Quote:
Originally posted by SilverTurtle:
But what if you consider Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory? It seems that the weaker would nurture the same traits/qualities in their offspring, while the strongest would nurture their stronger traits/qualities in their offspring. So is that nature, or nurture? I still think it's both.
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Well . . . i would argue that most humans aren't subject to Darwinian natural selection, not in the way he envisioned it anyway.
Think about it: are humans selected for competitively? No - they're subject to different pressures etc, and we attempt to overcome genetic/societal/etc. shortcomings w/ modern medicine and the sort. Other animals that are disabled/diseased/defective genetically etc are selected out by natural selection, but humans with these sort of problems are aided by medicine. The only type of selection that still remains is social selection, and i think that all of us can vouch for the fact that there is very little 'fair' or even constant about this sort of selection.
Think of people who acquire advantages in life through being born into wealth, or a young man whose father gives him a job he doesn't deserve, and you can see what i'm saying here.
Modern man has replaced genomic evolution with scientific and intellectual advance. This can be seen in human population growth - there's no way that the natural holding capacity of the earth is at over 6 billion people; we have altered the environment to create this. So yeah - i think in this way the darwinian natural selection model has been removed in many ways from humans - the term "social darwinism" has negative connotation in the eyes of most people. So the nature/nurture argument, in terms of selection, can't rely on natural selection so much as it may use unnatural selection, or different selection, as the model - maybe?
Food for thought, i guess, to contribute to the argument.