It's really incredible when you think about it. Here we are, well into the twenty-first century, and we are still fighting over the role of nature and nurture in human development. And it isn't even a new fight; it's not even a twentieth-century fight. It actually goes back to the nineteenth century and probably even before that. So why is it that we cannot get this question answered and move on to a new one? Is it because we haven't yet gotten the necessary data to make a conclusion one way or the other? Do we not yet have a powerful enough computer to sort everything out? Have we not identified the best method and statistics to collect and analysis the relevant data? One answer to these questions is, of course, “yes” to all these possibilities, but there is also another possibility. It may also be that we are having trouble coming up with the answer because we continue to ask the wrong questions.

The Nature–Nurture Debates: Bridging the Gap is an attempt to make sense out of the nature–nurture debate, to explain why this debate is still even a debate. I mean, after all, how many other topics in any of the sciences have been debated for more than 150 years without any resolution? Making sense out of the debate requires an examination of several issues and questions. For starters, what in fact are we talking about when we talk about nature and nurture? How is each measured, and how is its relative contribution assessed? What is the history of the debate? Have there been solutions that we now no longer accept? What were they? Why were they rejected? What has changed in our understanding of the course of human development? How has this change redefined the debate? What difference does it really make anyway how much nature and nurture influence our development? Is this essentially an academic debate that may never be answered to everyone's satisfaction, or are there important practical implications as well? What are the major theoretical positions in the debate? What does each have to offer? What claims does each make? What data does each provide?