Hello Mr. Hindu,

This is not the case at all about genetics. You should think about what I have said a bit. The DNA we have and the DNA the elephants have is different. To be able to behave like us, they would need the capacity to make large brains as well as to make to have the right vocal chords etc... I do not think you can think of these things as simply as you are making it out to be. These processes are quite complicated actually and need to be understood from a biological point of view before attempting to reason about them in philosophical manner.

The twin studies you have mentioned are a really interesting example of nurture and nature playing together. These twins should have identical DNA and yet they do not look exactly alike. What is the difference? usually nurture.

I wish you all good luck in your quest for knowledge.

Hello Mr. Hindu,

My point in the quote above that, was that nature and nurture are the same. If they are the same thing, then it makes no sense to say that there must be some distinction between them that we can measure. — Harry Hindu

I do not think nature and nurture are the same at all. Humans, being a subset of "life", are both. If you think about Nature vs Nurture in terms of gene expression, this distinction between the two becomes rather hard to ignore. Nature is essentially what you were born with.. so it is precisely the genetic code included in your DNA from the point that you were born.

Nurture is the sum total of all physiological interactions with the environment. This includes every single thought you have had and all the food you have eaten, everything you have witnessed, how well you sleep, etc... everything. The nurture will increase or decrease gene expression according to need, provided that system which deals with the thing you are doing, has the capacity to make adjustments.

Sounds like many of you playing the semantic game of knocking down scare crows.

when feminists say that sex is a determined by society, they are right; but they aren´t right in assuming that is a bad thing — DiegoT

Yes but only because it is often defined as such in an awkward way. This principle is not uniform and some species can switch sexes (not just genders). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism

Male behaviours and female behaviours are strongly linked to hormonal levels. So if you take a disease like polycystic ovarian syndrome, this becomes quite clear.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pcos/symptoms-causes/syc-20353439

Think about this...
1 - these women are often hairy in places they should not be.
2 - they are usually fat.
3 - they often do not have the ability to have children
4 - they can lose hair in places that women do not usually lose hair (balding))

How much do these women feel like the women that they see on the cover of magazines? Do they feel like what society tells them a woman is? So for every sex-specific hormone, run a plot of the hormone levels for men and women and look at the two distributions. I would imagine that you will get two offset normal looking distributions with different parameters. For many of these very potent hormones, you will have overlap. Those areas of overlap are areas where you would expect disparities between how someone perceives themselves with respect to how society perceives their sex/gender.

So you know how in the DSM 5, everything became a "spectrum disorder". The exact same principles can apply to sexes and genders. They have finally realized (by "they", I mean the medical profession; psychiatry mostly) that they cannot box people in such silly ways.

Feminism: they can say all they want but they do not dictate biology. I do not think it is possible to defend the position that society does not dictate gender stereotypes.

As I already told Andrew, genes are part of the environment. The other members of your species are made up bags of genes. These bags of genes are part of your social environment. — Harry Hindu

I agree with this position. I believe that the best way to view what "life" is, is to view it as entities that can reproduce and protect genetic upgrades. "anti-life" would be viruses. Everything else is just one thing... "life". bacteria is life, humans are life.. the divisions do not make sense to me. It would be bizarre to not think of all life on the planet just being self protecting genetic code.

This is a great example of how both nature and nurture (the environment) have equal influence on what we are now. — Harry Hindu

This claim would require quite a fair bit of justification (with data) to support. You would first need to come up with a metric to measure the relative contributions to even begin to utter the words which you have here spoken. If you were to be able to defend this statement in a peer-reviewed manner, you would probably win a Nobel Prize.

It would seem as though there is a bit of a knowledge gap in this thread. I am happy to answer any questions about genes. Behaviour and genes are definitely linked in a very straightforward way. In addition, the nature vs nurture is no longer a debate, we now know some things about the genome and it will only continue to grow with time. One of the simplest ways it can control behaviour is through the regulation of hormone levels. So I think that the best way to think about the human is not to make the human all that different from its mammalian cousins. A more distant relative would be something like E. coli. Essentially the nuclei of our cells are tiny machines that print instructions which allow other tiny machines to make proteins and other complicated molecules. The DNA encodes all of this stuff. In addition to storing the recipes including the recipe to replicate itself, the genes can be turned off and on in the sense of this instruction printing feature as a result of outside stimulus or stress.