Thinking on the Edge

Human development, nature

and nurture: Working beyond
the divide
Ilina Singh
London School of Economics & Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.

Abstract In this essay, I explore what social science might contribute to building a better
understanding of relations between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in human development. I first outline
changing scientific perspectives on the role of the environment in the developmental and
behavioural sciences, beginning with a general historical view of the developmental science of
human potentials in the twentieth century, and then reflecting on a call to arms against ‘toxic stress’
issued in 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics. I suggest that such post-genomic
programmes of early intervention, which draw on emerging scientific theories of organismic
plasticity and developmental malleability, raise significant social and ethical concerns. At the same
time, such programmes challenge social scientists to move beyond critique and to contribute to
new developmental models that deconstruct the old divide between nature and nurture. I conclude
by describing efforts that posit new terms of reference and, simultaneously, new kinds of research
interests and questions that are not founded upon, and are not efforts to resolve, the nature–
nurture debate.
BioSocieties (2012) 7, 308–321. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2012.20; published online 3 September 2012

Keywords: epigenetics; children; toxic stress; Nurse–Family Partnership;

ecobiodevelopmental model; plasticity

Introduction
In this essay, I explore what social science might contribute to building a better understanding of
relations between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in human development. I outline a general historical
account of changing scientific perspectives on the con-tribution of environment in the
developmental and behavioural sciences, before reflect-ing on a recent call to arms against ‘toxic
stress’ issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). I suggest that such post-genomic
programmes of early intervention, which draw on emerging scientific theories of organismic
plasticity and developmental malleability, raise significant social and ethical concerns. At the
same time, such programmes challenge social scientists to move beyond critique and to contribute
to new developmental models that dismantle the old divide between nature and nurture. I point
out the difficulties of this endeavour, even in the process of writing and re-imagining nature–
nurture relations.

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In examining these difficulties here, I use the language of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ systems and
functions where previously one may have used ‘environmental’ and ‘biological’. Other terms,
used by myself and others, are ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ or ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. Although all these terms
signal a start towards a different framing, they are of course vague and unsatisfactory, particularly
because they fail to represent the fundamental inseparability of most entities that we have tended
to divide with this sort of language. In concluding, I describe efforts to overcome such
problematics of language. These efforts posit new terms of reference, as well as research interests
and questions that are neither founded upon nor efforts to resolve the nature–nurture debate.
Throughout the essay, I focus mainly on early child development, in part because this is the area
that interests me most, and in part because it is an area in which social scientists have not recently
examined the problem of the nature– nurture divide. Although the arguments here may be obvious
to some multi- and inter-disciplinary scholars, I hope for others they will provoke constructive
thinking about the constraints of some more familiar critical and analytic orientations in the life
sciences and social sciences.

The Nature–Nurture Problem

Around the turn of the twentieth century, many countries in the West developed social
programmes that aimed to develop human fitness and potential in line with ideas derived from
plant and animal breeding. Various forms of social Darwinism sought to encourage good habits –
personal and mental hygiene, alcohol and drug abstention, and other forms of positive social
practice. However, good habits were not seen to be effective for managing inherent causes or pre-
dispositions to ‘bad’ behaviour. Eugenicists saw a person’s social and moral status as a direct
measure of their hereditary endowment: poverty, race, gender, crime, mental illness and addiction
were the result of innate faults – determined, fixed and passed along through multiple generations
of a family. For this reason, the social environment was to be directly managed through genetic or
biological manipulation: programmes of imprison-ment, to prevent the ‘feeble-minded’ from
reproducing, sterilization of active criminals and preventive sterilization of their families became
acceptable (Goddard, 1912; Dugdale, 1969 [1877]; Lombroso, 2004 [1876]). Such social
programmes later developed on a multi-national scale, with some of the most devastating human
and ethical consequences of the past century.
The emphasis on ‘nurture’ in the developmental sciences most recently came into force in the
twentieth century, with the mental hygiene movements, behaviourism and psycho-analysis
emerging more or less at the same time (though with different impacts at different times) in the
Anglo-American context. Among behaviourists, a formal interest in the environment was seen as
providing a correction from years of interest in the inner life, and a corresponding negligence of
technical analysis of the environment’s impact on behaviour. Psychoanalysis, as conceived by
Freud, had a different interest in the environment, as both the embodied space where the inner
workings of mental life could be ‘read’, and as a ground for resolving and healing trauma, through
the externalization of past experiences. Mental hygienists, drawing on medical ideas about
prevention of illness as well as theories of child maladjustment, saw the school and the family as
key environments for learning and activities that would prevent poor emotional and mental health.

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The excision of the biological realm was not complete, however, among behaviourists or
among early psychoanalysts. Behaviourism, as espoused by B.F. Skinner, was based in a belief
that biology was the ground of the ‘structure’ of human behaviour and the human psyche.
Because the inner world was then unobservable, Skinner worked on developing systematic ways
of researching and manipulating the effects of environment on human behaviour (Skinner, 1938).
Freud suggested that the development of hysteria was associated with an area of biological
weakness, such as a neurological lesion, and that this biological weakness played a role in the
articulation of early trauma. The insights his neurological training gave him to the possible
interactions between behavioural symptoms and deep trauma were largely forgotten as American
psychoanalysis grew up to emphasize the ‘nurture’ aspects in Freud’s developmental theories,
such as the Oedipus complex (Sulloway, 1992).

Although behaviour modification and psychoanalysis are today considered to be most useful as
individual therapies and are hardly comparable to the genetic management of populations, both
behaviourism and psychoanalysis have been used to support social programmes that develop
human fitness and potential. Skinner himself envisioned a utopia he called ‘Walden Two’, in
which systematic behavioural conditioning of all individuals would create a fully egalitarian and
free society that required no laws or governance (Skinner, 2005 [1948]). Ego psychology and
maladjustment theory came into fashion in American society after talk therapy was used to
manage shell shock among soldiers in World War II. Thereafter, psychoanalytic theory was one
foundation for US educational and national defence programmes that sought to develop young
1
boys into stronger men more capable of withstanding the stresses of war.

The heyday of psychological, social and behaviourist theories of human development faded
mid-century with the discovery of chlorpromazine, an effective, though highly unpleasant, anti-
psychotic. This inspired a surge of pharmaceutical research and develop-ment in psychotropic
treatments and a concurrent rise in the proportion of psychiatric drug users (Healy, 1999). One
important response to these developments was the anti-psychiatry movement, which in the 1960s
and 1970s raised awareness of the problems with psychiatric nosology and the growing links
between the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry. Anti-psychiatrists tended to believe that the
causes of mental suffering were not biological but social, and argued for renewed attention to
environmental factors, such as families and dysfunctional society (for example, Szasz, 1961;
Laing and Esterson, 1970).
Yet late in the last century, the ‘Decade of the Brain’ and the human genome project rang in a
fresh emphasis on ‘nature’. As a consequence of these projects, the divide between nature and
nurture has become materially more real in recent decades, as scientific capabilities have
investigated and visualized the molecular, cellular and genetic dimensions of life. Through a
variety of bio-technopolitical forces, the reduction of human behaviour to biological trace
elements, functions and structures has become an accepted way forward to understanding not only
the root causes of aberrant human behaviours, but also the mechanisms underlying those
behaviours. To a greater extent than ever before, claims are made that it is possible to ‘see’ the
root causes of complex human behaviours, from shyness to criminality, and to posit in a
preliminary way the biological pathways along which these behaviours may develop.

1 Some of this history is covered in Singh (2002), and far more completely in Shorter (1997).

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For some time, these investigations have ostensibly been carried out at a level so far distant from
‘the social realm’ (and it has seemed as though the relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is one of
linear distance) that life scientists and clinical researchers have struggled to articulate the relation
between ‘bench’ and ‘bedside’, ‘lab’ and ‘clinic’ despite pressures to do so from funders and
policymakers interested in ‘translational science’. This is most likely not because life scientists
disagree with the importance of the social dimensions of human behaviour. It is probably because
biology has for so long been seen as a priori to the social dimensions of human behaviour:
‘genotype’ structures ‘phenotype’; phenotype can reveal something about underlying genotype.

Yet this blinkered attention to the biological may be shifting. Discoveries that pre-date the
human genome project, but have matured as a result of its failure to discover the promised ‘human
blueprint’, are transforming our understanding of the very idea of the gene, and of how human
behaviour develops and persists across time. At the very least, these discoveries have already
brought new metaphors into the scientific language of human development, new understanding of
the boundaries of human development and new targets of interest in the fundamental ‘matter’ of
human development. I will briefly outline two recent metaphors that have been deployed in
developmental biology and paediatric medicine, and discuss some of the bio-political ground
around them.

Metaphor 1: Toxic stress

Developmental, behavioral, educational, and family problems in childhood can have both
lifelong and intergenerational effects. Identifying and addressing these concerns early in life
are essential for a healthier population and a more productive workforce. Because the early
roots or distal precipitants of problems in both learning and health typically lie beyond the
walls of the medical office or hospital setting, the boundaries of pediatric concern must
move beyond the acute medical care of children and expand into the larger ecology of the
community, state, and society. (Shonkoff et al, 2011, p. e225)

In December 2011, the AAP issued this ‘landmark warning’ that toxic stress, experienced during
early childhood or while in the womb, can harm children for life. This policy statement from
America’s most influential group of paediatricians argues that certain demographic factors (many
of them well known to sociologists, and for that matter to doctors) – poverty, lack of community
resources, lack of education, abuse and neglect, as well as high-stress conditions such as war and
famine – create stresses that are literally written into the biological processes of development,
penetrating environments from micro (for example, the cellular environment) to macro (for
example, home or community environments) with lasting, measurable, heritable physiological and
psychological effects.
Environment is evidently a hot topic again in human development. But unlike the earlier
incarnations of nurture theory, today’s emphasis on the environment is not motivated by visions of
utopian communities, or by concerns that mothers are raising weak, nervous sons unfit for war (at
least the latter is not an overt concern; there is certainly a worry about unproductive youth and its
relation to future national economic prosperity, as is evidenced in the excerpt above). Today, the
focus has shifted to the ‘ecological’ roots of developmental difficulties, and concern for the
iterative and reciprocal relations of the environment to

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healthy development at the level of microbiological systems. The dynamic interface of

‘environment’ and ‘biology’ is captured in what the AAP calls an ‘ecobiodevelopmental’ (EBD)
model:

An EBD approach recognizes that it is not adversity alone that predicts poor outcomes. It is
the absence or insufficiency of protective relationships that reinforce healthy adaptations to
stress, which, in the presence of significant adversity, leads to disruptive physiologic
responses (i.e. toxic stress) that produce ‘biological memories’. (Shonkoff et al, 2011, p.
e225)

At the EBD interface, there is ostensibly no one entity to blame for a child’s outcomes; nor is
there one entity or dimension to therapeutically manipulate. Consequently, it is far more difficult
to predict dangers: the interface is dynamic and shifting, and dangers are both actual and
potential. The proposed multi-dimensional solution to the problem and possibility of toxic stress
charges paediatricians to break down the traditional walls of the ‘medical home’ and disperse into
the surrounding ‘ecology’. They are urged to advocate for ‘protective relationships’ at local, state
and national levels, and to ensure that they themselves form trusted partnerships with children,
families, schools and neighbourhoods in the interest of building emotional and material ‘buffers’
against toxic stress.
This is a far cry from previous portraits of the paediatrician: this is neither the trusted family
doctor who gently ministers to the predictable and standard list of childhood illnesses at the
child’s bedside, nor is it the harassed employee of the modern NHS or managed care company,
whose performance targets leave barely 10 min to spend with each patient before moving on. To
understand the AAP’s source of inspiration to intervene (or perhaps it is a kind of panic,
sponsored by the contingent, emergent nature of toxic stress), we need to understand more about
this EBD interface and how it is recasting the nature–nurture divide.

Metaphor 2: The socialized gene

The role of the foetal environment is especially evident in mothers who directly
experienced the destruction of the World Trade towers. As you would expect, a number of
them evidenced PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder]. Those who were pregnant at the
time gave birth to babies with an elevated stress response and a hypersensitive stress axis.
They will be more susceptible to anxiety, depression and even PTSD than those whose
mothers did not experience PTSD. (Francis, 2011, p. 43)

The notion that the relationship between nature and nurture is porous is not new to science or to
social science. Anne Harrington (2008) has elegantly elaborated a history of the body as a
‘mindful entity’, which responds in a physiological language to the local stories and cultural
meta-narratives of a particular time. Margaret Lock’s (2001) influential work on menopause in
Japan led her to develop the concept of ‘local biologies’ to describe the significantly different
experience of menopause experienced by Japanese women as compared with women in the West.
Numerous accounts by medical anthropologists and others attest to the fact that social experience
and stories penetrate under the skin, with embodied consequences, such as ‘nerves’, ‘hysteria’ or
even death (Low, 1981; Showalter, 1998; Harrington, 2008).

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What is new, as exemplified in the AAP’s policy statement on ‘toxic stress’, is twofold. First is
the emphasis on the multi-directional and multi-dimensional nature of effects between nature and
nurture. ‘Stress’ refers simultaneously to events on the social level and on the biological level, and
these events are mutually reinforcing such that they are incorporated not only in the body, and not
only in the brain and not only in the environment, but in all these places. As body, brain and world
also incorporate each other, the incor-poration of stress is four-dimensional. Add in history (via
heritability) and incorporation of stress is five-dimensional. A five-dimensional model of the
transmission and impacts of stress in paediatric medicine is ambitious.

The second aspect that is new is the emphasis on very early intervention for children who are at
risk of toxic stress, but to come to that, we need first to understand more about the popular
metaphor of the ‘socialized gene’. This metaphor is an attempt to express to a lay audience the
importance of a (re)emerging area of genetics: epigenetics. As Fox Keller has noted, the discovery
of epigenetic processes was made over half a century ago; however, understanding that epigenetic
2
changes make up an ‘alternative system of inheritance’ has developed only recently (2010, p. 5).
Simply put, epigenetics refers to chemical processes that ‘tag’ or ‘mark’ the genome, thereby
controlling and modulating the activities of genes. The marks are not part of the DNA structure
itself. The epigenome can change as a result of environmental influences throughout the life
course, and it can be inherited. ‘Environmental epigenetics’ is one name given to the study of
environmental influences on gene expression, primarily through the processes of DNA
methylation and chromatin modification (Niewohner, 2011; Shostak, forthcoming 2013). The
‘socialized gene’ is popular shorthand for environmental epigenetics, summarizing the idea that
the genome responds to environmental inputs across the life course. This view emphasizes the
plasticity of the organism, rather than seeing it as fixed or determined.

The perceived importance of this discovery of plasticity for intervention strategies is

underscored in a scientific review by Champagne (2010b):

Converging evidence from studies of human subjects and animal models suggests that
experiences across the life span can exert persistent changes in gene expression and
behaviour y The dynamic yet stable nature of these heritable epigenetic marks implies the
potential for phenotypic plasticity in response to environmental cues y The potential to shift
developmental trajectories that have been established in laboratory studies may have
important implications for the strategies used to intervene to prevent the developmental
consequences of early life adversity. (2010b, p. 570)

The discovery of responsiveness to environmental inputs at the genetic level has inspired interest
not only in epigenetic mechanisms, but also in what can be achieved with very early interventions.
The emphasis on ‘very early’ is important, and different. Social programmes that support early
interventions in children ‘at risk’ have a long history, from state sponsored child guidance clinics
in the 1930s to current programmes like Head Start in the United States and Sure Start in the
United Kingdom.
Head Start was drawn up as part of the US War on Poverty in 1965, and was largely predicated
on the assumption that macro-level stresses require macro-level interventions;

2 Fox Keller takes the phrase ‘system of inheritance’ from Jablonka and Lamb (2005).

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education, nutrition and health services chief among them. However, in 2010, a review of Head
Start’s impact by the programme’s funder, the US Department of Health and Human Services
(DHHS), suggested that this macro-level strategy had not made an enduring difference to child
outcomes. The review found that although children aged 3 and 4 did benefit from enrolment in
Head Start, ‘y the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for
the program population as a whole. For 3-year-olds, there are few sustained benefits y’ (DHHS,
2010, p. xxvi).
Two years later, an epigenetic strategy that places equal emphasis on macro- and micro-level
systems is being mobilized as the new way to address social problems in the lives of young
children. Epigenetics is multiplying, molecularizing and atomizing definitions of ‘environment’
and ‘context’, as well as expanding the developmental horizon. As Niewohner notes in his study
of the laboratory life of epigeneticists:

Context is primarily a matter of different temporal horizons and spatial scales. In epigenetic
research, interpretations of findings often combine evolutionary time, transgenerational or
biographic time and the ‘real’ time of cellular activity y the approach is systemic focusing
on the multiple interactions between different levels of analysis. (2011, p. 285)

Thus, the toxic childhood report urges intervention in a new time-space: earlier, and deeper,
beginning at conception. The womb is, after all, a crucial first environment for a child: it is when
the ‘experiences of the organism’ (Champagne, 2010a, p. 2) begin. The report notes the success of
existing programmes. Chief among these is the US Nurse–Family Partnership (NFP), which
started 30 years ago as a small experimental programme in New York state and operates today in
34 states. The NFP partners a nurse and a ‘high risk’ (first-time, low-income) mother and supports
a series of home-visits from pregnancy until the child is 2 years old. The programme was
probably conceived in the spirit of the ‘war on poverty’, as an educational intervention. The
emerging focus on environmental epigenetics, however, gives such programmes a remit to enter
the time-space of the potential, in order to address ‘the biology of social class disparities’
(Shonkoff, quoted in Kristof, 2012).
The idea that social class disparities have a biology, and that this ‘biology’ explains poverty is
3
the sort of scientifically erroneous nonsense that gives developmental biology a bad name. Yet
the evidence that the NFP is an effective strategy at reducing the national burden of healthcare-
related costs and crime is compelling, at least in certain dimensions. In a 19-year follow-up
published in 2010, there was evidence that the intervention lowered rates of arrest and conviction
in girls visited while babies or when their mothers were pregnant; and at 19, the visited girls had
4
fewer children of their own as compared with a control group (Eckenrode et al, 2010). In 2012,
NFP is the cornerstone dimension of the US$350 million budget allocation to the Maternal, Infant
and Early Childhood Home

3 To be fair, this is a quotation from an interview with a journalist. Shonkoff is also the lead author of the toxic
stress report in Pediatrics, which suggests a more sophisticated understanding of the science. Nevertheless, it is
important to note the continued salience of claims to have discovered the ‘biology of (insert socially undesirable
status or behavior)’.
4 Interestingly, there were no positive effects of intervention on boys born to visited mothers, which should raise a
question of the overall success of the programme, given that men are more likely than women to be arrested and
convicted of crimes.

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Visiting (MIECHV) Programme, which encourages the use of ‘evidence-based models’ to ‘give
5
more children born into poverty a better start in life’.

A Constructive Role for Social Science

A sceptical stance
A birds-eye view of the physical and intellectual construction of most contemporary institutions of
higher education and research reveals how essentially important the nature– nurture debates have
been in erecting what Adele Clarke calls ‘disciplinary defense systems’ (personal
communication). Arguments that aim to break down the nature–nurture divide potentially threaten
hard-won territories, in which theoretical and methodological commitments have been carefully
and substantively cultivated.
Yet if social science scholars of biomedicine, science and technology engage with efforts in the
life sciences to move beyond the nature–nurture divide, this does not require aban-donment of
epistemological or theoretical commitments, nor does it constitute a rejection of the intellectual
history that endows the broader disciplinary fields in which we reside.
Indeed, the traditional bread and butter of the social studies of biomedicine, science and
technology is scepticism about practices, definitions and productions in the natural and life
sciences. Scepticism is important, and it can be constructive in this new moment when the
separation between the individual and the world, ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ appears to be
disintegrating. Therefore, the first role for the social scientist is familiar – there is much to be
sceptical and careful about.
We can take the NFP as an example. Such programmes appear well intentioned and reasonably
successful. But they also raise significant social and ethical concerns. As Shonkoff’s quote
illustrates, without sufficient care it is all too easy for sound bites to encourage a fundamental
misperception that the biological realm represents an encrypted version of the environmental
realm, or vice versa. Furthermore, motivation to discover the ‘biology of class disparities’ – much
like efforts to discover the biology of criminality, homosexuality, addiction or any other
‘undesirable’ set of social behaviours – must be viewed against the historical backdrop of efforts
to medicalize, criminalize, surveil or even eliminate specified classes of people. After all, the ‘war
on poverty’ was not an incidental use of metaphor. The juxtaposition of war and poverty suggests
the national threat that poverty poses to ideals of citizenship and to freedom. When poverty is
framed as part of a bio-political danger, as it is today, the ‘eligibility’ of the poor to life itself
comes into question (Dillon, 2007).

Part of what social science can contribute productively in this (possibly) new era of non-
reductionist interest in addressing the potentials of emerging life is analysis of emergent social
and ethical concerns. A programme of maternal support and education based around epigenetic
theories deserves some scrutiny. It is important to ask the old-fashioned dichoto-mous question in
order to enable exposure of a secretly maintained divide: Is the NFP conducting home-visits, or
womb-visits? Can we be sure that the rhetoric of reducing crime and poverty, of building national
productivity and pride through social programmes that

5 www.nursefamilypartnership.org/assets/PDF/Press-Releases-(1)/2012_MIECHVP_Funding_12_23_11
.aspx.

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intend to reach inside the body to adjust biological systems and potentials, are ethically and
socially distinct from earlier efforts to breed better human stock?

A collaborative stance
Having outlined a more traditional stance towards these developments at the nature–nurture
interface, I next want to suggest that social science has roles to play in addition to that of the
sceptic (and I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that we relinquish this role). There are
important constructive projects for social science within this emerging disintegration of the
nature–nurture divide, and alongside the scientists who are working in relevant areas. I will
briefly outline some potential contributions here.

1. Elaborate a rich understanding of context and environment across the human life course

y environmentally induced variations in gene expression both within the brain and the
periphery can persist beyond infancy and be observed in adulthood suggesting that there is
an interplay between genes and the environment that may be critical in mediating the long-
term effects of social experiences. (Champagne, 2010a, p. 2)

For researchers interested in epigenetics, the role of the environment is a critical factor, but
research has so far largely viewed the environment in operational terms, as a compilation of risks
(for example, toxins, drugs, stress, trauma, neglect). This is partly due to the fact that much of this
research takes place in rodents rather than in humans, requiring well-controlled paradigms and
protocols. In human studies, epidemiological factors have often served as proxies for
‘environment’. Poverty, crime, race/ethnicity and gender are popular factors but, increasingly,
newer indicators, such as urbanicity and migration are foci in neuroscience and genetic studies on
the developmental impacts of stress. The new economic and public health concerns with
‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ mean that human and animal studies are looking at the protective
effects of environments as well as at environmental risk factors.
Epidemiological indicators are at best crude approximations of context and experience, and a
reliance on these indicators may mean that ‘environment’ is included in models of
intergenerational transmission of disease, poverty or even of well-being, but only in a reductive
guise. It is clear that some scientific researchers working with epidemiological data are aware of
this problem, and wish to avoid it. For example, in a study of the impact of urbanicity on health
outcomes, researchers identified a variety of factors (nutrition, sanitation, healthcare, pollution,
overcrowding, noise and so on) that could be associated with negative outcomes, including
mental illness (which has been shown to be causally related to living in an urban environment).
This particular study found that urbanicity was significantly associated with neural processing of
stress. Researchers noted both the limitations of a global definition of ‘urban’ when research
participants inhabit a modern European city, and the necessity of further dissecting the variable
‘social stress’, perhaps by ‘characteriz[ing] further the underlying psychosocial components; for
example, the effects of finer-grained quantifiers of individuals’ social networks or individual
social experience in urban contexts’ (Lederbogen et al, 2011, p. 500).

At this point, social scientists are needed to contribute theoretical, conceptual and prag-matic
understanding of social networks, patterns of affiliation, movement and migration,

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urban spaces and communities, as well as of experiences of social stress. For neuroscientists
working on such studies, the goal is to better understand the deep mechanisms associated with
phenotypic variation; however, deeper understanding is predicated on sophisticated and subtle
descriptions of higher level mechanisms, and vice versa. Indeed, social scientists and
neuroscientists alike may discover that their models are improved by better understanding of
macro- and micro-level mechanisms and functions. Most important to the continued dissolution of
the nature–nurture divide is building models that describe the interaction of these mechanisms
across space and time.

2. Observe phenotypic plasticity and identify interventions that promote well-being

Let us not ask how much of any given difference between groups is due to genetics and
how much to environment, but rather how malleable individual human development is, and
at what developmental age y We may not share the interests of breeders in artificial
selection, but as both scientists and citizens, we are surely committed to trying to maximize
the development of individual human potential. And for this, we need a better
understanding of what resources can contribute to such development, and of how they can
best be deployed. (Fox Keller, 2010, p. 84)

Fox Keller’s call for new research questions that dissolve the nature–nurture debate is well heeded
by social scientists as well as by life scientists. In work on the development of human behaviour,
social science (and here I mean primarily sociology and anthropology) has for a long time held up
the constructionist end of the debate, arguing for the role of nurture over nature. Indeed, in
analyses of social, emotional and behavioural development, we have tended to a circularity in our
arguments. For example, we are critical of classifications such as those found in the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, on the basis that they statistically classify,
naturalize and pathologize ‘kinds’ of undesirable cognition, emotion and behaviour (for example,
Horowitz, 2002). But we also criticize the clas-sifications themselves for their heterogeneity, as
though what is needed is not no classification, but better classification (for example, Kutchins
and Kirk, 1999). Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a current indication of this circularity: it is
seen as problematic both because the diagnosis pathologizes a set of differences rather than
recognizing neurodiverse ways of being, and because the ASD spectrum is so broad as to
encompass a heterogeneous range of emotion, cognition and behaviour (Walsh et al, 2011). In
other words, some social science accounts have been suspicious of heterogeneity, ambiguity and
uncertainty in science even as they are critical of classification, naturalization and
homogenization. In our critical and sceptical stance, we have tended to avoid normative questions
– those concerning what Fox Keller, in the quote above, describes as a commitment to ‘maximize
the development of individual human potential’.

I have already noted the danger in discussions of ‘human potential’ particularly when these
relate to emergent beings whose capacities may be socio-biologically engineered. At the same
time, social scientists have arguably the best set of professional tools to discover, describe and
understand phenotypic differences between groups; to identify resources that contribute to
individual well-being; to explore structural, regulatory and material issues that matter to the
deployment of those resources; and to evaluate the differences those resources make to
individuals over the life course. The benefits when

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these new research questions are undertaken by social scientists are enormous: ‘phenotypic
differences’ can be described in rich, thick observations; methods allow for an under-standing of
group dynamics alongside individual differences, and complex models of social interactions and
experiences can be utilized to develop an empirical understanding of ‘plasticity’.

For example, in work on Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children, the

model of the ecological niche (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) has been used to elucidate the
embeddedness of a child across changing social, emotional and developmental contexts. Using
empirical methods, it has been possible to describe different ecological niches that children
inhabit, and to posit some mechanisms that may underlie the development of variations at the
phenotypic level among children diagnosed with the same disorder (Singh, 2011). Thus, it is
possible to consider the ways in which children in different niches are malleable – that is,
vulnerable or resilient – to different kinds of inputs at different moments and across different sites
of development within a given niche. The identification of vulnerabilities and resiliences in
children is a fundamentally different aim than critique of a diagnosis or pharmaceutical
treatments. Yet risk of diagnosis and treatment may be discovered to be a vulnerability, as may
risk of non-diagnosis and non-treatment. The point is to do work that puts the question of a child’s
well-being in the centre as a way to contribute to dissolving the debate over nature and nurture.

3. Theorize topographic porousness

In the developmental sciences, articles that describe hypothesized mechanisms linking

variations in genotype to variations in phenotype, or linking variations in fMRI scans to variations
in behaviour, frequently include visualizations of how these links might work – how higher level
and lower level activities and entities may be related. These visualizations are increasingly
accompanied by active topographical language: pathways, landscapes, regions, areas and sites are
changing, dynamic, plastic, promoted, inhibited, expressed and unstable. Although such
visualizations are reductive at all levels, and exemplify a tendency to mapping metaphors
inherited from genetics (Gaudillie`re and Rheinberger, 2004), they illustrate the complexity of
theorizing this new set of relationships and exchanges across the once-thought-to-be cellophane,
but now porous membrane separating inner and outer, biology and environment, self and world.
Ultimately, the membrane may disappear all together. This will likely require a new language,
much like ‘cyborg’ revolutionized our understanding of human beings’ relationship to nature,
technology and ourselves (Haraway, 1991).
Scientific visualizations are one attempt at this new language; social science can contribute
more. It is extraordinarily difficult to conceptualize, much less verbalize, a dynamic porous
topography, rather than a merging of two distinct parts. The human behavioural and
developmental social sciences have attempted such mergers: ‘neurochemical selves’, ‘somatic
individuals’, ‘cerebral subjects’. New disciplines have appeared that perform a similar merger:
cognitive anthropology, social neuroscience and neuroethics. It may be that social scientists and
others have to some degree been seduced by the beauty and complexity of the biological deep,
binding familiar objects of interest and fields of study to scientific accounts that provide new
visions and new explanations of our human experiences and self-understanding.

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At the same time, there are important efforts to build on these forerunners. One example is the
proposal by Roepstorff and colleagues (2010) to use an anthropological understanding of
‘patterned practices’ to model the activity of neural networks. The authors present a sophisticated
argument for the replacement of ‘culture’ with ‘practices’ in neuroscience work. They argue
further that ‘social neuroscience can draw on significant resources in anthropology and the social
sciences more generally [to analyse] structured (patterned), maintained relations between
embodied minds and their social, material and discursive “environments” ’ (2010, p. 1057). The
one limitation to this compelling argument is their final claim:

Patterns of practice are shaped by neural networks as well as belief systems and normative
orders. They thus sit in between micro and macro levels and analysis and enable us to
investigate the relative contributions of neural, individual and cultural factors to specific
practices. (2010, p. 1057)

Even an argument that systematically and persuasively shows the entanglement of deeper and
higher level functions, structures and practices, can slip back into a more familiar mode and
language in which the contributions of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ could and should be analytically and
methodologically separated. It is difficult to break old habits, perhaps because the normative
dimension of the nature–nurture question pulls in even those who resist normativity. Nevertheless,
this kind of work shows the promise of social science efforts to re-vision the nature–nurture
debate, drawing on traditional strengths of social science theory and concepts to do so. It also
demonstrates the importance of collaborative efforts between social scientists and life scientists in
forging these new articulations and visions.

Conclusion
I have attempted to raise both doubts and hopes in relation to the potential contributions of social
science to overcoming the divide between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in work on early child
development in particular. I feel quite hopeful that we are heading in a new direction in which
constructive and creative collaborations between social scientists and developmen-talists of
various stripes become increasingly possible. Significant conceptual, theoretical and
methodological barriers remain, but an emerging understanding of the importance of work ‘on the
other side’ is creating much more dialogue at the ‘EBD’ interface. It remains to be said that the
kind of collaborative engagements I have outlined in this essay, as well as informed scepticism,
require a significant investment. Social scientists who have to keep pace with scientific
discoveries lack training, support, time and opportunity. ‘Interliteracy’ (Franklin and Roberts,
2006) is a time-consuming achievement. In the future, however, attempts at interliteracy within
the developmental behavioural sciences may no longer be so one-sided. We now need
constructive multi-disciplinary collaborations to be instantiated at the level of education, funding
and publication, and to be institutionally sanctioned and rewarded through support for scholars
and departments that transcend the divide between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ intellectually and
methodologically. Perhaps one day the long walk from the science lab to the sociology department
will have become a stroll down the hall.

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 Singh

About the Author

Ilina Singh is a Reader in Bioethics and Society at the London School of Economics. In
September 2012, she will move to Kings College, London, where she will be the Director of
Research in the Department for Social Studies of Health and Medicine, with a cross-appointment
to the Institute of Psychiatry.

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