Nature Vs. Nurture
“Origin Story”
Analog Collage, 2020
Watch the full making of “Origin Story” here:
My Thoughts on the Process:
After my last piece about Transcendence I wanted to move in the opposite direction; “descendence”. I want to explore my thoughts on the depths of life.
As a collage artist naturally I’m going to approach this topic metaphorically and I hope I did this through the artwork. However, I also wanted to consider this practically too. From what I’ve learned through the lens of Biology I know that a human is a set of inherited genomic information. That information expresses itself based on environmental interactions. Simply, we all have different information stored in our cells and we all react in different ways to environmental stress. Some young people live healthy lifestyles yet die from cancer. Some people who have unhealthy lifestyles live a long happy life. This may make us feel like we are all unique individuals and that we are subject to luck yet I know one thing that every human has in common, one thing that we all absolutely need to survive and that is the biological imperative of nurture.
As someone who has no children I’m at a loss for understanding the deep exeriencial bond between a parent and a child. However, the basic concept that I’m sure everyone knows is that once you cut a newborn baby’s umbilical cord you can not leave it alone to survive. Humans need to be taken care of for years if not decades after birth. There are other species on the planet that don’t ever need parental guidance but we are not one of them.
Without the environmental interaction of nurture we die.
Going deeper into the science behind human attachment theory it is well documented that if you take a child away from it’s parents, even if you give the baby all the “nature” it needs, food, shelter, clothing etc. the damage of denying the child the physical nurturing aspect has major negative developmental consequences for the nervous system that cannot be reversed. Even after typical early childhood development there have been far too many instances where adult humans are imprisoned, put in solitary confinement and suffer consequence.
Sometimes the question is posed about the choice between nature and nurture as if they are in some sort of opposition. This is a silly comparison because we know that through these examples humans are nature that needs to be nurtured. I think this should be a lesson for us all that our very nervous systems are codependent on each other. We don’t just need our neighbors in external or symbolic way but we are deeply dependant on our connections to each other in very physical ways.
As we enter the most widespread physically distant winter of our lives we need to remember that that we need to take care of each other in order to survive.
Sincerely,
Randy Grskovic
