The nature versus nurture debate deals with children developing their psychological attributes through genetics, in this case nature, or through their education and how they are raised, also known as nurture. This argument can be tracked back to a few millenniums ago when in 350 B.C. philosophers asked the same question about human behavior. Plato and Aristotle, for instance, were both philosophers with different views on the issue. Plato believed that knowledge and behavior were due to innate factors, while Aristotle backed up the idea of tabula rasa, which means "blank slate". The latter idea is on line with the thought that everyone is born basically mindless and gained their own behavior or knowledge from experiences. .
Considering philosophy as a whole, it is possible to distinguish philosophers who adopt an extreme nature or heredity position, known as nativists, and philosophers who support the nurture and environmental position, known as empiricists.
The basic belief of a native philosopher is that individual difference is the mere consequence of evolution; every individual is unique and unrepeatable thanks to each person's unique genetic code. Nativists truly believe that skills and abilities of every human being are "native" or hard-wired in the brain since birth. Language, for example, is considered as innate and built in every human being at birth, it is "embroidered" in the history and development of the biological organism, which contains the language instinct. The language is furthermore in the genes. On the other hand of the spectrum, there are the empiricists to support the nurture and environmental position to be considered in contraposition to the nativists main ideas. According to them the human being acquires knowledge only through experience. In fact when the infant is born his mind is a tabula rasa that is gradually filled in with experience and practice.
