Boyce – symphonic causation

The phrase nature versus nurture implies that there is some kind of a play-off of one versus the other and a decision of either proportioning variants to one versus the other and I think the understanding that is emerging is that in almost no case is it an issue of nature versus nurture but rather a case of nature and nurture and the ways in which those things work together to produce health and well-being or disease and disorder.  

Symphonic causation is sort of a whimsical term that I used in my presentation to describe the interaction between aspects of the person that are biologically given – those that are heritable and part of the genome or expression of the genome. The interaction of those kinds of properties of the individual and the kinds of experiences that an individual has. And what we’re learning over the years, and especially right now, is the way in which those sort of given properties, that are more biologically based, interact in certain systematic ways with experience to produce the outcomes that we’re interested in health and development and well-being.