In the competition between nature and nurture, nurture always dominates. Nurture is the winner. Debate settled.

Nature is just DNA, which encodes for certain proteins. Given any configuration of DNA, we can in theory create an injection that suppresses the expression of the proteins we don’t want and encodes for different proteins instead, overriding DNA entirely. Nurture wins.

And if we aren’t allowed to use an injection, there are other less direct ways of overriding nature. Nature can’t make you poor if everyone gets a billion dollars the day they’re born. Nature can’t make you short if we stretch everyone to 7 feet. The heritability of height drops to zero in a world where we give people surgeries to make everyone the same height.

The question of heritability is much more interesting than the question of nature vs. nurture, because it compares the variation in a trait that exists now vs. the distribution of genes that exists now. However, it doesn’t tell you anything about how much a trait is caused by genes, it only tells you how much of a trait is caused by genetics right now. Which is super misleading if you notice, for example, that something like obesity is very heritable, and that heritability comes from e.g. certain personality traits related to lack of willpower. It would be tempting to then blame people for being fat. But you’d be neglecting the fact that the heritability of obesity could be precisely zero given a different environment. Nurture wins, always.

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