Nature and Nurture Contributes to the Development of Individual Differences in Intelligence - Term Paper Example

Running Head: Nature as well as…. Topic: Nature as well as nurture contributes to the development of individual differences in intelligence. Discuss. Order#: 332630 Topic: Nature as well as nurture contributes to the development of individual differences in intelligence. Discuss. Introduction: Human mind exercises the direct control on all biochemical reactions taking place in the body. Directly or indirectly, each thought, emotion, and feeling influence the body. The body is the physical outcome of all the thoughts and emotions one has been rearing in the mental plane, as the wise saying goes, “Belief creates biology.” In other words, the physical body can be described as the manifestations of emotions or the three dimensional projection of the mental thoughts. To quote Shakespeare, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Our physical body is composed of our feelings, emotions, and thoughts, which after transmutation assume the state of physical expression. They are the basis of one’s intelligence. Each body cell gets imbibed with the mental stuff in the form of coded vibrations. It has been researched that those who are chronically depressed are four times more likely to get gripped with sickness. A bout of depression is mighty enough to disrupt the human immune system. The negative feelings and emotions become one of the causes of the flaring up of life-threatening cancerous diseases. The combination and permutation of varied factors like pollutants, imbalanced diet, and highly intensified aspirations and desires have rendered the human mind restless, thereby making the body perpetually ill. It is in this context, the observation of Joel Paris need to be understood. He writes, “Humanity is a single species. All of us have a great deal in common. We share the same body plan. We also have similar patterns of thought. Yet we are different from each other. Humans differ in physical characteristics, such as height, facial features, and the skin color. We are also mentally different –in our thoughts, in our emotions, and in our behavior.” (Paris,Introduction, p. ix) The area for discussion on the subject, nature as well as nurture contributes to the development of individual differences in intelligence, is very vast. Within the limited scope of this essay, Pre-disposition-stress theory as a model has been analyzed. “Predisposition-stress theory is a model that has been used widely in medicine. Whenever we apply a “medical model” to psychiatry, we normally take both predispositions and stressors into account.” This “model is the best way to understand the causes of mental disorders than an interactive model.” (Paris, Introduction, p. xiii) When trying to make the correct assessment of nature as well as nurture, and their effects on individual differences on intelligence, the fair conclusion is, nature and nurture are alternative beats of the same heart. Both are of equal importance and one can not exist without the other. “Life events alone cannot account for the development of personality disorders—or, for that matter, of most mental disorders.”(Paris, Introduction, p. xi) Children adapt to their social worlds with their ability to understand. “In this first genetic analysis of the phenomenon, using 119 same-sex 3-year-old twin pairs, evidence for substantial genetic influence was found. Intraclass correlations for identical and fraternal twins were .66 and .32, respectively; the maximum-likelihood model-fitting estimate of heritability was 67%. Bivariate model-fitting analyses showed that most (66%) of this genetic influence on understanding of mind was independent of verbal ability. Environmental influences on understanding of mind were attributed to child-specific factors, rather than those shared by children in the same family.”(Nature….) Nature vs. Nurture Perhaps this is the never-ending controversy though the Ages—between the heredity and environment! How much of a trait is due to heredity and environment? What is their proportional influence? Is the correct and conclusive answer ever possible? Let us take the example of a sprawling tree with many thousands of leaves. Do any two leaves of the trees match though they are supported by the same stem and fed by the same roots of the same tree? The tree is stationary in a particular place, it doesn’t move, and the same geographical conditions influence its existence. Why then all the leaves are not alike? Why all the fruits of the trees are dissimilar as for their size and color? How this diversity can be explained amidst the unity that they all belong to the same tree? The controversy related to Nature and nurture “ has continued despite continual reiteration that the critical question is not how much of a trait is due to heredity and how much is due to environment, but rather how environment transact to influence development." (Essay on….) The relative powers of nature and nurture have been relentlessly pursued by psychologists and biologists in an effort to determine how heredity and environment influence the mind. Before discussing their relationships, one must know what the mind really is. Mind is minding the eve-fluctuating contents in its portal. It is defined as the flux of thoughts. It is a thought-producing machine. Every action is propelled by the relative type of thoughts originating in mind. For example, for building an enterprise, the first requirement is to actualize it, to bring it to reality, to think about its details. Human body is subservient to mind and cannot be influenced without its consent. Mind must first dispatch its consent for the body to be influenced. All bodily diseases, therefore originate in mind. “According to Corsini, the term intelligence can be employed to indicate the amount of knowledge available and the rapidity with which new knowledge is acquired; the ability to adapt to new situations and to handle concepts, relationships, and abstract symbols.” (Raymond J, 1984) A thorough investigation on variety of subjects like twin, adoption, family, orphanage life, IQ and race studies are necessary to understand the topic of nature/ nurture and their mutual interaction. Four lines of evidence support the conclusion that life events alone cannot account for the development of personality disorders. They are:“1.Children, who have experienced serious adversity demonstrate high levels of resilience, and many develop no discernable psychopathoogy.2. A large number of patients with mental disorders have no history of childhood adversity.3.Siblings exposed to the same parental environment have different personalities, and, if they should later develop mental disorders, do not necessarily develop the same ones.4.Paients with similar life experiences can develop completely different illnesses.”(Paris, Introduction, p. xi) Psychotherapy: Psychotherapy can be defined as an art of healing an individual’s suffering by relieving distress emerging from emotional disturbances and behavioural disorders originating from maladaptive behaviour patterns. In addition to the care of mental, hence character, disorders, known as psychopathological symptoms, it also aims at infusing strength and courage in the patient to cope up with life situations. It aims at confidence-building by uprooting negative self assumptions and alleviating interpersonal problems. Modern psychotherapy is not just limited to disease cure, but, in addition, it focuses on the growth of an individual. Encyclopedia Britannica defines psychotherapy thus: “The systematic effort of a person or group to relieve distress or disability by influencing the sufferer’s mental state, attitudes, and behaviour.” The techniques involved basically revolve around patient’s total personality development by altering the behavioural patterns blocking individual’s development. The major causes of psychological illness are: Feeling of emptiness or meaninglessness, discontent with present existence, inability to cope with life situations, a sense of insecurity, despair, frustration, fear, anxiety, social failure etc. Directly or indirectly, all these emotional malfunctioning, which are the cause of all prevailing crisis are the consequence of a defective integration. We fail in integrating our different personality layers, resulting in a distorted make-up, leading to strife and frictions. When the different personality layers try to react differently, which, leads to friction amongst them, may cause personality degradation. On the contrary, if all these layers are harmonized perfectly, it may lead to faultless personality without any strife, without any friction. Thus, to root out the cause of all mental ailments and disturbances, the need is to incorporate the effective strategy for integrating our different personality layers—physical, mental, intellectual and spiritual. Due to lack of this integration, the patients, according to the details provided by them and as per the grasp of the issues by the psycho-therapist, stands to get benefit by psychotherapy, soon relapses and within some months of the treatment, reverts to the same distressing mental state. The psycho-therapist now tries transpersonal psychotherapy, which is also called psycho-spiritual discipline. What causes individual differences in intelligence? The causes can be compared to the growth of an octopus. It grows in all directions and that growth is not measurable accurately; it can only be estimated at a given time, under the given circumstances. The impact of two identical experiences on a particular individual may invariably vary at different times. The causes of differences may be political, moral, ethical, social, educational, physiological and statistical, to mention a few. In the search for the causes of individual differences in intelligence, the issues to be noted are the relative contribution of genetics and environment. According to Paris, “Ultimately, the differences between biological and psychological ideas in psychiatry are not really based on evidence. Rather, they are rooted in ideology.”(p.4) Currently the Western psychological world is somewhere in between - both genetics and environment are seen as playing important roles. To be more precise, the modern view about nature versus nurture in intelligence is "interactionist". This view is well expressed by Ridley. "Mother Nature has plainly not entrusted the determination of our intellectual capacities to the blind fate of a gene or genes; she gave us parents, learning, language, culture and education to program ourselves with." (Ridley, 1999, p.77): Galton writes, “I propose to show in this book that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. As it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations." (Introduction, p.1) How far this observation will be accepted by the present generation? Some are likely to dismiss Galton’s views outright. Accept or reject, this idea needs careful scrutiny. According to him, in the debate nature versus nurture, nature shall always prevail. He argued with a good deal of evidence that exceptional talent often ran in families. He proved it with statistical sampling that eminence in any field was due to hereditary factors. Heredity versus environment: Investigations have been carried out to study the implications of inheritance and evolution towards the development of outstanding human abilities. What contributes to the inborn ability that is exceptionally high? According to Galton, Nature always prevails. This is the satisfactory explanation to exceptional ability often seen in families. Most of the high performers had blood relatives with notable abilities. He provided statistical sampling to prove his point and came to the conclusion that hereditary factors contribute to eminence.The results were not acceptable to many, but Galton had a strong supporter in Chares Darwin. Galton proceeded with his research further and explained it in a new field called “eugenics,” The betterment of human race was contemplated through suitable marriages or abstention from marriage. Nazis later availed the opportunity to pursue their racist ideology, which they claimed had the scientific support. Today Galton’s viewpoints have surfaced into prominence again with the discovery of heritable diseases. Genetic screening is being used to eliminate undesirable traits. Subjects like Sperm banks, designer babies and human cloning are great research areas. Historical trends in the nature-nurture debate “A historical perspective is a useful way to frame the theoretical vicissitudes of the nature-nurture controversy in social sciences.”(Paris, p.58) Nature camp had an upper hand from mid to late 1800’s to the early 1900’s. This was in line with the scientific discoveries on the role of inheritance and natural selection as concluded by Darwin and others. Galton concluded through his research that “intelligence must be bred, not trained.” This observation had disastrous social and political consequences. The vested interests utilized this theory to initiate sterilization programs, and implemented such policies to encroach on the human rights from minority groups. Politicians like Adolph Hitler worked to eliminate from the face of Planet Earth certain races that led to the extermination of millions of Jews under very unfortunate circumstances. The intelligence of the section of the society that had the upper hand had thoroughly downplayed the intelligence of the people that were in a politically and socially disadvantageous position. The pendulum of nature versus nurture swings…. The post World War (1920-1930) research scenario provided different results. The intelligence data gathered challenged the commonly accepted view that intelligence was directly genetically linked to racial traits. It was observed that blacks from Illinois had higher IQ than whites from 9 southern states in USA. How could then the whites be intellectually superior to blacks? In any case, Wahlsten states, “It does not matter whether the field of human behavior genetics finally decides that the heritability of IQ in the United States is 25%, 40%, 50%, or 70%. Any such estimate will be utterly useless to anyone seeking better ways to improve the intelligence of the nation through health care and education."(84) Even from the point of view of judging an individual, Herrnstein and Murry categorically state that, "Measures of intelligence have reliable statistical relationships with important social phenomena, but they are a limited tool for deciding what to make of any given individual. Repeat it we must, for one of the problems of writing about intelligence is how to remind readers often enough how little an IQ score tells you about whether the human being next to you is someone whom you will admire or cherish." (21) Further studies gave conclusive results about the closer link between social class and intelligence as compared to race and intelligence. Psychologists of the 1930s shifted their stand towards the environmental camp. The social consequences of the government policies had a telling effect. The shift against nature gathered momentum. Earlier sterilization laws passed in many US States and Germany enabling the governments to initiate compulsory sterilization programmes drew the ire of the people. “The nature-nurture problem is not unique to psychiatry; it has also been a crucial area of contention in the social sciences. Interactions between genes and environment not only determine the development of psychopathology but also shape variations in normal behaviour.”(Paris, p.57) Between 1940s and 1990s simplistic nature or nurture views, as water-tight compartments, were rejected and their complex interplay came to be recogniszed. Social determinants came to the forefront instead of individual as the cause of the problem. The pendulum moved towards the nurture/environment end from the nature/genetic end. Better schooling and improvement in health conditions through welfare can provide the changed results. According to Ridley, "Mother Nature has plainly not entrusted the determination of our intellectual capacities to the blind fate of a gene or genes; she gave us parents, learning, language, culture and education to program ourselves with."(77) The final summing up and a conservative, seemingly safe position according to Sternberg & Grigorenko is that: "In the field of intelligence, there are three facts about the transmission of intelligence that virtually everyone seems to accept: 1. Both heredity and environment contribute to intelligence. 2. Heredity and environment interact in various ways. 3. Extremely poor as well as highly enriched environments can interfere with the realization of a persons intelligence, regardless of the persons heredity” (p. xi) Conclusion: This age old controversy regarding the contribution of nature as well as nurture remains controversy, taken in isolation. Considered together, it is no controversy at all. Both factors play their role in determining the level of intelligence of an individual. Moreover, intelligence of an individual does remain at a fixed level throughout the lifetime of an individual. It keeps on changing, perhaps for the better. Many instances can be quoted about children, who had docile childhood, shaping as brilliant scientists/engineers when they grow up. Spiritualists have a better understanding of the function of nature as well as nurture, when they tender advice to an individual—you are the creator of your destiny, not the victim. Many unsaid issues relating to the development of the personality/intelligence of an individual are revealed through this statement. ************** References: Essay on Philosophy …. Retrieved on November 12, 2009 Galton, Francis; Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws And Consequences (Great Minds Series) Adamant Media Corporation (2000) Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve. New York: The Free Press Nature, Nurture, and Individual Differences in Early Understanding …. Retrieved on November 12, 2009 Paris, Joel; Nature and Nurture in Psychiatry: A Predisposition-Stress Model of Mental Disorders; American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.; 1 edition (January 1999) Raymond J. (1984). Encyclopedia of Psychology, Volume 2 (New York.) Ridley, M. (1999) Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. London: Fourth Estate Ltd. Sternberg, R. J., & Grigorenko, E. (Eds.) (1997). Intelligence, heredity, and environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wahlsten, D. (1997). The malleability of intelligence is not constrained by heritability. In B. Devlin, S.E. Fienberg & K. Roeder (pp. 71-87). Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists respond to The Bell Curve. New York: Springer. Read More