ABSTRACT
In science, ideas come and go. Some ideas are driven out by an accumulation of opposing scientific evidence; other ideas take forever to get rid of, no matter what the evidence suggests. The nature-nurture controversy – the long-standing debate over whether heredity (i.e., influences from within, inherited from or transmitted by previous generations) or environment (i.e., influences from the outside, encountered throughout the lifespan) is more important in human development – is just one of these hangers-on: no matter how much evidence accumulates in the field of scientific inquiry into the etiology of human behavior that shows this controversy to be invalid as a logical premise, it continues to exist.
