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Introduction
In this essay, I explore what social science might contribute to building a better understanding of relations between 'nature' and 'nurture' in human development. I outline a general historical account of changing scientific perspectives on the contribution of environment in the developmental and behavioural sciences, before reflecting on a recent call to arms against 'toxic stress' issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). I suggest that such post-genomic programmes of early intervention, which draw on emerging scientific theories of organismic plasticity and developmental malleability, raise significant social and ethical concerns. At the same time, such programmes challenge social scientists to move beyond critique and to contribute to new developmental models that dismantle the old divide between nature and nurture. I point out the difficulties of this endeavour, even in the process of writing and re-imagining nature-nurture relations.
In examining these difficulties here, I use the language of 'higher' and 'lower' systems and functions where previously one may have used 'environmental' and 'biological'. Other terms, used by myself and others, are 'micro' and 'macro' or 'inner' and 'outer'. Although all these terms signal a start towards a different framing, they are of course vague and unsatisfactory, particularly because they fail to represent the fundamental inseparability of most entities that we have tended to divide with this sort of language. In concluding, I describe efforts to overcome such problematics of language. These efforts posit new terms of reference, as well as research interests and questions that are neither founded upon nor efforts to resolve the nature-nurture debate. Throughout the essay, I focus mainly on early child development, in part because this is the area that interests me most, and in part because it is an area in which social scientists have not recently examined the problem of the nature-nurture divide. Although the arguments here may be obvious to some multi- and inter-disciplinary scholars, I hope for others they will provoke constructive thinking about the constraints of some more familiar critical and analytic orientations in the life sciences and social sciences.
The Nature-Nurture Problem
Around the turn of the twentieth century, many countries in the West developed social programmes that aimed to develop human fitness and potential in line with ideas derived from plant and animal...