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Many of the weeks I give talks on the intersections of psychology with the

Darma and very often that entails

discussing how early childhood infancy relational experiences, i.e. the way we interact

with our caregivers and our families create traits that will endure for much of our lives.

And I talk about the tools that help us address attachment styles and work issues that tend to be

essentially structured by again those early experiences in life. I should note that it's probably 50% of our traits and our

ingrained perceptions and behavioral patterns are set not only by early attachment or what we call nurture, but the other 50% would be produced by natural selection slash evolution and that is what falls under the rubric of nature.

So it's neither nature nor nurture, it's both that produces the attributes that we

work with in our lives.

Now you might well wonder how do we tell or discern

which attributes are attributable to our early life experiences versus which attributes are probably the product,

1.8 million years of the evolution we've had since the first version of Homo sapiens.

I think Homo erectus or something like that happened 1.8 million years ago.

So roughly the way you would tell is that traits that are different in people, different in cultures, different in people,

in cultures, different in family systems,

would certainly be nurture, would be those traits

produced by our early life experiences.

On the other hand, traits that are universal and are largely operated by limbic structures would be those traits we would call natural or the product of natural selection.

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