At the end of the eighteenth century, scholars in mental medicine sparked off a debate on the relative importance of causes of human development. On one side of the debate was the belief that the human infant is born without knowledge or skills, proposed by British philosopher John Locke. He argued the newborn mind to be like a blank slate, tabula rasa on which development is directed by experience and education in the form of human learning that can be written from scratch, thus forming the nurture argument. In opposition, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued for the biological predispositions and abilities that humans are born with, that is genetically determined, to be the main shaper of development….(short extract)

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