The Relationship Between Heredity And Environment Essay

, Research Paper

The Relationship between Heredity and Environment

February 22, 2000

William Lee

People of the world believe that the way you turn out as a person depends on either your inherited genes or the environment around you. In the article, The Wild boy of Aveyron it talks about how a boy was found in the wild, and how he was in isolation from the human race for so long, that he didn t really have any human characteristics. Doctors examined the boy, and one of the doctors tries to teach the boy, how to be accepted back into society, by teaching him the basics, like talking. Thus through all the experiments it shows the difference of nature, and nurture.

While reading the article I found that, the theory of how the environment affects a person personality more then heredity, is true. This is shown through out the article, it shows examples of how the boy has animal characteristics instead of human ones, even though he was born from a woman, and looks like a human he acts completely different from a normal human being. The living conditions that we saw before the boy was found is that he was living in a forest in France, thus explaining the isolation from other humans. There is also the display of how intelligent the boy was, which wasn t very smart because he had never experienced any kind of communication, and he had never learned anything from any other people, other then how to survive. In this article it shows that the environment is one really strong influence of how the boy come out to be. Over the years of treatment it showed that he could be a little human, but since he was in isolation since he was a kid, it is hard to drop habits. Thus the boy always broke out in out rages, not being able to cope with the opposite sex, once because of the isolation. Through out the article there are many example of how nurture overcomes nature.

Thus it is clear that the theory of nurturing a child is one of the most important facts of shaping a child. It is shown in this article because of the outcome of the child how he first is like a savage animal, and then later tamed, but even a tamed animals go on rampages, just like the Wild Boy .