Nature versus nurture
Scholarly and popular discussion about
nature and nurture relates to the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities as compared to an individual's personal experiences in causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. The phrase "nature and nurture" in its modern sense was coined by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton in discussion of the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement, although the terms had been contrasted previously, for example by Shakespeare. Galton was influenced by the book
On the Origin of Species written by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin. The concept embodied in the phrase has been criticized for its binary simplification of two tightly interwoven parameters, as for example an environment of wealth, education, and social privilege are often historically passed to genetic offspring, even though wealth, education, and social privilege are not part of the human biological system, and so cannot be directly attributed to genetics. The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed
tabula rasa by philosopher John Locke.