The Nature-Nurture Debates Bridging the Gap

How is it possible that in more than one hundred years, the nature-nurture debate has not come to a satisfactory resolution? The problem, Dale Goldhaber argues, lies not with the proposed answers, but with the question itself. In The Nature-Nurture Debate, Goldhaber reviews the four major perspectives on the issue - behavior genetics, environment, evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory - and shows that the classic, reductionist strategies (behavior genetics and environmental approaches) are incapable of resolving the issue because they each offer a false perspective on the process of human development. It is only through a synthesis of the two holistic perspectives of evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory that we will be able to understand the nature of human behavior.

1. Issues and questions; 2. A brief history lesson; 3. The proxy debate: a primer on methodology and analysis; 4. A classic debate; 5. A new debate; 6. So what?; 7. Now what?

Dale Goldhaber is Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont. In 2010, he received the John Dewey Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Education and Social Services. Professor Goldhaber is the author of Theories of Human Development: Integrative Perspectives and Life-Span Human Development in addition to numerous articles related to human development and early childhood education.