Friends->"The Office" trivia->"Arrested Development" trivia->Twins->Nature Vs. Nurture Debate
Yeah, long title, I know. And the conversation that is the background to the blog posting was very tangential as the title suggests.
So, yesterday was Cinco De Mayo and my friend David’s birthday- we went out to celebrate both. As we are waiting to be seated we start a conversation about “The Office” so we start asking each other questions about the show to see who the bigger fan is. I then remember that a few people in the circle like “Arrested Development” so I start asking questions about that show. We then start talking about blogs and websites, and someone mentiones “IamOscar.com” which is a site that was created on “Arrested Development” because this character Oscar is the twin brother of George Bluth. Then we got seated and had an ok Mexican dinner.
The rest did not happen till I got home. I started thinking about twins and then on another tangent I started thinking about Arnold and Danny, then I started thinking about the Nature Vs. Nurture argument in relation to the movie. In the movie both twins are part of an experiment, Arnold gets all the good stuff while Danny gets all the bad stuff, but that is not the end of it- this is where the experiment does not make sense to me. They seem to only have been experimenting on Arnold and just sort of let Danny’s character live his own life.
Now, I don’t know why someone would run this sort of experiment, but if I did it would be in order to test whether its nature or nurture that shapes us. So I would have changed the experiment. I would have made two sets of the twins using the same genetic material. One set of twins I would put in a good home, and the other set in a not such a good environment. Back to the movie- the point is that I would be testing whether Danny’s character would have been a lot different if he grew up in the same environment as Arnold’s character, and if Arnold’s character would have been a lot different if he grew up in an environment similar to Danny’s character.
So if the results show that both “Arnolds” and both “Dannys” would have been the same, then we can say that Nature (our genes) is what shapes us, because the environment did not matter. If the results would have shown that each person in the Arnold-Danny set was the same then we can show that Nurture is what shapes us, since they were raised in the same environment. I feel that this would have been a much better experiment and would have made the movie a lot more educational while still allowing it to maintain its comedic element.
Am I missing anything in my experiment data that would provide even more conclusive evidence? Feel free to criticize and comment.
