My original goal was to use my previous paper on Nature vs. Nurture to base my final project off of. While I'm not changing my topic at all, I'm not going to use the previous paper for groundwork. I hadn't really decided upon this until this morning when, after finishing my research Saturday and struggling all day yesterday to use what I already had in addition to what I'd found, I decided I needed to start fresh.
I've found a few books with very strong arguments in favor of my thesis and, rather than using a lot of the in class fiction texts as I had originally wanted to, now plan to use only McKibben, Silver, and these found materials. My paper will be a lot less about providing examples of counterarguments in fiction than I had originally planned and instead will be focused mostly on refuting McKibben's insistence against germline engineering by proving personality/identity is not dependent entirely on genes.
I will have an outline to give to you tomorrow during our meeting as well as a summary of the research I've done. I'm sorry not to have more for you to edit, especially since this would be of help to me, but there's just nothing of any consequence written right now that I plan to use.
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Final Project Outline
1. Open
2. Presentation of McKibben’s position on Germ-line Eng.
3. Presentation of my opposition
4. Presentation of Nature vs. Nurture debate
5. McKibben’s point #1
6. Opposition
7. McKibben’s point #2
8. Opposition
9. Silver’s support #1
10. Agreement
11. Silver’s support #2
12. Agreement
13. Tie together evidence and effect on Germ-line Eng.
Quotes
Taylor, Jim and Gregory Wilson, eds. Applying Sport Psychology: Four Perspectives. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2005.
“Researchers Ryan and Deci (2000) put their considerable understanding of motivation very succinctly: ‘Motivation concerns energy, direction, persistence, and equifinality—all aspects of activation and intention. Motivation…is at the core of biological, cognitive, and social regulation. Perhaps more important, in the real world, motivation is highly valued because of its consequences: Motivation produces’ (p. 69). These last two words help explain why coaches…want athletes to be motivated: because this condition leads to much-desired outcomes. Motivation moves an athlete to engage in needed preparation, even when the practices are difficult, grueling, and long. Highly motivated athletes will stay focuses and defer their involvement in other activities…What perhaps makes motivation so important in the minds of sports psychology consultants is that it can be understood as the factor over which athletes appear to have the most control. An individual, or even a team, can shift motivation, sometimes quickly…other factors affecting competition performance, such as an athlete’s physical attributes or talent or the difficulty of a task, are far less rapidly changed.” (5)
“As Ii matured athletically, I realized there was a lot more to competing in sports than mere athletic ability. I became inspired by anyone who worked hard and pursued excellence in his or her discipline…Competing in sporting events can be more of a mental battle than physical challenge. My college coach understood that for me to reach my greatest athletic potential I had to believe that I could successfully compete with anyone in the world on any given day” (12)
“Motivation is a critical variable in an athlete or a team’s performance, influencing the amount of effort expended, the ability to remain resilient after setbacks, how long someone will persist during long and difficult periods of training and actual competition results. Motivation may be the factor over which athletes have the most control” (18)
“Confidence may be the single most influential psychological contributor to success in sports. Athletes ay have all the ability in the world to perform well and achieve their goals, but if they don’t believe they have that ability, then they won’t fully use that ability…It is often not their physical or technical capabilities but rather their belief in their ability to use those capabilities at a critical time in the most important competition of their lives. The best athletes have the confidence that they will perform their best and be successful when it really counts.” (22)
Hettema, Joop and Ian J. Deary, eds. Foundation of Personality. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
“…Man is a biosocial animal…in other words, our behavior is determined in part by biological caused, in part by social learning” (Eysenk qtd 55)
“If twins are separated soon after birth and not placed in correlated environments,, the similarity of separated identical is a pure measure of the influence of heredity. The difference in correlation between identical twins raised together and those raised in different families is a measure of the influence of shared environment. Recent results…suggest that about 40% of the variance…can be attributed to heredity” (Zuckerman qtd 94)
Plomin, Robert. Genetics and Experience: The Interplay Between Nature and Nurture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994.
“Is there a single scientist today who truly believes in either the hereditarian or environmentalist extreme? A century of research in the field of behavioral genetics has shown that genetic influence is significant and substantial for most areas of behavioral development, even though it is not true that nature prevails enormously over nurture. For some traits…genetic differences among individuals can account for about half of the variance in test scores…if genetic differences account for half of the variance, this means that genetic differences do not account for the other half…behavioral genetic research has provided the best available evidence for the importance of the environment” (3)
Future Sources
Steen, Grant R. DNA and Destiny: Nature and Nurture in Human Behavior. New York: Plenum Press, 1996.
Neubaurer, Peter B. and Alexander Neubeurer. Nature’s Thumbprint: The New Genetics of Personality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Silver, Lee M. Challenging Nature: The Clash Between Biotechnology and Spirituality. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007
McKibben, Bill. Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. New York: Times Books, 2003.
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