As a genetics major, I am a firm believer that your personality and physical characteristics are based on your genes.
My favorite evidence of this genetics as the basis to your personality are those pictures of twins, each with similar posture, arm placement, and smile without being told to sit in any position. One of the first of these pictures that I have ever seen was in my genetics book. It was a picture of around 20 sets of identical twins, not told to sit in any way, but all having same posture and look. This is fascinating to me. Also, hearing about twins separated at birth found to have very similar mannerisms and habits is extraordinarily amazing. Genes must be the basis to these quirks. It would be hard to attribute the nurture aspect to these quirks because they grew up in different households.
As an example, I have a sister, who is almost the same age as me, raised in the same environment, etc. Our personalities are night and day different. To be short, I am very outgoing, love big cities, and am very independent. She, on the other hand, is more reserved, would be perfectly content in the middle of nowhere, and is much less independent . I believe this difference in an outcome of the differences in our genes. I don’t believe that there was much difference in the way we were raised and therefore it would be hard to attribute our differences to “nurture”. We do have some similarities. We obviously look very similar and we are both very dedicated to our educations. I hope to go to medical school and she is now in her first year in veterinarian school. I think these similarities are due to us sharing some of the same genes.
I believe that genetics is a framework to the person that you become. To some extent, yes, living in an abusive/neglecting/fill in the blank household, may affect you, but I think that much of who you are is based on the DNA you inherit.
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I am also very interested in genetics and the relation between personality and genes. I agree completely with you, that personality is based on nature rather than nurture. I find twin studies to be very intriguing and great evidence to back up the argument that personality and physical characteristics are based on genetics. An example that is very similar to what you had described about the posture study on the twins, is when Pinker described his favorite example about two identical twins raised apart. One twin was raised Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany and the other was raised Jewish in Trinidad, so they obviously were brought up very differently with opposing views and ideas, but when they met at a lab, they were both wearing the same outfit and had very similar quirks. So Pinker also agrees and goes along with the idea that nature wins over nurture. I find all these examples of nature to be very interesting and I really enjoyed what you had to say about genetics, and I completely agree.
ReplyDeleteI also find genetic influence on personality to be very interesting, and relevant. I think that environment has an influence, but the overlapping of the two aspects seems so grey (and mind-boggling...)
ReplyDeleteI am taking a Linguistics class right now, which oh-so-conveniently correlates to many of my other current courses. The first thing my teacher had us study was the brain. I learned that there are just a few particular areas where language is centered. There are also locales of the brain specific to color processing, and many other things.
You mentioned the study of identical twins who, unprovoked, posed the same for a photo; someone else mentioned identical twins who unknowingly gave their children the same names; one of my Linguistic text books (which happens to be The Language Instinct by none other than Mr. Pinker) mentions a pair of identical twins seperated at birth, who after meeting sent eachother identical presents which crossed in the mail.
Since these are identical twins, they would have the same DNA and thus (nearly?) identical brains. The functions of different brain locales seem to be quite specific, so if two brains were the same that might explain striking similarities in preferences.
But does a similarity in preferences mean a similarity in personality? What defines you? Is it your posture? Is it your taste in clothes? Is it the words that feel right in your mouth? All of these? None of these?
And how much flex does your environment have to shape you? Would an abusive stepfather have a big impact on your emotional response, or is that something to which you are finitely predisposed?
Sorry if there doesn't seem to be a lot of direction here; it's primarily speculation. Your posting about twins got me excited - thanks for bringing it up!