ABSTRACT
The proposition that social behaviors may be partitioned into components of nature or nurture has endured over the past century. At least part of the contemporary debate stems from the different levels of analysis that are employed in addressing the matter. At one level, the focus has been on the identification of the mechanisms supporting their integration within the developing organism (Scott, 1977). At another level, the concern has been with the psychometric quantification of how much variance each component contributes to social behavioral characteristics in a specifiable population (Plomin, 1990). The two levels of analyses appear to aspire to a common goal–namely, the understanding of gene–behavior interrelations–but they differ in methods, generate different analyses, and, unhappily, employ different conceptual definitions for some of the same terms. Although the assumption that genetic and environmental factors are separate and additive has proved to be productive in the psychometric tradition and in neurobiological investigations where it introduces an additional level of control, it encounters difficulties when social adaptations are examined in their functional context.
