Question 2

[brennapayne]

To add on to this discussion; yes I brought up the importance of nature, but I truly believe that you cannot have nurture over nature or vice versa. For complete functionality in a society, there needs to be a balance of nature and nurture( nurture to make humans feel important and teach them the difference between right and wrong and nature to force them to apply these principles to independent life). I also agree with several of the group members in regards to how humans are definitely products of their environment. Natalie brought up the comparison of Holcomb to Fort Thomas and I find this to be a very accurate comparison. We could even go further to compare the reaction of the people of Holcomb to the reaction of the People of Fort Thomas to ISIS right now. Currently, our community has almost reached a point to where the students have not been directly affected by 9/11. Our grandparents and maybe our parents have, but we have not. Therefore, we did not know what it felt like to experience terrorism first hand. When we hear about ISIS, its almost unbelievable. We cannot even fathom what would motivate someone to do such things. We look at the victims and think of how nice they are, much like the people of Holcomb thought of the Clutter family. How could people do such things? Why them? What did these victims do to deserve this? We think this way because of where we live. As much as we may protest, we really do not lead a difficult life. Our community offers us ample security. However, if we think about the people in Iraq and Syria, they do not feel secure within their community. First Iraq had to battle a post-revolutionary Iran in the Iraq-Iran War, and now they struggle to control Isis, offering little support and stability to their community members. These people know how it feels to witness the effects of terrorism first hand, resulting in them being less astonished by the actions of Isis. Of course they are terrified of it, but its a familiar terror.

[lukewormald]

In response to Alex most of early human life and society was based on nature. Although nurture was constantly a factor in societies such as Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, and ancient China nature usually determined who lived and who died. Survival of the fittest has only recently lost most of its application to human society. In Sparta smaller, underweight babies were left in the wilderness to die, in almost all cases if a person had a disorder they were abandoned or killed, and of someone was crippled and could not hunt or farm for themselves they usually died off. Even in the 1900s many "weaker" members of society were kept out of it. One of Albert Einstein's sons spent most of his life locked away after his schizophrenia became apparent and was abused by the doctors of the clinic who knowingly overdosed him with drugs and used excessive electroshock therapy to "treat" him. However in the time that "In Cold Blood" takes place nurture would have probably been seen as the more common issue as it is today.