# There is no such thing as nature versus nurture

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2016/08/24/there-is-no-such-thing-as-nature-versus-nurture/
- Published: 2016-08-24T19:21:06+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

#### The grand canyon of reflexive beings

So I wanted to comment on the highlight above, but then this comment thing got my
attention:

> There is also no evolutionary purpose to the in love feeling lasting longer than
> it takes to produce offspring, [Sara Lynn Michener](https://medium.com/@saramichener)
> said in her article.

> And raise them, and provide for them, and protect them. _There_ is an evolutionary
> reason, [thnidu](https://medium.com/@thnidu) appropiated swiftly the idea of Sara’s
> love

> Pretty sure that comes from the “nurture” side of things rather than nature, and
> sociology statistics back me up on that. But the nature/nurture argument is obviously
> a bigger debate 😉 [Sara Lynn Michener](https://medium.com/@saramichener) replied

Here is the thing, if there are any aliens in space and they also have brains and
conscious phenomenons like we do in those brains, I bet there is a nature versus
nurture debate on other planets as we speak.

Maybe their subjects are different: do we love to invade less evolved civilizations
because it is in our nature or because we’ve been nurtured into it, might such an
alien astronomer wonder, while gazing at the star map showing the bounds of their
galactic empire. But the theme is the same if they are self reflective creatures
like us, also known as beings.

Unlike creatures, beings have a very weird geography of knowledge, like: mountains
of misunderstandings, valleys of ignorance, plateaus of facts, rivers of ideas, 
seas of wonder and canyons of identity.

Canyons of identity are the saddest and, at the same time, magnificent part of a
being’s geography of knowledge.

> The recursiveness inside our heads makes us have **ourselves perceiving ourselves**,
> this creating the ego. We have one personality. The personality is real. There
> are two mirror reflections of our personality one inside, the ego and the other
> outside, the identity.

> Identity is the internal representation of an external personality. Thus, the 
> others create one’s identity and the experiences create one’s personality. Hence
> the conflict: socially you are what other people make of your personality, aka
> your experience, while they have had none of your experience. You’re defined by
> noobs. [[Evolving](https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/evolving-published-as-a-book-fe4ff9cf3fda#.hid1lgbbn),
> god! I am citing myself, the shame]

A canyon is the erosive effect rivers have on rock during huge periods of time.

A time limited being, such as a human, does not have huge periods of time as a direct
experience, but we get them as an indirect experience from society through education
and entertainment. So we feel as if we’ve been here forever. Sadly we also feel 
like we will be here forever. It is often perceived as if we’d be moved back one
thousand years ago we’d feel weird but quickly we’ll be like home, especially if
one likes to read up on history. It is a continuity sensation that ties our small
flicker in the universe’s timeline with the past we never lived and the future we’ll
never live.

At the same time we are idea factories. Our brains make all these ideas, that all
flow together, like rivers do, into our seas of wonder. The more ideas we make, 
the more fresh water our wonder will get. But because of the continuity our social
behavior creates, we get connected to rivers of ideas that belong to our entire 
species’s history: humanity! We inherit this geography of humanity’s entire knowledge
from the human peers that groom us for the life among the living

Some rivers of ideas are so old, much older than one human will ever be, they dug
huge canyons in the plateaus of facts and in the the mountains of misunderstandings.
Some of these canyons are dry, no ideas flow through them for centuries but they
still are deep cracks in the way we see the facts and connect the misunderstandings.

The there is one such canyon that is so deep and so long it basically allows one
to live off intellectual tourism to it: the nature versus nurture debate. It was
once a river of ideas, fast and swift in its flow, with frothy little cascades here
and there, ever since we’ve moved our eyes towards the heavens at night and wondered
what does that twinkling light could be, or that blue gem sitting proudly next to
the shiny circle that kept us safe at night. So we began to create culture, because
that is what we do when take sail on our inner seas of wonder.

In essence, what we call nurture is our mirrored selves, our mirrored creation, 
the effort we make to rise as high as required to be the giants our future generations
will stay on. What we call nurture is the collective reliance on our ancestor’s 
best guess, which we call wisdom, but which is seldom so. Nurture is the the screen
saver that shows up in our minds where we’re not working on it consciously. Alas,
we can only _think _about nurture like this, just like I am doing here, writing 
this.

But we _feel _nurture differently.

We feel as if it is our creation, our brainchild, the thing which we “teach” others
to be, or the thing they are “taught” to be by their experience. We separate it 
and cherish it so dearly. But this separation is false.

Nurture is a mere side effect of nature.

Nature is the all encompassing circle of effects of existing as a living _aware 
_being, including nurture. You cannot have a score board between the two, because
nurture is nature, just retrofitted with the models our brains require to predict
what’s next. Nurture is nature with bells and whistles. We sure like bells and whistles.
But take them out and nurture is just plain old nature.

See the paragraphs of words above all written as metaphors? As you see you need 
not talent to make metaphors, we all do it.

Metaphors are the maps we use to navigate the geography of our knowledge.

Bam, another one. If you liked any you’ve been exposed to nurture.

Everything is natural, including things we don’t like. This is the reason that the
single valid moral argument is the golden rule. Everything else is debatable, specifically
because everything is natural. Once we acknowledge nurture as a simple side effect
of nature at work, we’ll stop taking refuge in arbitrary moral rules to selectively
approve worthy humans that are having experiences we know nothing about.

It is natural to raise a child to be adapted to the society they enter into, the
act is natural and the result is natural. It is natural for social beings to [groom others for stability](https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-funnel-of-change-557c86c0b2ff#.qvin9aq5p),
it is natural to behave according to your models about your experience (which include
sexuality, the big bugaboo) and some of all the natural effects of your existing
and of the other’s existing intertwine in a common timeline, which help us thrive
as long as we don’t fill up the atmosphere with too much crap, or kill off all the
bees who have no way to moralize us and ask if our ruthless expansion of habitat
is nature or nurture ….

At this point I feel like [Fabiana Cecin](https://medium.com/@fcecin) said some 
place, pouring ideas out like notes to self. Yet, I couldn’t skip again laying out
my dislike for this concept that is so common and dry: nature versus nurture.

#### So, back to the main theme.

Now, my question was:_ isn’t polygamy about monogamy, relationship exclusivity, 
and polyamory about sexual exclusivity_? I mean all this mixup is confusing. You
can be monogamous and polyamorous at the same time. You can be ploygamous and you’ll
NOT be ployamorous by default, ask Suleiman the Magnificent who despite a great 
opportunity at polyamory chose monoamory 🙂 Is monoamory a thing?

> If you are that person, who has ended a long-term relationship over _not feeling
> the magic_, then you owe it to yourself and others to become a polyamorist.

This should be the most highlighted sentence,

A

---

P.S. For the folk to read this and have an ad literam background process that skews
their metaphor perception so that all roads lead to Rome:

 * I used the word “our” about 21 times in this and yet I don’t mean to generalize
   but to involve the reader in my worldview
 * I don’t endorse generalizations and labeling, but we must trust and / or train
   our (22) billions of neurons to discern when that happens