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Books
Beyond Human Nature by Jesse J. Prinz
Lantz Fleming Miller considers the nature versus nurture divide in Beyond Human Nature.
The debate as to what extent genes or environment determines us rages on. As Jesse Prinz points out in this lively, well-documented book, the controversy between nature and nurture dates back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the Fourth Century BC. Since the Nineteenth Century, when both biological inheritance and culture were first thought about scientifically, the sciences have taken up the debate, from the Nineteenth Century nativist psychologists, to the half-century of behaviorism in the Twentieth. Since the 1960s, the majority view has been ‘it’s in our genes’. Popular naturist (sic) books, such as those by Stephen Pinker, have inundated us.
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