Socialization and Biology
Our identity is based on the interplay of nature and nurture. Naturemeans our phys-
ical makeup: our anatomy and physiology, our genes and chromosomes. Nurture
means how we grow up: what we learn from our physical environment and our
encounters with other people. Nature and nurture both play a role in who we are,
but scientists and philosophers have debated for centuries over how much each con-
tributes and how they interrelate.
Before the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nature was
supreme: Our identity was created by God along with the natural world and could
not be changed by mere circumstances. Nurture played virtually no part at all: As
many fairy tales assure us, a princess raised in poverty was still a princess. Theolo-
gian John Calvin taught that we were predestined to be good or evil, and there was
nothing we could do about it. But in the seventeenth century, British philosophers
like John Locke rejected the idea that nature is solely responsible for our identity, that
biology or God places strict limits on what we can become. They went in the other
direction, arguing that we are born as tabula rasa—blank slates—and our environ-
ment in early childhood determines what we become.
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a compromise. He argued
that human beings do inherit identities: All children, and adults in their natural state,
are “noble savages,” naturally warm, sociable, and peace loving. However, their envi-
ronment can also change them. Cold industrial civilization teaches children to become
competitive, belligerent, and warlike. Thomas Jefferson based his ideas for the Amer-
ican experiment on Locke and Rousseau: “All men are created equal,” that is, they
derive some basic qualities from nature. However, some are more civilized than others.
In the nineteenth century, the nature side of the debate got a boost when Charles
Darwin observed that animal species evolve, or change over time. He was not aware
of genetic evolution, so he theorized that they develop new traits to adapt to chang-
ing food supplies, climates, or the presence of predators. Because human beings, too,
are the result of millions of years of adaptation to the physical changes in their world,
identity is a product of biological inheritance, unchangeable (at least during any one
individual’s lifetime).
But growing up in different environments changes our ideas about who we are and
where we belong without having to wait millions of years. For example, a person140 CHAPTER 5SOCIALIZATION“true self,” but a different self, a different person. Our identity is a process, in constant
motion.
The sociological perspective may make us feel more creative because we are constantlyrevising our identity to meet new challenges, but it may also make us feel more insecure and
unstable because it argues that there is nothing permanent or inevitable about the self.
Change means creative potential, but it also means instability and the potential for chaos.