
Nature versus Nurture? Add ‘Noise’ to the Debate - theafh
https://www.quantamagazine.org/nature-versus-nurture-add-noise-to-the-debate-20200323/
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fernmyth
Jushi: “Is nature or nurture the primary driver of human development?”

Sensei: “First tell me, what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Jushi: “Huh? That doesn’t even make sense to ask! You can’t get a clap without
two surfaces interacting with each other!”

Thus the jushi was enlightened

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u890jm34c2fqtr
I once asked a friend this question. He replied by clapping with one hand.

I am no longer interested in Zen.

~~~
twiceaday
Simpsons:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUzbmIKVAHo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUzbmIKVAHo)

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valiant-comma
Isn’t “noise” in this context just another form of “nurture” (i.e.,
environmental factors at a molecular level)?

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Analemma_
In these debates, “nurture” is typically taken to mean factors you as a parent
or a society can control, whereas “nature” is heritable genetic information.
“Noise“ is neither of those things, and so needs a new word.

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echelon
The terms do not need to be redefined or made more complex.

"Nature" is genotype.

"Nuture" is everything not encoded by genotype or that environmentally changes
expression. It doesn't matter if it's parenting, culture, or random noise.
It's the universe the genotype is exposed to.

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jshevek
We benefit from having different levels of granularity in our terminology for
different purposes. Noise and non-noise nurture (as you use the term) are
sometimes, but only sometimes, worth differentiating between.

Those who see a benefit from making this distinction may also see a benefit in
having different terms.

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INGELRII
In addition to noise and small changes, the same genome can contain multitude
of mutually exclusive anatomical and behavioral traits.

For example, high stress environment might trigger different genetic traits
than low stress environment, it's neither nature or nurture but both. In some
animals you can get so different phenotype by altering environment that it's
hard to recognize that they are the same species.

The idea that the genes just run the same process for the same set of genes
and the environment just linearly modulates some traits is not the whole
picture.

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gwern
Gene-environment interaction already falls into the 'heritability' variance
component, so appealing to GxE can't explain what the nonshared-
environment/error variance component _is_.

Is it mostly something trivially boring & unimportant like measurement error
(which does account for a lot of it, especially behavioral stuff), or is it
large meso-scale environmental factors which happen to not be exactly
identical within a household such as which college one goes to (which are the
bread and butter of sociology, fit nicely into theories, and can potentially
be measured, controlled, and equalized), or is it low-level biological details
like random cells mutating or random cells going haywire (possible but
extremely difficult to measure, control, or derive any understanding from,
which is depressing from both the scientific & social points of view)?

This might seem to be impossible to solve: behavioral geneticists have already
used extensive checklists and inventories to measure all sorts of aspects of
families to try to reduce the nonshared-environment down to clear constructs,
and failed to explain more than trivial amounts of variance (indeed, it worked
out a lot better at showing how the 'environment' is genetically-caused); but
you could always argue that they were measuring the relevant environment badly
or measuring the wrong things entirely (maybe it's not how the mother
interacts with the child in a nurturing or authoritarian fashion, but the
_father_ , etc).

OP is about the clever research approaches which allow digging into it and
distinguishing between high-level environmental variables, and just damn
random noise and low-level problems, and quantifying how much of each.

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maxnoe
Stephen Fry also insists on adding Nietsche to the list of necessary words
with N important for the development.

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HPsquared
I'd lean towards putting noise under 'nature' as it's uncontrollable.

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strstr
A lot of people treat nature as "inherent". Noise has the implication that it
is external.

Obviously, the case mentioned in the article is that there is an inherent
property of the crawfish that modulates the effect of noise, which blurs this
line.

