Who Are We?

Scientists have been asking the same question for hundreds of years, “What is it that makes us who we are?” Some of them believe that it is only the nature, which means the traits that we get from our parents. Imagine that you want to make chocolate chip cookies and your ingredients are sugar, flour, butter, eggs and chocolate chips. The nature of the cookies come from the ingredients. If you use raisins instead of chocolate, they would be no longer chocolate chip cookies but they would be raisin cookies. Your nature is about the ingredients you get from your parents. You have these parts and pieces when you are born. If you change one of your traits, just like the chocolate chips and raisins, then you wouldn’t be the same person anymore.

On the other hand, we know that even twins’ nature can be changed based on where they live and the way they grow up. The way we change based on the world around us and our environment growing up is called nurture. For many years, people have believed that this is what really decides who we are. They believed that we could raise a child to become just what we wanted him or her to be. 

If we go back to the cookie example, we know the nature of it because of the stuff that goes into it, but that’s only the first part of what it will be like. Once you mix everything together, you shape the dough, put them on the baking sheet and place it in the oven. What bakes the cookie is the heat of the oven, and the cookie becomes flat and round. If you put the dough into a square-shaped pan, would it be the same round shaped? No. The shape of the pan, which is the environment of the cookie, changes the way the cookie “grows up.” You might get two different looking chocolate chip cookies at the end, even though you used all the same ingredients. Think about yourself right now, even if your nature says that your feet will grow to be a certain size, if you keep wearing shoes that are too small for you, your feet might not reach their full size. You might change the size of your feet just by wearing the wrong size.

These two ideas of nature and nurture have been studied over many years; many people have agreed that both are very important for how we grow and who we become. Both the traits and the environment play a big part in how we become who we are.