Word.ws English Dictionary

nature versus nurture

nature versus nurture phrase: the longstanding academic inquiry into the relative contributions of innate biological factors (nature) and environmental influences or upbringing (nurture) to the development of human traits, behaviors, personality and psychology.

Phrase

nature versus nurture

  1. The longstanding academic inquiry into the relative contributions of innate biological factors (nature) and environmental influences or upbringing (nurture) to the development of human traits, behaviors, personality and psychology.
    • Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences. Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter the world as blank slates, formed only by what we encounter in our...2025 March 13, Dalton Conley, “A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way”, in New York Times

Forms of nature versus nurture

alternative formnature vs nurture
alternative formnature vs. nurture

Origin of nature versus nurture

The phrase was coined in the mid-1800s by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton in discussion about the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement.

Questions about nature versus nurture

What does nature versus nurture mean?
Nature versus nurture means the longstanding academic inquiry into the relative contributions of innate biological factors (nature) and environmental influences or upbringing (nurture) to the development of human traits, behaviors, personality and psychology.
What part of speech is nature versus nurture?
Nature versus nurture is a phrase.

Words near nature versus nurture in the dictionary

  1. nature strips
  2. nature table
  3. nature tables
  4. nature trail
  5. nature trails
  6. nature versus nurture
  7. nature vs nurture
  8. nature vs. nurture
  9. nature's candy
  10. nature's garb
  11. nature's scythe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nature versus nurture (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “nature versus nurture.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nature_versus_nurture. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.