Evelyn Fox Keller : The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture Duke

For well over 100 years, some scientists have been interested in disentangling how nature and nurture affect the development of people’s characteristics. After all, some characteristics appear uninfluenced by the contexts in which development occurs, whereas others appear very much affected by developmental environments. To choose two obvious examples, skin color appears to be little affected by a child’s nurturing environment— children born to black Kenyan adults, for example, grow up to have dark skin like their parents even if they are raised by adoptive white parents in Denmark—and language appears to be little affected by a child’s natural biological inheritance—those same children learn to speak the perfect Danish of their adoptive parents, knowing nothing of their biological parents’ Swahili. As a result, it seemed reasonable to Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton to attempt to develop a way to measure the relative influences of nature and nurture on human traits. Efforts building on Galton’s studies in this domain have continued to the present day. More recent theorists have recognized that Galton mischaracterized the origins of our traits; because nature and nurture in fact always interact during development, both factors are always influential. Although skepticism about this fact remains high when the traits in question are thought to be ‘‘biological’’—for example, many people seem confident that traits like skin and eye color are genetically determined and therefore uninfluenced by nurture—psychological traits (e.g., behaviors, intelligence, and temperament) are generally understood to be influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Consequently, the nature/nurture debate is considered by many to have been resolved. Why, then, might a new book on this old debate be of value? In The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, Evelyn Fox Keller explains why this debate is ongoing in spite of repeated claims that it has been resolved. She uses several sorts of evidence to demonstrate that even molecular biologists, behavior geneticists, and philosophers of science sometime appear confused about these issues. But the general