biology and paediatric medicine, and discuss some of the bio-political ground around them. Metaphor 1: Toxic stress

Developmental, behavioral, educational, and family problems in childhood can have both lifelong and intergenerational effects. Identifying and addressing these concerns early in life are essential for a healthier population and a more productive workforce. Because the early roots or distal precipitants of problems in both learning and health typically lie beyond the walls of the medical office or hospital setting, the boundaries of pediatric concern must move beyond the acute medical care of children and expand into the larger ecology of the community, state, and society. (Shonkoff et al, 2011, p. e225) In December 2011, the AAP issued this landmark warning that toxic stress, experienced during early childhood or while in the womb, can harm children for life. This policy statement from America's most influential group of paediatricians argues that certain demographic factors (many of them well known to sociologists, and for that matter to doctors) poverty, lack of community resources, lack of education, abuse and neglect, as well as high-stress conditions such as war and famine create stresses that are literally written into the biological processes of development, penetrating environments from micro (for example, the cellular environment) to macro (for example, home or community environments) with lasting, measurable, heritable physiological and psychological effects. Environment is evidently a hot topic again in human development. But unlike the earlier incarnations of nurture theory, today's emphasis on the environment is not motivated by visions of utopian communities, or by concerns that mothers are raising weak, nervous sons unfit for war (at least the latter is not an overt concern; there is certainly a worry about unproductive youth and its relation to future national economic prosperity, as is evidenced in the excerpt above). Today, the focus has shifted to the ecological roots of developmental difficulties, and concern for the iterative and reciprocal relations of the environment to healthy development at the level of microbiological systems. The dynamic interface of environment and biology is captured in what the AAP calls an ecobiodevelopmental (EBD) model:An EBD approach recognizes that it is not adversity alone that predicts poor outcomes. It is the absence or insufficiency of protective relationships that reinforce healthy adaptations to stress, which, in the presence of significant adversity, leads to disruptive physiologic responses (i.e. toxic stress) that produce biological memories. (Shonkoff et al, 2011, p. e225) At the EBD interface, there is ostensibly no one entity to blame for a child's outcomes; nor is there one entity or dimension to therapeutically manipulate. Consequently, it is far more difficult to predict dangers: the interface is dynamic and shifting, and dangers are both actual and potential. The proposed multi-dimensional solution to the problem and possibility of toxic stress charges paediatricians to break down the traditional walls of the medical home and disperse into the surrounding ecology. They are urged to advocate for protective relationships at local, state and national levels, and to ensure that they themselves form trusted partnerships with children, families, schools and neighbourhoods in the interest of building emotional and material buffers against toxic stress. This is a far cry from previous portraits of the paediatrician: this is neither the trusted family doctor who gently ministers to the predictable and standard list of childhood illnesses at the child's bedside, nor is it the harassed employee of the modern NHS or managed care company, whose performance targets leave barely 10min to spend with each patient before moving on. To understand the AAP's source of inspiration to intervene (or perhaps it is a kind of panic,

sponsored by the contingent, emergent nature of toxic stress), we need to understand more about this EBD interface and how it is recasting the naturenurture divide. Metaphor 2: The socialized gene The role of the foetal environment is especially evident in mothers who directly experienced the destruction of the World Trade towers. As you would expect, a number of them evidenced PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder]. Those who were pregnant at the time gave birth to babies with an elevated stress response and a hypersensitive stress axis. They will be more susceptible to anxiety, depression and even PTSD than those whose mothers did not experience PTSD. (Francis, 2011, p. 43) The notion that the relationship between nature and nurture is porous is not new to science or to social science. AnneHarrington (2008) has elegantly elaborated a history of the body as a mindful entity, which responds in a physiological language to the local stories and cultural meta-narratives of a particular time. Margaret Lock's (2001) influential work on menopause in Japan led her to develop the concept of local biologies to describe the significantly different experience of menopause experienced by Japanese women as compared with women in the West. Numerous accounts by medical anthropologists and others attest to the fact that social experience and stories penetrate under the skin, with embodied consequences, such as nerves, hysteria or even death (Low, 1981; Showalter, 1998; Harrington, 2008). What is new, as exemplified in the AAP's policy statement on toxic stress, is twofold. First is the emphasis on the multi-directional and multi-dimensional nature of effects between nature and nurture. Stress refers simultaneously to events on the social level and on the biological level, and these events are mutually reinforcing such that they are incorporated not only in the body, and not only in the brain and not only in the environment, but in all these places. As body, brain and world also incorporate each other, the incorporation of stress is four-dimensional. Add in history (via heritability) and incorporation of stress is five-dimensional. A five-dimensional model of the transmission and impacts of stress in paediatric medicine is ambitious. The second aspect that is new is the emphasis on very early intervention for children who are at risk of toxic stress, but to come to that, we need first to understand more about the popular metaphor of the socialized gene. This metaphor is an attempt to express to a lay audience the importance of a (re)emerging area of genetics: epigenetics. As Fox Keller has noted, the discovery of epigenetic processes was made over half a century ago; however, understanding that epigenetic changes make up an alternative system of inheritance has developed only recently (2010, p. 5).2 Simply put, epigenetics refers to chemical processes that tag or mark the genome, thereby controlling and modulating the activities of genes. The marks are not part of the DNA structure itself. The epigenome can change as a result of environmental influences throughout the life course, and it can be inherited. Environmental epigenetics is one name given to the study of environmental influences on gene expression, primarily through the processes of DNA methylation and chromatin modification (Niewohner, 2011; Shostak, forthcoming, 2013). The socialized gene is popular shorthand for environmental epigenetics, summarizing the idea that the genome responds to environmental inputs across the life course. This view emphasizes the plasticity of the organism, rather than seeing it as fixed or determined.

The perceived importance of this discovery of plasticity for intervention strategies is underscored in a scientific review by Champagne (2010b):Converging evidence from studies of human subjects and animal models suggests that experiences across the life span can exert persistent changes in gene expression and behaviour The dynamic yet stable nature of these heritable epigenetic marks implies the potential for phenotypic plasticity in response to environmental cues The potential to shift developmental trajectories that have been established in laboratory studies may have important implications for the strategies used to intervene to prevent the developmental consequences of early life adversity. (2010b, p. 570) The discovery of responsiveness to environmental inputs at the genetic level has inspired interest not only in epigenetic mechanisms, but also in what can be achieved with very early interventions. The emphasis on very early is important, and different. Social programmes that support early interventions in children at risk have a long history, from state sponsored child guidance clinics in the 1930s to current programmes like Head Start in the United States and Sure Start in the United Kingdom. Head Start was drawn up as part of the US War on Poverty in 1965, and was largely predicated on the assumption that macro-level stresses require macro-level interventions; education, nutrition and health services chief among them. However, in 2010, a review of Head Start's impact by the programme's funder, the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), suggested that this macro-level strategy had not made an enduring difference to child outcomes. The review found that although children aged 3 and 4 did benefit from enrolment in Head Start, the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole. For 3-year-olds, there are few sustained benefits (DHHS, 2010, p. xxvi). Two years later, an epigenetic strategy that places equal emphasis on macro- and micro-level systems is being mobilized as the new way to address social problems in the lives of young children. Epigenetics is multiplying, molecularizing and atomizing definitions of environment and context, as well as expanding the developmental horizon. As Niewohner notes in his study of the laboratory life of epigeneticists:Context is primarily a matter of different temporal horizons and spatial scales. In epigenetic research, interpretations of findings often combine evolutionary time, transgenerational or biographic time and the real time of cellular activity the approach is systemic focusing on the multiple interactions between different levels of analysis. (2011, p. 285) Thus, the toxic childhood report urges intervention in a new time-space: earlier, and deeper, beginning at conception. The womb is, after all, a crucial first environment for a child: it is when the experiences of the organism (Champagne, 2010a, p. 2) begin. The report notes the success of existing programmes. Chief among these is the US NurseFamily Partnership (NFP), which started 30 years ago as a small experimental programme in New York state and operates today in 34 states. The NFP partners a nurse and a high risk (first-time, low-income) mother and supports a series of home-visits from pregnancy until the child is 2 years old. The programme was probably conceived in the spirit of the war on poverty, as an educational intervention. The emerging focus on environmental epigenetics, however, gives such programmes a remit to enter the time-space of the potential, in order to address the biology of social class disparities (Shonkoff, quoted in Kristof, 2012).

The idea that social class disparities have a biology, and that this biology explains poverty is the sort of scientifically erroneous nonsense that gives developmental biology a bad name.3 Yet the evidence that the NFP is an effective strategy at reducing the national burden of healthcarerelated costs and crime is compelling, at least in certain dimensions. In a 19-year follow-up published in 2010, there was evidence that the intervention lowered rates of arrest and conviction in girls visited while babies or when their mothers were pregnant; and at 19, the visited girls had fewer children of their own as compared with a control group (Eckenrode et al, 2010).4 In 2012, NFP is the cornerstone dimension of the US$350 million budget allocation to the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Programme, which encourages the use of evidence-based models to give more children born into poverty a better start in life.5 Topof page A Constructive Role for Social Science A sceptical stance A birds-eye view of the physical and intellectual construction of most contemporary institutions of higher education and research reveals how essentially important the naturenurture debates have been in erecting what Adele Clarke calls disciplinary defense systems (personal communication). Arguments that aim to break down the naturenurture divide potentially threaten hard-won territories, in which theoretical and methodological commitments have been carefully and substantively cultivated. Yet if social science scholars of biomedicine, science and technology engage with efforts in the life sciences to move beyond the naturenurture divide, this does not require abandonment of epistemological or theoretical commitments, nor does it constitute a rejection of the intellectual history that endows the broader disciplinary fields in which we reside. Indeed, the traditional bread and butter of the social studies of biomedicine, science and technology is scepticism about practices, definitions and productions in the natural and life sciences. Scepticism is important, and it can be constructive in this new moment when the separation between the individual and the world, nature and nurture appears to be disintegrating. Therefore, the first role for the social scientist is familiar there is much to be sceptical and careful about. We can take the NFP as an example. Such programmes appear well intentioned and reasonably successful. But they also raise significant social and ethical concerns. As Shonkoff's quote illustrates, without sufficient care it is all too easy for sound bites to encourage a fundamental misperception that the biological realm represents an encrypted version of the environmental realm, or vice versa. Furthermore, motivation to discover the biology of class disparities much like efforts to discover the biology of criminality, homosexuality, addiction or any other undesirable set of social behaviours must be viewed against the historical backdrop of efforts to medicalize, criminalize, surveil or even eliminate specified classes of people. After all, the war on poverty was not an incidental use of metaphor. The juxtaposition of war and poverty suggests the national threat that poverty poses to ideals of citizenship and to freedom. When poverty is framed as part of a bio-political danger, as it is today, the eligibility of the poor to life itself comes into question (Dillon, 2007).

Part of what social science can contribute productively in this (possibly) new era of nonreductionist interest in addressing the potentials of emerging life is analysis of emergent social and ethical concerns. A programme of maternal support and education based around epigenetic theories deserves some scrutiny. It is important to ask the old-fashioned dichotomous question in order to enable exposure of a secretly maintained divide: Is the NFP conducting home-visits, or womb-visits? Can we be sure that the rhetoric of reducing crime and poverty, of building national productivity and pride through social programmes that intend to reach inside the body to adjust biological systems and potentials, are ethically and socially distinct from earlier efforts to breed better human stock? A collaborative stance Having outlined a more traditional stance towards these developments at the naturenurture interface, I next want to suggest that social science has roles to play in addition to that of the sceptic (and I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that we relinquish this role). There are important constructive projects for social science within this emerging disintegration of the naturenurture divide, and alongside the scientists who are working in relevant areas. I will briefly outline some potential contributions here. 1. Elaborate a rich understanding of context and environment across the human life course environmentally induced variations in gene expression both within the brain and the periphery can persist beyond infancy and be observed in adulthood suggesting that there is an interplay between genes and the environment that may be critical in mediating the long-term effects of social experiences. (Champagne, 2010a, p. 2) For researchers interested in epigenetics, the role of the environment is a critical factor, but research has so far largely viewed the environment in operational terms, as a compilation of risks (for example, toxins, drugs, stress, trauma, neglect). This is partly due to the fact that much of this research takes place in rodents rather than in humans, requiring well-controlled paradigms and protocols. In human studies, epidemiological factors have often served as proxies for environment. Poverty, crime, race/ethnicity and gender are popular factors but, increasingly, newer indicators, such as urbanicity and migration are foci in neuroscience and genetic studies on the developmental impacts of stress. The new economic and public health concerns with happiness and well-being mean that human and animal studies are looking at the protective effects of environments as well as at environmental risk factors. Epidemiological indicators are at best crude approximations of context and experience, and a reliance on these indicators may mean that environment is included in models of intergenerational transmission of disease, poverty or even of well-being, but only in a reductive guise. It is clear that some scientific researchers working with epidemiological data are aware of this problem, and wish to avoid it. For example, in a study of the impact of urbanicity on health outcomes, researchers identified a variety of factors (nutrition, sanitation, healthcare, pollution, overcrowding, noise and so on) that could be associated with negative outcomes, including mental illness (which has been shown to be causally related to living in an urban environment). This particular study found that urbanicity was significantly associated with neural processing of stress. Researchers noted both the limitations of a global definition of urban when research participants inhabit a modern European city, and the necessity of further dissecting the variable social stress, perhaps by characteriz[ing] further the underlying psychosocial components; for

example, the effects of finer-grained quantifiers of individuals social networks or individual social experience in urban contexts (Lederbogen et al, 2011, p. 500). At this point, social scientists are needed to contribute theoretical, conceptual and pragmatic understanding of social networks, patterns of affiliation, movement and migration, urban spaces and communities, as well as of experiences of social stress. For neuroscientists working on such studies, the goal is to better understand the deep mechanisms associated with phenotypic variation; however, deeper understanding is predicated on sophisticated and subtle descriptions of higher level mechanisms, and vice versa. Indeed, social scientists and neuroscientists alike may discover that their models are improved by better understanding of macro- and micro-level mechanisms and functions. Most important to the continued dissolution of the naturenurture divide is building models that describe the interaction of these mechanisms across space and time. 2. Observe phenotypic plasticity and identify interventions that promote well-beingLet us not ask how much of any given difference between groups is due to genetics and how much to environment, but rather how malleable individual human development is, and at what developmental age We may not share the interests of breeders in artificial selection, but as both scientists and citizens, we are surely committed to trying to maximize the development of individual human potential. And for this, we need a better understanding of what resources can contribute to such development, and of how they can best be deployed. (Fox Keller, 2010, p. 84) Fox Keller's call for new research questions that dissolve the naturenurture debate is well heeded by social scientists as well as by life scientists. In work on the development of human behaviour, social science (and here I mean primarily sociology and anthropology) has for a long time held up the constructionist end of the debate, arguing for the role of nurture over nature. Indeed, in analyses of social, emotional and behavioural development, we have tended to a circularity in our arguments. For example, we are critical of classifications such as those found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, on the basis that they statistically classify, naturalize and pathologize kinds of undesirable cognition, emotion and behaviour (for example, Horowitz, 2002). But we also criticize the classifications themselves for their heterogeneity, as though what is needed is not no classification, but better classification (for example, Kutchins and Kirk, 1999). Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a current indication of this circularity: it is seen as problematic both because the diagnosis pathologizes a set of differences rather than recognizing neurodiverse ways of being, and because the ASD spectrum is so broad as to encompass a heterogeneous range of emotion, cognition and behaviour (Walsh et al, 2011). In other words, some social science accounts have been suspicious of heterogeneity, ambiguity and uncertainty in science even as they are critical of classification, naturalization and homogenization. In our critical and sceptical stance, we have tended to avoid normative questions those concerning what Fox Keller, in the quote above, describes as a commitment to maximize the development of individual human potential. I have already noted the danger in discussions of human potential particularly when these relate to emergent beings whose capacities may be socio-biologically engineered. At the same time, social scientists have arguably the best set of professional tools to discover, describe and understand phenotypic differences between groups; to identify resources that contribute to individual well-being; to explore structural, regulatory and material issues that matter to the

deployment of those resources; and to evaluate the differences those resources make to individuals over the life course. The benefits when these new research questions are undertaken by social scientists are enormous: phenotypic differences can be described in rich, thick observations; methods allow for an understanding of group dynamics alongside individual differences, and complex models of social interactions and experiences can be utilized to develop an empirical understanding of plasticity. For example, in work on Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children, the model of the ecological niche (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) has been used to elucidate the embeddedness of a child across changing social, emotional and developmental contexts. Using empirical methods, it has been possible to describe different ecological niches that children inhabit, and to posit some mechanisms that may underlie the development of variations at the phenotypic level among children diagnosed with the same disorder (Singh, 2011). Thus, it is possible to consider the ways in which children in different niches are malleable that is, vulnerable or resilient to different kinds of inputs at different moments and across different sites of development within a given niche. The identification of vulnerabilities and resiliences in children is a fundamentally different aim than critique of a diagnosis or pharmaceutical treatments. Yet risk of diagnosis and treatment may be discovered to be a vulnerability, as may risk of non-diagnosis and non-treatment. The point is to do work that puts the question of a child's well-being in the centre as a way to contribute to dissolving the debate over nature and nurture. 3. Theorize topographic porousness In the developmental sciences, articles that describe hypothesized mechanisms linking variations in genotype to variations in phenotype, or linking variations in fMRI scans to variations in behaviour, frequently include visualizations of how these links might work how higher level and lower level activities and entities may be related. These visualizations are increasingly accompanied by active topographical language: pathways, landscapes, regions, areas and sites are changing, dynamic, plastic, promoted, inhibited, expressed and unstable. Although such visualizations are reductive at all levels, and exemplify a tendency to mapping metaphors inherited from genetics (Gaudillire and Rheinberger, 2004), they illustrate the complexity of theorizing this new set of relationships and exchanges across the once-thought-to-be cellophane, but now porous membrane separating inner and outer, biology and environment, self and world. Ultimately, the membrane may disappear all together. This will likely require a new language, much like cyborg revolutionized our understanding of human beings relationship to nature, technology and ourselves (Haraway, 1991). Scientific visualizations are one attempt at this new language; social science can contribute more. It is extraordinarily difficult to conceptualize, much less verbalize, a dynamic porous topography, rather than a merging of two distinct parts. The human behavioural and developmental social sciences have attempted such mergers: neurochemical selves, somatic individuals, cerebral subjects. New disciplines have appeared that perform a similar merger: cognitive anthropology, social neuroscience and neuroethics. It may be that social scientists and others have to some degree been seduced by the beauty and complexity of the biological deep, binding familiar objects of interest and fields of study to scientific accounts that provide new visions and new explanations of our human experiences and self-understanding.

At the same time, there are important efforts to build on these forerunners. One example is the proposal by Roepstorff and colleagues (2010) to use an anthropological understanding of patterned practices to model the activity of neural networks. The authors present a sophisticated argument for the replacement of culture with practices in neuroscience work. They argue further that social neuroscience can draw on significant resources in anthropology and the social sciences more generally [to analyse] structured (patterned), maintained relations between embodied minds and their social, material and discursive environments (2010, p. 1057). The one limitation to this compelling argument is their final claim:Patterns of practice are shaped by neural networks as well as belief systems and normative orders. They thus sit in between micro and macro levels and analysis and enable us to investigate the relative contributions of neural, individual and cultural factors to specific practices. (2010, p. 1057) Even an argument that systematically and persuasively shows the entanglement of deeper and higher level functions, structures and practices, can slip back into a more familiar mode and language in which the contributions of nature and nurture could and should be analytically and methodologically separated. It is difficult to break old habits, perhaps because the normative dimension of the naturenurture question pulls in even those who resist normativity. Nevertheless, this kind of work shows the promise of social science efforts to re-vision the naturenurture debate, drawing on traditional strengths of social science theory and concepts to do so. It also demonstrates the importance of collaborative efforts between social scientists and life scientists in forging these new articulations and visions. Topof page Conclusion I have attempted to raise both doubts and hopes in relation to the potential contributions of social science to overcoming the divide between nature and nurture in work on early child development in particular. I feel quite hopeful that we are heading in a new direction in which constructive and creative collaborations between social scientists and developmentalists of various stripes become increasingly possible. Significant conceptual, theoretical and methodological barriers remain, but an emerging understanding of the importance of work on the other side is creating much more dialogue at the EBD interface. It remains to be said that the kind of collaborative engagements I have outlined in this essay, as well as informed scepticism, require a significant investment. Social scientists who have to keep pace with scientific discoveries lack training, support, time and opportunity. Interliteracy (Franklin and Roberts, 2006) is a time-consuming achievement. In the future, however, attempts at interliteracy within the developmental behavioural sciences may no longer be so one-sided. We now need constructive multi-disciplinary collaborations to be instantiated at the level of education, funding and publication, and to be institutionally sanctioned and rewarded through support for scholars and departments that transcend the divide between nature and nurture intellectually and methodologically. Perhaps one day the long walk from the science lab to the sociology department will have become a stroll down the hall. Topof page Notes
1

Some of this history is covered in Singh (2002), and far more completely in Shorter (1997).

Fox Keller takes the phrase system of inheritance from Jablonka and Lamb (2005).

To be fair, this is a quotation from an interview with a journalist. Shonkoff is also the lead author of the toxic stress report in Pediatrics, which suggests a more sophisticated understanding of the science. Nevertheless, it is important to note the continued salience of claims to have discovered the biology of (insert socially undesirable status or behavior).
4

Interestingly, there were no positive effects of intervention on boys born to visited mothers, which should raise a question of the overall success of the programme, given that men are more likely than women to be arrested and convicted of crimes.
5

www.nursefamilypartnership.org/assets/PDF/Press-Releases(1)/2012_MIECHVP_Funding_12_23_11.aspx. Topof page References 1. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2. Champagne, F.A. (2010a) Epigenetic influence of social experiences across the lifespan. Developmental Psychobiology 52(4): 299311. | Article | 3. Champagne, F.A. (2010b) Early adversity and developmental outcomes: Interaction between genetics, epigenetics and social experiences across the lifespan. Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(5): 564574. | Article | 4. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Administration for Children and Families. (2010, January) Head Start Impact Study, Final Report. Washington DC: DHHS. 5. Dillon, M. (2007) Governing terror: The state of emergency of biopolitical emergence. International Political Sociology 1(1): 728. | Article | 6. Dugdale, R. (1969 [1877] ) The Jukes: A Study of Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, Paper 1, Georgia, USA: GSU College of Law Faculty Publications, http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/col_facpub/1. 7. Eckenrode, J. et al (2010) Long-term effects of prenatal and infancy nurse home visitation on the life course of youths: 19-year follow-up of a randomized trial. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 164(1): 915. | Article | PubMed | 8. Fox Keller, E. (2010) The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. 9. Francis, R.C. (2011) Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. New York: Norton. 10. Franklin, S. and Roberts, C. (2006) Born and Made: An Ethnography of Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

11. Gaudillie`re, J.-P. and Rheinberger, H.-J. (eds.) (2004) From Molecular Genetics to Genomics: The Mapping Cultures of Twentieth Century Genetics. New York: Routledge. 12. Goddard, H.H. (1912) The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble Mindedness. New York: MacMillan. 13. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Re-Invention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 14. Harrington, A. (2008) The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine. New York: Norton. 15. Healy, D. (1999) The Anti-Depressant Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 16. Horowitz, A. (2002) Creating Mental Illness. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. 17. Jablonka, E. and Lamb, M. (2005) Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge: MIT Press. 18. Kristof, N.D. (2012) The poverty solution that starts with a hug. New York Times Sunday Review, 7 January,http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/kristof-apoverty-solution-that-starts-with-a-hug.html. 19. Kutchins, H. and Kirk, S.A. (1999) Making Us Crazy. New York: Constable. 20. Laing, R.D. and Esterson, A. (1970) Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics. London: Penguin. 21. Lederbogen, F. et al (2011) City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans.Nature 474(7352): 498501. | Article | PubMed | CAS | 22. Lock, M. (2001) The tempering of medical anthropology: Troubling natural categories. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15(4): 478492. | Article | PubMed | 23. Lombroso, C. (2004 [1876]) Criminal Man. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. 24. Low, S.M. (1981) The meaning of nervios: A sociocultural analysis of symptom presentation in San Jose, Costa Rica. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 5(1): 25 47. | Article | 25. Niewohner, J. (2011) Epigenetics: Embedded bodies and the molecularisation of biography and milieu. BioSocieties6(4): 279298. | Article | 26. Roepstorff, A., Niewohner, J. and Beck, S. (2010) Enculturing brains through patterned practices. Neural Networks23(89): 10511059. | Article | PubMed | 27. Shonkoff, J.P. et al (2011) Early childhood adversity, toxic stress and the role of the pediatrician: Translating developmental science into lifelong health. Pediatrics 26(December): e232e246. 28. Shorter, E. (1997) A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: Wiley. 29. Shostak, S. (forthcoming 2013) Defining Vulnerabilities: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 30. Showalter, E. (1998) Hystories: Hysteria, Gender and Culture. New York: Picador.

31. Singh, I. (2002) Bad boys, good mothers and the miracle of Ritalin. Science in Context 15(4): 577603. | Article | 32. Singh, I. (2011) A disorder of anger and aggression: Children's perspectives on attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the UK. Social Science and Medicine, Special Issue on Diagnosis 73(6): 889896. 33. Skinner, B.F. (1938) The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century. 34. Skinner, B.F. (2005 [1948]) Walden Two. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. 35. Sulloway, F. (1992) Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 36. Szasz, T. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper & Row. 37. Walsh, P., Elsabbagh, M., Bolton, P. and Singh, I. (2011) In search of biomarkers for autism: Scientific, policy and ethical challenges. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 12(10): 603612. | Article | PubMed |

There has been a huge debate on nature versus nurture and how it affects people. This debate has been going on for years in the study of human development. Nature and nurture seem to both have an effect on people, and they both definitely have an overall effect on the classroom performance of a student. When people use the term "nature" in reference to human development, they mean "inherited (genetic) influences on growth and functioning" (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2004, p. 7). This means the basic inherited traits such as walking, talking, standing upright and using basic utensils, but there are many other inherited characteristics such as physical attributes, intelligence and psychological traits. The idea of nurture affecting the development of an individual means that environmental factors around the individual affect the way a person grows and develops on many levels. Nurture is the "effects of family, peers, schools, neighborhoods, culture, the media, the broader society, and the physical environment. Nurture affects children's development through multiple channelsphysically through nutrition and activity; intellectually through informal experiences and formal instruction; socially through adult role models and peer relationships" (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2004, p. 7). Although the argument is nature versus nurture, I believe that both of these factors attribute the development of a child. I also believe that it is hard to completely distinguish between the two ideas. Nature will inevitably affect the classroom performance of a student because a student inherits certain traits that pertain to education. A student inherits the ability to do well in certain subjects and poor in other subjects. A student also inherits the certain psychological traits such as shyness or self confidence. Students may not be very assertive in class because they are inherently shy; this is also true in the case of students that have inherited a tendency to be outgoing. They will consistently be out spoken people. This is where nurture comes into play because students who are shy by nature can be nurtured and encouraged to be more aggressive and this may cause a change in their development. It also appears that nurturing can play a stronger role at certain points of a child's development. There are critical times where nurturing is more influential, and this usually occurs for young adults and children. These times may be more effectual, but they are not the only time where the environment has affect.

Overall it appears that nature supplies people with certain characteristics, but they can be altered and modified by the environment to an extent. Students are especially influenced by environment because although they are instilled with genetic influence at birth they can be influenced through the learning process in a way that can cause change in their development. References: McDevitt, T., & Ormrod, J. (2004). Child Development: Educating and Working with Children and Adolescents (2nd ed.). : Prentice Hall

The Influences of Nature and Nuture on Human Development Nature is responsible for the growth of a person from the fetus level until development into a normal adult. The genetic makeup of a human being is responsible for their sex, skin color, color of their eyes and hair as well as distinguishing features which are inherited. Nature can only assist in the growth of a fetus into a normal well-developed adult who may have inherited some special talents. Thus it can be concluded that nature uses the genetic coding to help in physical development and does impart some positive or negative traits to an individual. However, it is nurture which can be utilized to improve positive traits and diminish the effect of negative traits in a child. It is indeed important to recognize that nature in the form of inherited traits does exist but a persons overall behavior is influenced a great deal by nurture or upbringing and the environmental factors involved in this upbringing. Several recent studies carried out on infant and child behavior have shown that there is significant evidence to support the fact that nurture strongly influences human development especially in the early years. In traditional society most parents encourage their kids to take part in extracurricular activities like learning music, dance or sports in accordance with the childs talents and interests. The talents have been given by nature but they can only be developed into skills through the hard work of nurture.

Which Plays the Greater Role? Undoubtedly, nurture plays a very big role in early human development. Nurture in some way or another speeds up an individual's capacity to study and learn new things. There is the common saying that practice makes perfect. Therefore, an individual can improve knowledge by practicing to adapt to all creations in these circumstances or environment. The part which nurture plays in human development has been demonstrated by psychologists in experiments in which stepping practice was administered to a cohort of inference for just a few minutes many times in a day. It was later that these children were able to walk several days earlier than infants who had not been given stepping practice (Zalazo, Zelazo & Kolb, 1972.) In conclusion, it is evident that nature is responsible for producing healthy, well-developed babies. It is also nurture that plays an important role in the early stages of human development. Research has concluded beyond doubt that early human development is quicker and more focused due to nurture as it builds up on the talents provided by nature. Nature is responsible for the normal development of the fetus into a normal and healthy infant, but it cannot entirely develop that fetus into an intelligent, knowledgeable or athletic adult. This

is possible only through the exposure that nurture gives a person. Therefore, it would be correct to say that although the nature has some degree of influence, nurture strongly influences early human development.

References: 1) CollinsWA, Maccoby EE, Steinberg L, Hetherington ME, Bornstein MH. (2000). The case for nature and nurture. Am. Psychol. 55:218-232. 2) Ge X, Conger RD, Cadoret RJ, Neiderhiser JM, Yates W, et al. (1996). The developmental interface between nature and nurture: a mutual influence model of child antisocial behavior and parent behaviors. Development Psychology 32:574-589. 3) Plomin R, Reiss D, Hetherington EM, Howe GW. (1994). Nature and nurture: genetic contributions to measures of the family environment. Dev. Psychol. 30:32-43 4) Zelazo PR, Zelazo NA, Kolb S. (1972). Walking in the newborn. Science, 176:314-315.