ABSTRACT
Reflections about human nature have been marked by controversy over how much of our personality is preordained, and how much is shaped by what happens to us in the course of living. Philosophers in the nativist tradition, such as Kant, supposed that mental properties unfold independently of experience (a “destiny that shapes our ends”), while the empiricists, Locke, Hume, and Condillac for example, imagined the mind as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, upon which individual experience writes. This controversy is older than genetics, older indeed than the science of psychology. Behavioral scientists in the hundred or more years of our discipline have contended between these two camps.
