We've been told since the time that we were little that we would grow up to be just like our parents. Yet, no matter how much we hated their nagging or their unexplainable talent of being able to embarrass us in public, we could not prevent ourselves from turning into them. So why is it that we, as human beings, have this fate, and what makes us this way? This brings us to the age-old debate of nature versus nurture. For centuries, an argument has been going on about whether our genetics are responsible for our commonplace behaviors or if it has been our social and economic environment that is reflected in our personalities (Buttelheim, 1998).
             The King of Germany, Frederick II, first brought up this topic in the 13th Century when he wanted to find out what language a child would speak if they grew up without any preexisting language. He was curious to know if they would speak in the ancient European language, Hebrew, or the more recent Greek and Latin languages. To set up this experiment, he had a foster mother raise and care for a series of children without speaking to them. However, this experiment came to a terrible conclusion when all the children died fairly quickly because they could not survive without the bonding that is developed through language (Kimble, 1993).
             Experiments such as these continued for quite some time but provided little to no statistical evidence until the Split Twin Approach was developed in 1869 by Francis Galton. In this situation, several sets of both fraternal and identical twins who had been separated at birth and raised in different environments were studied to discover both the similarities and differences in their personalities. This proved to be most beneficial considering that identical or monozygotic twins are derived from a single egg, making up the same DNA structure. Monozygotic twins were then compared to both fraternal or dizygotic twins and siblings. In doing this, Galton was able...