fciwomenswrestling.com femcompetitor.com article, Pexels.com Juan Pablo Arenas photo credit
Nature vs nurture debates hopefully turn into discussions of give and take but in our experience they seldom do. Generally whatever camp you are in, you stake your tent and tend to stay there.
There is evidence to support both lines of thought.
On the genetic side, twins who have been separated at birth or at a very early age have often reported that decades later when they finally did meet, in some cases they lived eerily similar lifestyles with a few of the same habits and life altering occurrences.
Perhaps the most famous case was that of the Jim identical twins.
Jim Lewis and Jim Springer were only four weeks old when they were separated. Each infant was taken in by a different adoptive family.
At age 39, the two brothers were finally reunited. The similarities the twins shared not only amazed one another, but researchers at the University of Minnesota as well. The very fact that there were twin siblings separated at birth bearing the same name, both 6 feet tall and weighing exactly 180 pounds is pretty incredible.
At the informative site science.howstuffworks.com regarding the life of the Jim twins they enlighten, “In her book Entwined Lives, Nancy Segal lists the following shared characteristics:
- As youngsters, each Jim had a dog named “Toy.”
- Each Jim had been married two times — the first wives were both called “Linda” and the second wives were both called “Betty.”
- One Jim had named his son “James Allan” and the other Jim had named his son “James Alan.”
- Each twin had driven his light-blue Chevrolet to Pas Grille beach in Florida for family vacations.
- Both Jims smoked Salem cigarettes and drank Miller Lite beer.
- Both Jims had at one time held part-time posts as sheriffs.
- Both were fingernail biters and suffered from migraine headaches.
- Each Jim enjoyed leaving love notes to his wife throughout the house.
That is as amazing as it is unsettling.
There were a few other documented cases of twins separated at birth who would later find unique similarities in their lives as well.
One more example found at the nice educational site thethings.com. They share, “When their single mother killed herself, twins Daphne Goodship and Barbara Herbert, were adopted into separate British homes. It wasn’t until they were 40 years old that they reunited and realized that their life experiences were unbelievably similar. They both left school at the same age, worked in the local government, met their husbands at the same age, miscarried the same month and even gave birth to the same sexes (two boys and a girl). If that isn’t strange enough, they also both drink their coffee cold, have heart murmurs and use the same brand of products.”
Real life can indeed be stranger than fiction.
A book that fascinated one of us when we were young was The Reincarnation of Peter Proud which would later be recreated into a major film.
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is a 1975 American horror mystery film directed by J. Lee Thompson. The film was released on April 25, 1975 by American International Pictures.
Peter Proud is based upon a 1973 novel of the same name by Max Ehrlich, who wrote the screenplay. The film stars Michael Sarrazin in the title role, along with Margot Kidder, Jennifer O’Neill and Cornelia Sharpe.
The premise is simple and un-nerving. Suppose you knew who you had been in your previous life, where you had lived, who you had loved, how you had died and that your killer was still alive?
What would you do about it?
Peter decided to track down his killer with very surprising consequences.
Which camp are you in?
Do you believe that genetics or nature is the main factor in how our lives turn out or environment which includes the class structure and neighborhood you grew up in followed by your unique decision making?
The latter is sometimes described as nurture.
We sense a lot of how you answer that question has to do with your personality.
If you tend to be a person who is keen on exerting a lot of control in your life and follow the lift yourself up by your bootstraps and self-made man theory, you probably most likely believe in the power of the environment that you are raised in, or later, the one that you design and create.
If you believe that good breeding and that elite genetic markers heavily determines a person’s future, than you probably are in the genetics camp.
The extreme example of this on film and we suppose in real life is when a couple who cannot conceive and decide to create through a test tube will request certain criteria in terms of eye color, height and good looks which they feel according to study after study will give their child a chance to be superior, more physically attractive, intelligent and desirable by society’s standards, therefore enabling them to live a much more superior life.
How do we feel?
Our own personal collective experience has taught us not to be big on control. Things happen in life too often that you have no control over that can positively are adversely have a major influence on your future.
Permanently.
We know of a friend who was initially raised in an urban environment as a young man and was violent and by age ten begin to engage in light forms of stealing.
By age eleven his parents moved the family to a deeper suburb and after a few years of fighting there, he soon ascertained that in the suburbs, you didn’t have to fight to survive. In fact it was the opposite of an urban environment where your fighting status was extremely important. In the suburbs your academic achievements were far more important.
Fighting in the suburbs could get you immediately and permanently kicked out of school.
By age 14 he never got into another fight in his life, stopped stealing and eventually would pay for his own college education.
Clearly in his case, environment was a huge fork in the road in determining his future.
The reason why we lean more towards environment is because when you are young, your life is similar to a book that has only a few chapters written and it is up to you, based upon sound or poor decision making which will determine your future far more than genetics.
Otherwise our futures are pre-determined which in our minds would be awful.
If our theory is true then as a young person you can literally sit down, put a lot of thought into your plan, make sacrifices, take steps and begin to dream about the future person you desire to be.
Though not here yet, you desperately want that future version of yourself to exist.
Where do you want to live? What kind of person do you want to marry? What kind of house and neighborhood do you want to raise your children in? What career do you want to pursue? How much money do you want to make?
If you attempt to answer those questions in your youth, especially before you finish college, then in many ways you are dreaming about who you hope to evolve into.
We love that ideology much better.
The opposite example of that can occur, like in the sad and tragic well done film titled Stockholm Pennsylvania, but it still makes a strong case for our point.
At the Lifetime Movie website they explain, “Saoirse Ronan, Cynthia Nixon, Jason Isaacs and David Warshofsky star in this moving film that centers on a young woman, kidnapped as a child, who struggles to readjust to life after being returned home. Abducted 17 years ago, Leia (Ronan) is miraculously found and returned home to her parents Marcy (Nixon) and Glen Dargon (Warshofsky). Having long forgotten her family, after being raised by her captor Benjamin McKay (Isaacs), Leia finds herself unable to connect to those who love her the most. Instead, she yearns for Ben, the only father figure she’s ever known, and the safety of the basement she called home most of her life. Marcy resorts to desperate measures to forge a relationship with Leia, allowing her marriage to unravel as a byproduct. With Marcy’s increasingly erratic actions echoing those of Ben, Leia is left questioning what it really means to be loved.”
What struck us most about the film was who Leia, the once abducted child, evolved into.
At age 22 she was a person practically void of emotion, briefly agreed to what a person wanted to hear, even if she didn’t agree, and unable to accept love. She was also very limited but effective in her social skills in terms of expressing herself.
Had she stayed with her original parents and was raised by them instead of a loving but deranged man who kept her locked in a comfortable basement, who would she have evolved into?
She would have gone to high school, had a circle of friends, possibly become a cheerleader, attended college and by age 22 begin to chart her own future based upon decision making.
The well-rounded person she would have become will never, ever exist.
The abduction destroyed the lives of her parents and turned her biological mother into a true control freak.
That is what troubles us the most about not being able to chart your own future when you are young.
If you make the wrong decisions, the person that you should have become, your true self, the epitome of your self-actualization will never ever exist.
Ever.
Try placing that into perspective.
Go down the wrong pathway and you can read all the self-help books that you want, meet with all of the therapists that money can buy or travel to far off places for spiritual enlightenment and it won’t change the most important thing.
The person you could have evolved into had you made the right decision when you are young will never exist.
We know of a person in our circle who feels the gravity of this.
When she was young she played it safe in her decision making and did primarily what her community expected her to do. She would eventually marry the expected person who was not a good fit and certainly not her soul mate and lived a materially comfortable but different life than she desired or expected.
What troubled her the most was that when she was young, she was at a fork in the road and counter to what her parents and relatives wanted for her, had she pursued a non-traditional pathway that fascinated her, there is no doubt that she would have evolved into someone else.
A someone that she can no longer manufacture based upon that alternate pathway’s life experiences.
A person that will never, ever exist.
Ever.
Instead, the person that she is exists, and while she does the best that she can, it is not the person that she wanted to be.
Genetics will never alter that storyline for any of us.
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OPENING PHOTO – Pexels.com Juan Pablo Arenas photo credit
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/twin1.htm
https://www.thethings.com/15-twins-separated-at-birth-stories-that-will-seriously-shock-you/
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/26/archives/screen-peter-proud.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Peter_Proud
https://www.mylifetime.com/movies/stockholm-pennsylvania
