well, this is a pretty bold introduction, isn't it? how do i dismiss centuries long question so easily? firstly, because i have a degree related to biological sciences, i'm able to deconstruct this question, though i probably won't bother with citing sources and so on here; it's a bother and a half and i didn't get my own "blog" to be obligated to write things like a professional article, with all the effort it needs. here i'm allowed to go 'works cited: i'm high', and i'll happily jump on this opportunity. i do want to make sure this is written in a simple and understandable way, contains actual arguments and makes sense, though.
the second reason i'm capable of pretty quick deconstruction is because this question has been blown over like all intellectual problems of similar variety that white men without proper education love, excuse me for the wording, to wank to while stroking their own egos. these questions often turn out less complex and overwhelming for someone with a problem-solving approach.
the dichotomy is false because they shape each other entirely.
yes, i know, sounds intellectually lazy, "it's a bit of both!!", but that's not what i mean. there's not a bit of both, they're essentially the same thing. how?
1. socialisation and expression of genes
you remember these experiments with raising children in isolation to see what language they would end up speaking to discover the first language of humanity? i assume yes, otherwise google it. spoiler alert: they all failed. unsocialised children didn't speak any language, they communicated in nonverbal ways, moans, growls, screams. they also didn't show inclination for "natural" human social attitudes, which humans exhibit as a social species. why? because they weren't "pure nature", they were damaged development. humans are, by "nature", a social species and thus an unsocialised child is developing against "nature". a baby, while born, has all the genetic ability to speak a language - there are specific centers in the brain which process speech, language is a phenomenon old enough that humans are adapted for language and verbal communication in the process of evolution sufficiently - such as the broca's area, which, if it sustains injury and organic damage, causes a condition called expressive aphasia - that means inability to use language despite knowing what one wants to communicate; inability to use words and sentences. quoting after wikipedia:
"Damage to Broca's area is commonly associated with telegraphic speech made up of content vocabulary. For example, a person with Broca's aphasia may say something like, "Drive, store. Mom." meaning to say, "My mom drove me to the store today." Therefore, the content of the information is correct, but the grammar and fluidity of the sentence is missing."
"Patients with expressive aphasia, also known as Broca's aphasia, are individuals who know "what they want to say, they just cannot get it out".
humans have organic structures which participate very significantly in processing speech, and evolved for specialising in that, due to thousands generations of speech usage, which promoted said specialisation. therefore, by "nature" a human should be able to compherent and produce speech. but that's not possible for someone who was never taught a language. why? because learning a language is necessary for these structures to properly develop and be functional. in some cases, people like that can be taught a language and become communicative as adults, but before they're socialised, their genes in themselves will not make them coherent language speakers, despite the fact ability to use language has genetic background!"
2. biology =/= genetics
something clearly often forgotten is that brain is a biological organ that works on the way of transmisiting electric and biochemical impulses via physical structures, therefore whatever happens to the brain is reflected by biochemical, material changes in it. what do i mean? generally speaking, what i mean is that any experience changes the brain in a physical way that's either short term, lasting or even permanent, depending primarily on which period of life it happened - most dangerous are the changes happening in formative periods, like childhood, since they're more difficult to affect the entirety of the brain rather than a particular area, by halting, derailing or otherwise affecting its development and, as a result, leading it to develop in atypical ways; however, even in adults things such as trauma, habit or reptititon change their biological background. it's hardly up for debate that traumatic experiences permanently affect the brain - because they create and enforce lines and patterns of impulse transmission as well as changes in secretion of neurotransmitters due to the enormous stress they instill onto the organ. in this way, the brain is permanently biologically changed by an environmental factor in ways that affect future behaviour. as i said, this doesn't only concern trauma - brains prioritise pathes that were already used; every coincidental case where a path is generated or reused increases the probability of it being activated again when similar stimuli appear. what does that mean? well, it means a coincidential, "societal" situation may create a physical, privileged new line of transmission, which will be activated again solely because it was already activated once and for the brain it's default to automatise as much as it can to take the strain off the consciousness, and therefore it gladly resorts to already used patterns and automatises them, transferring them into the unconscious. this is habit. brain does its absolute best to relegate as much as it can of the decision-making to unconscious structures that exist beyond the "self" to aid the "self's" freedom of action and ability of fluidly adapting and quickly responding to new things it doesn't have ready schemes to go off yet. all these are biological processes, habit changes biology and that changed biology will cause prioritising the habit over new, conscious ideas that may arise. why do smokers smoke, aside from nicotine withdrawal? well, they smoke because they smoked in the past and repeated it multiple times, but that's a simplified, shallow explanation. in reality, they smoke because they repeated it two or three times, and their brains developed an inclination to resort to the pathes of transmittion that lead to the action of smoking, as something that's already had been "paved the way" to follow, and prioritised them smoking again; every time they smoked, these pathes of transmission became stronger and more default, like a convenient, wide highway. what pushed them to this behaviour is habit and biology, biology changed by habit and prioritising following the habit. they've changed the structure of their brain and then the structure changed them (and further changed itself, which is synynomous).
3. genes are affected by environmental factors
once and for all: genes aren't a pure essence of self, genes are biochemical entity (substance) that can sustain damage, or can be interrupted in process of being translated to protein, and that damage and interruption is caused by environmental factors. it happens routinely in the somatic cells, like when dna in a cell gets damaged in such a way the damage concerns the genes that should lead to apoptosis of a cell with damaged dna. such cells start replicating out of control, each one with more broken dna, leading to the phenomenon colloquially known as cancer. however, environmental damage can also reach reproductive cells; the spermatozoa and the ova. what happens then? well, depending on what part of the dna was damaged, and what the nature of damage was - some kinds of damage do not impact the translation process; some do. what happens if it's impacted? depending on the gene and how important it is; sometimes nothing, sometimes decreased intelligence or inborn predispositions for, said, lack of impulse control, sometimes somatic genetic disorders, sometimes it's lethal and causes the zygote to die. what about later? during the prenatal development external, environmental factors may affect development as well, causing similar effects, though usually less dramatic. even after birth, environmental factors such as poverty or undergoing some diseases can impact expression of genes in a child, such that it may get limited and the child will not be as intelligent or as tall as they would be had they grown in more optimal conditions. the interaction and mutual impact is constant.
4. more mutual impact, or "behaviouralists can suck my dick"
in fairness, that would be difficult for the reason of technicalities. all for the figurative, however. my point is: behaviouralism and tabula rasa is dumb and doesn't work. why? because genetic and prenatal backgrounds cause different responses to the same environmental factors. of course they will be a response to environmental factors, including the society and individual experiences - as i said - and of course trauma will cause damage in everyone, but why do people have such varied symptoms and responses after surviving highly similar situations? among other things, because things such as the kind of dopamine receptors and their amount and sensitivity, which are strictly biological and even highly genetic, determine which responses are more likely to occur and be enforced. one cannot pin everything on "society", because the human is as much of a social animal as they are a biological machine, and biology determines what impact the environmental factors cause. simultaneously it works in the opposite direction and experiences determine what many potential ways the biological background can develop is "chosen". they're in a relation of mutual impact of a degree where there's hardly possibility for any separation. behaviouralists love to indicate that sociobiology is fascist solely because it seeks to understand the biological background of human social behaviours and the biological structures, transmissions, chemical states, reactions, and resulting drives that enable them, forgetting that no self respecting sociobiologist nowadays leaves out the fact that genes are only a background of brain biology, fundament on which the house is built, and not even untouchable and unchangeable in themselves.
in short: genetics determine how specifically prenatal factors impact brain development while prenatal factors determine that there is an impact, and of course, what factors happen also determines the direction biology "picks" to grow in. the primary structure of the brain and its biochemistry (on which genetics have impact via things such as receptors) at birth determines the way it responds to childhood experiences in the formative period, causing one of possible multiple responses to be prioritised. childhood formation and later habits cause biological changes that are responsible for automatisms and default patterns of thinking and action. "pure" behaviouralism promoted by good part of the left is as silly and ignorant as the alt-right psychoevo is.
5. christian damage?
apparently. not long ago i've engaged in an argument with a communist - note, i'm sympathetic to communists and currently exploring these currents of thoughts myself, so it's criticising people i somewhat align with (though for now i haven't read enough political theory to be certain of it) rather than being anticommunist here, but i have to point out that this side is falling into ignorant thought at times and would do better to stop. that communist - otherwise a person i don't consider to be dumb - told me she disliked the sociobiological theory i myself am a great fan of that states the human abstract intelligence and things such as art evolved on the way of sexual selection moreso than selection for survival - there are multiple arguments for this theory, including the fact majority of species for very well at survival without complex, abstract intelligence, but i've basically put down these arguments here. it's not holy truth, but multiple evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists i personally respect nowadays lean towards this theory. doesn't matter - anyone is allowed to dislike a theory and disagree with me, that's not the problem. the problem is that she argumented it with disliking any theories that state human intelligence is a biological trait of individuals that resulted from evolution rather than a trait of the whole species. that is, unfortunately, nonsense. why? well, anyone who would agree that humans have been improving in intelligence, cognitive abilities or whatever it is called, since homo erectus or homo habilis, has to recognize that this improvement could have only happened on the way of natural selection, since in darwinist evolution it's the only thing that leads to a "positive" (in terms of fitness) trait being enforced and increasing in populations; and darwinist selection is only possible if there's significant differences between individuals. in other words - if there were no differences between humans, then the smarter ones couldn't have been promoted by selection, and then evolution towards being smarter for the entire species couldn't have happened. we couldn't have evolved this way as a hivemind species since group selection has been disproven back in the 1970s, but also because who would be our rival? other species? would we rival pantheras and be selected over them as a collective? that's not how any of this works.
but where does this allergy to the notion that since the brain is a physical, biological organ, all traits of personality, all talents et cetera must have a biological reflection within it? how could they exist on their own without having structures and biological realities that correspond to them? how, if the personality cannot exist separately to the physical brain? how, if we are the brain? how could something be individual or societal, or species-wide, but not be biological, material and with the right technology and right ways of gathering and interpretation of data (highly important, biased interpretations of data caused a lot of harm - hell, i have to write about it too) touchable and measurable? how does one think whatever trait of their character can exist without there being transmission pathes in the brain which are prioritised the correspond to patterns of thought and behaviour?
i do, honestly, see in it a kind of christian damage - the separation of spirit from the body; the assumption that the "spirit", consciousness, personality is something that exists separately to the physical brain and is only loosely tied to it, or else, there there's something more, something metaphysical to it which isn't contained in the structure and biochemical transmission of the brain itself, something beyond, what is it? for the left, isn't it just replacing "g*d" with "society" and engaging in the same idea of the greater entity blessing a person with a kind of personhood that somehow is non-biological, escapes biology and goes beyond it? well, no, it doesn't.
anti-intelletctualism is one of the things i loathe the most in the world; the belief that having "one's heart in the right place" is enough to be right if one doesn't have knowledge and should abstain from having an opinion is destructive. again, this isn't a subtweet of sorts towards that casual friend of mine, i like her and i don't consider her an idiot nor "everything that's wrong with the world"; it's just one opportunity that burnt into my own brain where a wellmeaning person rejected science in the name of wrongly understood praxis.
isn't this... giving up the field? if we allow the right a monopoly on biology, a monopoly on statistics... and then we shall allow just any interpretation, and that interpretation will always turn out bigoted and negative for us; and we will fight science as a concept instead of gathering our own data and correcting the biased reading of it. if we end up anti-intellectual we will lose, and it doesn't help the other side isn't very intellectual either - and that the rightist theory, often based on religion and bigotry, goes wildly against intellect and will not lead to unbiased research motivated by true curiosity; now if we just give up the field all it'll lead to is both sides of the conflict being stupid. which, by the way, is already a sight often encountered, at least something i often encounter. perhaps we should consider both stopping wasting our time on false dilemmas that obscure nuance and waste time, and stopping abandoning reason in favour of morality and principle? just saying.