What A Cake Can Teach Us About Nurture Vs Nature
When we try to psychoanalyze life on earth we often end up arguing whether something is genetically or culturally inherited. I believe the juxtaposition is rather silly. Everything exists as a result of both. Their effects intertwine, spanning across time and space. Trying to isolate nurture from nature is like trying to pick out the eggs from a cake mix. It is improbable to happen.
False Dichotomy
The main reason many people fall into this logical fallacy is due to the simplifying nature of the human mind. Thinking takes effort. This is why we have invented Evil vs Good, Nature vs Nurture, Reward vs Punishment. We think that there are only two options in regards to how we evaluate something because considering more options messes up with our heads.
Life is never about black or white. Life is all about shades of gray. A recipe of different ingredients that are blend together in different proportions in order to deliver different cake flavors. No cake is made out of only flour or sugar.
The Epigenetic Mixing Pot
Genes don't just pop out of nowhere. Same applies to behavior. Epigenetics teach us that changes in organisms happen all the time due to different gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. The process takes a long or short time depending on what kind of cake nature is preparing.
Some of nature's cakes need more genetic steering before adding nurturing. Some others rely more on nurturing. Much like any steering pot, size matters in regards to how something gets mixed.
Nature is a psychotic cook with unpredictable mood swings
Depending in what goes around her, Mother Nature decides how to go about her cake mixing,... or not. If there are too many stress agents, nature strengthens the genetics part. If she feels "OK" then culture is added plentifully. Heck, everything can be just fine and Mother Nature might decide to make her own mixing for no reason whatsoever.Quantity Over Quality
Being such a sloppy cook nature decides to make thousands, even millions of different cakes without paying too much attention on how the ingredients mix. She figures that if she makes many, at least some of them will actually turn out good. And this is exactly what we observe in our phylogenetic trees. 99.9% of all species that ever existed are now extinct.
Final Word
We don't see ourselves going crazy about baking soda, sugar, eggs or salt when making a cake. We know that if we screw up any of these ingredients then our cake will suck. We are more moderate in our approach because we understand the dynamics of baking. We acknowledge how important each ingredient is in order to construct a unique composite. Nature and Nurture work alongside thousands of constituents in order to create, preserve and propagate an organism. They cannot be separated, only observed as part of a greater sum.
Interesting perspective. Trying to understand a complex phenomena, our first approach is often to split it into parts. In this case we see the process of evolutionary change operating on different substrates of reality and so we tend to explore them independently. But eventually we should move to reconstruct an integrated view that considers the dynamic interplay between all parts.
Nicely put. I agree
Very interesting post, you have made a great comparison.
thank you
I guess this apply well to the posts we are creating, or pretty much every aspects of our lives. We are all told to hustle, hustle, hustle. And when we are tired, we are told to hustle even more. But truly, we often don't take the time to pause and reflect for a moment on the effectiveness and efficiency of our work.
Results and effort are not always in a linearly correlated.
That of course goes beyond just baking cake. Good analogy anyway!
Well said
I always try to learn from cake, but by the time the lecture starts I have already gobbled down Professor Cakington.
lol
Cakes don't grow in nature.
no shit Sherlock
A very interesting read which touced on the way we see thngs, thanks
thank you
welcome.
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Cool Timberland cake !!
lol. i knew somebody would notice.
nice post...
...And like the michelin 5 star chef, mother nature is a master at baking, she needs no recipe to follow to create perfection from several ingredients, we are the product of millions of years of tweaking a recipe, we are the expression of mother nature herself. What is our purpose? Our purpose is to be conscious, our purpose is to protect her at all costs, if we don't fulfill that purpose she wont be happy with her creation and she'll start from scratch with a new recipe, one that will be better than its predecessor, and will be fit for purpose.
Thanks @kyriacos , I can see you back to your intelligent philosophical self, don't let your little sister ever blog on this account again! :P (jokes)
look forward to your next entry.
Mother Nature doesn't care either way about her cake creations. She cooks for her own pleasure. She might as well throw them out of the window once they are done.
:D
I offer variety. It is good to disagree in some topics. Run away from those whom you find to agree on everything.
See I interpreted your post a completely different way, looking around to see all of mother natures creations you can deduce that she does care, there is beauty in all of her creations, there's symmetry and there's a natural symbiosis that wouldn't exist without careful consideration and care, we are conscious beings because she cares and wants us to know she cares, it's us who don't care trying to undo the millions of years hard work she's put in. You dont want to be alive the days that mother nature decides to stop caring my friend, and those days are fast approaching if we don't right the wrongs our species has committed.
The personification of "Mother Mature" has always freaked me out :p It's something that started from a sensationalized metaphor and came to be given god-like properties. Does mother nature care or does it not care? Well, we know that each individual organism cares for its own survival. We also know that there are so many contributors that if you mess up with their balance you can set off a chain reaction. Natural symbiosis exists because what didn't compromise became extinct. Basically, you only get to know what works and what is more efficient. Also, there are endless combinations of genes and environmental factors so some will obviously get better results than others. I believe that suggesting a conscious entity that cares for her own pleasure, or cares about us, or takes revenge, is misleading. I know I sound like not much fun and @kyriacos I certainly enjoyed your article and your humorous parallelism. I'm mostly referring to debates in a more serious tone on mother nature's intents. It just doesn't make sense to me.
I think one of my disadvantages in conversations like these is my understanding of the universe itself, i was using the term "mother nature" in its metaphorical sense in reality i do believe the universe itself is concious, maybe not always but the universe as we know it, And just as our conscious selves try to use science and technology to try make sense of who we are and why we are here, the universe has been trying to do that ever since its gained conciousness, we are a result of that, we are part of the universe, the evolutionary expression of conciousness, its our job to make sense of all of this and science is the way we do that, but science is not finite so to believe in science is to be open minded enough to accept all possibilities even those that have yet to be understood. Yes I accept the possoblility that natural symbiosis exists because what didn't compromise became extinct and at the same time I accept the possibility that we are the product of a universe which is trying to understand itself, and personally I fond comfort in believing the latter :) thanks for your comment @elemenya
Well baked !
oh, nice one