ABSTRACT
The nature—nurture debate is one of the oldest debates in psychology. It is something that is commented on by many people on a regular basis, often without realising and certainly without actually referring to the terms nature or nurture themselves. In fact, the terms nature and nurture didn’t come into common use until the sixteenth century, but the issue has been hotly debated for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The simplistic aspect of the nature—nurture debate can be very appealing when we are considering the causes of people’s behaviour. To understand how the debate applies to real life, it’s useful to go back to the biological approach and the belief that genes and biological structures influence our behaviour. Some would argue that ultimately all behaviour is biological as everything we think and do is related to one biological structure or another.
