Wow! You've really asked a very broad question. But I respond briefly by stating that both genetics and the environment are important for shaping behavior (including social behavior). I'll refer you to the following Nature article that begins by stating:

"How do genes and the environment come together to shape animal behavior? Both play important roles. Genes capture the evolutionary responses of prior populations to selection on behavior. Environmental flexibility gives animals the opportunity to adjust to changes during their own lifetime."

Read the full article here:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/both-environment-and-genetic-makeup-influence-behavior-13907840

Breed, M. & Sanchez, L. (2012) Both Environment and Genetic Makeup Influence Behavior. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):68

Both our genetic code and our learned social and cultural habits play a role. Languages are genetically contained in our brain but they socially emerge in social environments. I wonder what you meant by anything else.

Dear Brian, thank you very much for your contribution. You are right, it's a very broad question. In my opinion, scientific research should search answers to this kind of questions. As a social and political scientist I experience very often a cleavage between social sciences and natural sciences. Especially in research on quality of life we are very quickly arriving at the point where the premises and assumptions of the two branches clash. That's why I appreciate your contribution and your uploaded article very much.

Dear Jose, thanks a lot. I fully agree with you - language is a good example! By "anything else" I meant on the one hand possible explanations lying outside of ourselves but still not in social conditions (such as climate or ecosystems), but (to be a little provocative) also extra-scientific models of explanation like religion or whatever. I hoped to have manifold answers for a rich discussion out of different perspectives.

Hi Marcus,

I'm glad you found the info useful. I certainly appreciate the unnecessary divide between the social and biological sciences. I have a PhD in biological psychological, and I am interested in the biological mechanisms related to cognition and behavior. A lot of interesting research comes from looking at what happens to behavior, including social behavior, when one or more brain regions are damaged (e.g., from a stroke or brain lesion). These kinds of studies allow one to see not only the loss of a previous function, but the ability/inability to processes new information or react to new stimuli.

Dear Marcus, in addition, as a political scientist you may want to get in touch with Sven Oskarsson, a researcher posted in Uppsala, Sweden. He is currently investigating concerns similar to what you just brought up using both twin and adoption data. The following link takes you to his contact information.

http://katalog.uu.se/empInfo/?languageId=1&id=N96-2049

All the best, Viktor

Dear Bud Viktor, thank you for the link. I am very interested in his work.

No problem, good luck Marcus! /V

Just a broad answer to a broad question, i.e., isn't it interesting how animals are born "into" the appropriate environment? Humans aren't born into birds nests and it seems that each animal is born into an evironment fully endowed with the genetic code appropriate to its survival and fitting into the objective conditions there. We enter the matrix with the observation that the parents of the animal could only produce an adapted offspring because of their objective condtions. For the offspring it seems that prior time period genetics and environment has established limit conditions for its existence. These conditions are so fundamental to the life of the offspring that too much variation in the offspring's genetic acquisitions or objective environmental conditions and their life ends. It should be noted that the variation can be not only physiological but also social as in lack of affiliation with others of its species. From my recent cursory reading of Lizardo's work, the idea of isomorph and homology seem somehow to take on a diferent level of conceptual relevance in the nature vs nurture puzzle.

For a well balanced, lucidly written book on the development of (human) behaviour and a good account of how nature and nurture always interact, I recommend

Patrick Bateson & Paul Martin

'Design for a Life' Vintage, Random House/Vintage 2000.

I suggest one other area of inquiry that some argue influences the social relationships, i.e., the cultural determinants of behavior. In summary, cultural might be considered as the learned foundations of behavior that have become automatisms and disconnected from consciousness. Sharkansky writes of "routines of politics" and seems to point to this same area of "given" sets of behaviors that establish uncritical beginnings for all sorts of political behaviors. Kuhn, in The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, makes a case for the uncritical acceptance of historical accounts of experimental outcomes as given material used to advance scientific instruction. It seems that the realm of cultural influences get the least attention when it comes to explaining behavior. Bourdieu's "habitus" is a good place to explore as you address your question. Also you familiarize yourself with the concept of "automatism".

From considering biology, we could generalise that every species evolves to occupy a certain ecological niche. I have proposed that humans are gene machines (Richard Dawkins) that are emotional in the sense that emotions are a condition for their behaviour and that this emotional gene machines evolved to occupy the ecological niche that is constructed through application of knowledge learned by the member of the species. Every ecological niche confronts its suitor with some condition. The two most important questions for the Ecological Niche of Knowledge are possessing moral capacity or at least the capacity to manipulate morality and the to be able to learn, transmit, inform and misinform and use knowledge. I have presented these ideas, in an inchoate form, in my PhD theses, now available as a book. The combination of the three factors allows us to predict how politics and political world would be and even how is the psychology of being driven by those factors. The book in PDF format is available here for free. Book Knowledge Processing, Creativity and Politics

https://www.simplypsychology.org/naturevsnurture.html

Dear Showan Khurshid , Nice Contribution.

Dear Abdelkader Mohamed Elsayed thank you very much.

There are many factors, the most important of which are the social environment, and the behaviors of the parents and those around us.

This link may be Useful:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19932/

Following

This is big philosophical debate. There plenty of studies on this issue!

Regards