Nature v nurture? Please don't ask

The monster Caliban, according to his master, Prospero, was “a devil, a pure devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. Yet only a few decades before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, St Ignatius Loyola had founded the Jesuit order, with its famous maxim: “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.”

This ancient debate over the relative contributions of inheritance and experience to the human condition has never been more charged than in the genetic age

the doctrine of the blank slate.

The idea, usually traced to the 17th-century philosopher John Locke, grew popular in the Enlightenment, fitting the mood of challenge to the supposedly innate authority of monarchy and aristocracy.

It was a statement of individual freedom

Liberal opinion turned against the concept of a biological human nature, which was increasingly seen as a tool with which male and bourgeois elites could rationalise hegemony.

Protesters in masks and suits satirizing bankers gather outside the Bank of England in the City of London in a demonstration against the financial institutions as world leaders from the Group of 20 countries gather for a Summit

difficulty

separating nature and nurture