Five Positions on the Nature-Nurture Issue
The tenth excerpt from my forthcoming book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences
This is the tenth excerpt from my forthcoming book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences. You can access the full collection here, and preorder the book here.
In this installment, I tackle one of the most familiar yet most persistently misunderstood debates in the social sciences: the nature-nurture question as applied to psychological sex differences. Rather than asking whether nature or nurture wins, I lay out five distinct positions we can take on any given sex difference - positions that are often overlooked, talked past, or mistaken for one another. They range from the Nature-Only position at one extreme to the Nurture-Only position at the other, with various blended positions in between.
Along the way, I argue that:
Almost no one today endorses Nature‑Only explanations, but many people act as if they hold the Nurture-Only view for most sex differences.
Many assume that if a sex difference varies across cultures, evolution must be irrelevant - an assumption that doesn’t survive scrutiny.
Claims that “nature and nurture can’t be separated” are often deployed selectively, and only when nature threatens to matter.
On with the show!
Five Positions on the Nature-Nurture Issue
The first sentence most people hear when they enter the world is ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’ It doesn’t mean a lot to them at the time, but those three simple words foreshadow much of what life has in store for them. How much of what’s in store, though, is due to society channelling its members into pink and blue gender roles, and how much to the evolved nature of our species?
In this chapter, we’ll throw ourselves into the ongoing, sometimes heated debate about the nature and nurture of psychological sex differences. Simplifying recklessly, there are five main positions we can take for any given difference.