Explain the debate over whether nature or nurture is more influential in shaping a person’s character, using reductionism and relationalism to emphasize the importance of nurture.
The debate over whether nature or nurture is more important in shaping a person’s personality has been going on for a long time. Experiments have been conducted to find out, such as raising identical twins in different environments, or raising different children in the same environment. However, due to methodological and ethical limitations, these experiments have not been able to conclusively determine what is important. In this article, we will use the concepts of reductionism and relational methods to show that acquired traits are more influential than innate traits in shaping a person’s character.
Reductionism and relationalism are fundamental mechanisms for analyzing something. Historically, reductionism emerged first, followed by relationalism. Reductionist methods are those that analyze an object or relationship by reducing it to its smallest units. For example, when we want to understand the disposition of a society, we derive answers from the disposition of individual members, or when we analyze the characteristics of life, we derive answers by analyzing smaller and smaller units (organs, tissues, cells, genes).
Reductionism naturally entered the public consciousness with the development of science and technology. Around the 17th century, the Scientific Revolution, which began with the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavens and ended with Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, completely changed the religious mindset and made scientific thinking the most important aspect of human reason.
As research progressed in each field, people became more inclined to analyze all phenomena in a reductionist way. In physics, the desire to find the smallest unit of matter led to the discovery of molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, and electrons, which led to the development of a sophisticated atomic model and the quantum theory of physics. The discovery of the quark, a subunit of the proton, also led scientists to analyze physical phenomena in a reductionist way. It was believed that by uncovering the properties of quarks and smaller particles that had yet to be discovered, the secrets of all physical phenomena could be unlocked. In biology, the study of the microscopic level began when Levenhuk built a microscope and discovered microorganisms. By observing the structure of cells and smaller units, researchers sought to explain the phenomena of life. Over time, a historically important theory emerged: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he published in the mid-19th century. Darwin argued for the theory of natural selection, which states that genes are important for the evolution and change of life. When Watson and Crick discovered the substance of these genes, DNA, and explained how DNA inherits traits to the next generation, the method of analyzing life solidified into reductionism. The double helix structure of four units was fascinating, and people came to believe that analyzing it all would unlock all the secrets of life. This is how the Genome Project began, which sought to identify the roles of every unit in DNA.
The reason for the rise of reductionism is that scientific research is done at the microscopic level. When studying how apparent natural phenomena work, it is convenient to study them by reducing them from higher-level concepts to lower-level concepts, and it is advantageous to understand the detailed mechanisms. In fact, there are many achievements that have been made using reductionist methods. For example, the understanding of human metabolism and the internal structure of the human body have led to improvements in medical technology.
However, in the 20th century, the reductionist method of analysis was challenged. Fritzoff Kapra, a world-renowned nuclear physicist, argued that ‘classical physics, called mechanistic physics, had a causal theory that was the basis of reductionism, but in modern physics, the causal theory that is the basis of reductionism is not established according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Reductionism is based on the causal theory that a phenomenon of a lower concept explains a phenomenon of a higher concept, but according to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, this causal theory does not hold because it is impossible to accurately observe a phenomenon in the microscopic world of photons and cannot determine its cause. Furthermore, he emphasized the need to change the mechanistic view of nature based on reductionist causality to an organismal view of nature without unilateral causality.
The limitations of reductionism became more apparent when analyzing the complexity of life. As genes were analyzed in depth, it was realized that genes are expressed to induce the synthesis of proteins, which in turn regulate gene expression. This led to the realization that there is no one-sided causality in the system of life. It was also suggested that the uniqueness of life cannot be analyzed in a reductionist way. The reductionist approach to life is to determine the characteristics of higher-level entities from the characteristics of lower-level entities that are common to all entities. The end result of this method is a grand discourse that presupposes universals for all entities, which cannot account for the individual uniqueness of life.
This reductionist approach to explaining life and natural phenomena has clear limitations. In particular, despite the near-completion of the Genome Project, which was the epitome of the reductionist method to reveal the nature of life, the uniqueness of individuals cannot be explained by gene expression. As a result, relational methods have been proposed as a new way to analyze things or objects. Relationalism is based on the premise that when analyzing an entity, rather than reducing it to its lower levels and looking for features, we see it as a part of a larger whole, and the entity itself as a whole. In such a system, the relational method is to analyze the relationship between internal components and the relationship between the object and the outside world to identify its characteristics. This is in clear contrast to reductionism, which analyzes an object by reducing it to subordinate levels and then analyzes the whole object through the premise that ‘the whole is the sum of its parts’, and is based on the premise that ‘the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts through the relationships between the internal and external parts’.
The concept underlying the relational methodology is the complex system. A complex system is a system that cannot be described in a single word and is randomly changed by a myriad of variables. In such complex systems, there are macroscopic phenomena that cannot be understood by looking at individual components. There are three typical characteristics of complex systems: phase transition, scale independence, and payoffs. A phase transition is a significant change from one state to another within a complex system. In a complex system, these transitions can occur at any time as the internal relationships change. Scale independence means that a complex system has a fractal-like characteristic where a part of a complex system is a whole of another complex system, and the whole is a part of the parts. Poorly distributed means that complex systems have uneven relationships, reminiscent of the trickle-down phenomenon in economics. Relational theory suggests that since a collection of living things is characterized as such a complex system, each living thing should be viewed as a component unit of the complex system and its macroscopic appearance should be observed to understand the uniqueness of each individual, which cannot be understood through reductionist methods.
Organisms are oriented to differentiate themselves from their surroundings and establish relationships with their surroundings. There are two types of individual uniqueness that distinguish each individual: physical uniqueness conferred by the immune system and mental uniqueness conferred by the nervous system. When the immune system encounters an invader that is not itself, it eliminates it through an antigen-antibody response and records the stimulus in memory cells to prepare for the next invasion. By storing these stimuli in memory cells, we gradually develop a sense of physical individuality that is distinct from the outside world. As the nervous system grows, it also accumulates the stimuli it experiences and forms patterns of behavior in response to each stimulus, giving it a mental identity. When an organism is first born, it is largely undifferentiated from its surroundings, but it establishes its individuality as it interacts with its environment. For example, as a newborn baby, it has no experience and has not yet differentiated itself from its environment, so it is not able to distinguish between what is and is not acceptable behavior. However, as time goes on, you learn what you should and shouldn’t do, as you are stimulated by other people’s actions, and as you learn what you should and shouldn’t do, you form your own personality. They develop their own differentiation from their surroundings. Importantly, most organisms do not simply seek to differentiate themselves from their surroundings, but rather change the direction of their differentiation through their relationships with their surroundings. An entity that tries to differentiate in isolation is like a cancer cell. They act only to establish their own identity without considering the reactions of others. In this sense, the psychopath’s inability to feel other people’s emotions can be seen as a way of describing a person who is unable to consider their relationships with others in the process of differentiating themselves from the world around them.
This growing collection of individuals in relationship to their surroundings has all the important characteristics of a complex system. First, as each individual receives external stimuli and establishes relationships, the conditions for differentiation from its surroundings are created and rapid changes occur, which can be seen as a kind of enlightenment as the organism differentiates from its surroundings. In other words, these changes demonstrate the phase transition potential of complex systems. In addition, the internal components of an organism are constantly reorganizing themselves and feeding back to each other, eventually reorganizing themselves into better structures, which is very similar to the transformation of countless people in a society. In other words, the organism itself is both a whole of internal components and a part of a whole society of organisms. In this sense, a collection of organisms can be seen as having the scale independence of a complex system. Finally, the more differentiated an organism is from its surroundings, the more it can build on them, whereas organisms that are less differentiated have to work harder to create new ones. This shows the uneven diversification of a collection of organisms, much like the rich and poor nature of complex systems.
In other words, when analyzing an organism, it is difficult to grasp its full essence by reducing it to subordinate levels and finding the sum of its parts, and it is only by recognizing the organism itself as a complex system and analyzing its internal and external relationships by looking at the group to which it belongs on a macroscopic scale that we can properly grasp its essence.
Human personality is very complex and difficult to understand intuitively, and each person has different individual uniqueness. Therefore, as we have seen above, it is appropriate to apply relational rather than reductionist methods to examine the essence of something as complex as human personality. Reductionist and relational methods of analysis can also be interpreted as those based on innate and those based on acquired human characteristics. According to reductionism, human personality is determined by the DNA information we are born with. On the other hand, according to the relational theory, human personality is created through the internal action of innate DNA information and the differentiation of individual uniqueness through new internal interactions that are learned through external stimuli and constant relationships with other individuals. In other words, human personality is more influenced by nurture than by nature.
