Men have long professed that all of human behavior will be fully understood once it is conclusively determined whether the deciding factor in a man’s life is his heredity, or his environment. Do his genes make him act as he does, or is it his external conditions?
There are logical arguments for either position, replete with supporting examples that can momentarily persuade any ordinary mind of the validity of its view. Indeed, if you will look at the question exclusively from their perspective, the arguments of either camp can fully explain all of human behavior. Either can – either always has, and either will continue to do so. (And no one finds this interesting?)
The arguments can be made for either view. The endless examples available to support each are so well known, and easily observed, as to need no coverage here. Listening to such from either camp can cause any ordinary man’s mind to agree with its position, of why men act as they do. And yet, after thousands of years of this debate, still no one is satisfied with either explanation.
One of the two possibilities must be the determining factor in making a man live his life in the particular way he does. It must be due to either what is inside of him – the unique genetic make-up with which he was born and which directs his individual, instinctive responses to the external world – or else genetically, everyone is basically the same, and each man’s behavior is controlled by the ever changing conditions of the external world. One of the two MUST explain it!
As always, the mind is generally confined to a binary view. Although there are those who clutch at the cloak of intellectual superiority, by proposing that what is really involved is, “a little bit of one, and a little bit of the other,” to wit that heredity explains some aspects of man’s behavior, and his environment explains others, and yet – even this position has not proven satisfying.
J.