In order to follow my argument one must first accept the basic premise that everyone is a combination of what they've been exposed to, (their enviornment) and their genetics.

I learned this in Psych. 101. I remember looking at an illustration of a rectangle in a textbook that allows students to visualize the concept. The rectangle's width was nurture and the height was nature. This is a good way to visualize this concept.

Once this basic premise is accepted it is only logical to come to the conclusion that there is no free will, and no one has ever truly had a mind of their own.

Think of it, If all we are is a combination of what we've been exposed to and what we were born with then there is no seperate self. True, we make decisions everyday, but those are only a direct result of our nature and nurture.

We've all heard the saying we are a product of our enviornment. We are products of our enviornment and our genetics.

This argument can be difficult to accept because it is an admittidely deppressing one. However, the logic is flawless.

First, the nature/nurture dichotomy is an invented one. That is, they exist as categories only insofar as people belive they are real categories. Arguments about these categories will then follow from the social construction and might be limited by them.

Secondly, there are always outliers. The presence of outliers indicates that these categories are false and don't hold true across the board.

Thirdly, the debates over nature/nurture having really "solved" any world problem. The world is not a better place. This obsession with understanding human behavior appears to be arising from inadequacies in deterministic types more than in anything that will modify or improve society.

The question that really needs to be asked is - why is it such an important question? Who cares?

I won't use the term "free will" but in my opinion there is the mind. People with identical or very similar genetics in identical environments are not the same. Period. They might use the same shampoo, vote for the same candidates, but they are different people. It is absurd to reduce people to these functionalist categories. Leaning on the side of biology (nature) is like modern day phrenology - it's a mistake. Leaning on the side of environment (nurture) is akin to the cultural materialists of the 70s. Those people were debunked years ago. Saying that everything is equal to the sum of nature plus nurture presumes that people only have brains and not minds.

Hopefully that will comfort you. The whole thing is a farce and I have yet to see where these arguments have solved anything.

signed, an anthropologist who tried to get students in classes to think and analyze rather than limiting their arguments to pre-existing ideas.