The longstanding debate of nature versus nurture, initiated by Sir Francis Galton over 150 years ago, is being transformed by the emerging field of sociogenomics. This new science reveals that genes and environment do not operate separately but interact in complex ways, influencing and shaping one another. Sociogenomics has profound implications for our understanding of identity and development, suggesting that genetic predispositions can determine the environments we gravitate towards, reshaping traditional views on free will, race, and policy. Rather than choosing a side in the debate, it appears that both nature and nurture are inextricably linked.
Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate—not by declaring victory for one side or the other, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place.
Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don't operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other.
Genes, it turns out, don't affect who we become just on their own, inside our bodies—they work, in part, by shaping the environments we seek out or engender.
For all the talk of someday engineering our chromosomes and the science-fiction fantasy of designer babies flooding our preschools, this is the real paradigm shift, and it's already underway.
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