ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury near Birmingham, England, and Abraham Lincoln was born in Hodgenville near Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Although the two men never met or corresponded, they are now associated with views of human nature that are diametrically opposed to one another. These two views, one biological, the other primarily political, have posed a dilemma with which psychology still struggles as it approaches the beginning of the 21st century. Victorian society quickly noted the implications of Darwinian theory of evolution and those who set human beings apart from other animals took offense at it. The original genotypic blueprint inherited by an individual is immutable for the entire life of that person, but each cell's copy of that blueprint is somewhat different from the original because it is modified by these several environments. An argument that frightens many people away from any acceptance of the genetic side of the nature-nurture argument grows out of an implication for social and political policy.
