Many other people believe that we are born as a blank slate, and that everything we believe, like, desire, find important, and do is a result of being influenced by our environment. This has also been proven to be wrong. Let me point out a case that has caught my attention. In Switzerland, there has been a huge discussion regarding whether our sexuality is innate or learned. In the following video, you will see that, unlike what we would expect, scientists are not curious about that. Much for the opposite. They think it is an unimportant question. Many people who defend gay rights in Switzerland believe that saying that our sexuality (and consequently homosexuality) is innate is the same as saying it is undesirable. I found that quite odd. In my opinion (as as the American scientist points out), seeing our sexuality as innate encourages people to be more sympathetic towards it.
(WARNING: This video contains images which may not be suitable for some audiences. Its also in Swedish, which English subtitles)
So, what makes us good or evil? Is a psychopath born a psychopath, or is there such thing as "The Lucifer effect"? Well... a little bit of both. Some people are in fact born with genes that make them more likely to have some sort of personality, such as psychopathy, but without the environment to pull the trigger, those personality traits may never come to surface.
Many researchers have explored the topic. As the researcher in the BBC documentary below tells us, if our pre-disposition to be moral or immoral depends on a chemical, than that makes it easier not just to measure how evil someone is, but also to predict how likely, lets say, a child is to become a
psychopath as an adult. The tests performed in the video below are amazing. From the very first test, we can see that the discussion of whether people may be born instinctively good (or evil) is a complex one.
(Fast video forward to 31:00) This is mid blowing. There are actual physical signs of psychopathy. Researcher Jim Fallon analyzed a group of brain scans, those of patients of depression, schizophrenia, normal people, and killers. He noticed a pattern. The group he separated as those with a defective orbital cortex and the front part of the temporal lobe. This group, amazingly, was made up of the killers. This finding is amazing in its own. It, as the narrator says, is a step closer to finding the signature brain profile of a psychopath. But this isn't the most surprising finding.
From where do these differences in the psychopaths' brain come from? The answer is: Their genes. The MAOA gene (also known as the warrior gene) became a vital player in this research. Just being born with this gene can pre-dispose you to violent behavior. The very fact that one is born with that gene makes them much more likely to be a killer than a person without it. So, everyone that is born with that gene is deemed to become a killer, which proves that nature is stronger than nurture, right? Wrong.
(Fast forward to 36:35) The researcher himself finds that he has a family history of serial killers. After further research, he finds that he possesses the warrior gene. So why didn't he become a murderer? Because his environment hadn't allow him to do so. As he points out, he had an amazing childhood, and that allowed the psychopath gene to not be triggered. Fascinating!
And that raises a question. Is our genetic make up enough to control who we are? Or is the environmental trigger necessary? In my opinion, there is no "Nature vs. Nurture" but rather a "Nature and Nurture". Both nature and nurture work together in making who we are. We are neither born evil, nor born as a blank slate. Our genetics can have great influence on our behavior, however without our environment to (again) "pull the trigger", those genetic traits may never come to surface.
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