Continuing on the debate between genetics and experience, I would like to add my two cents of experience. Like many others, I have examples of how my appearance and behavior are very much identical to one parent; I am almost completely like my father. Although there are some minor things that I have in common with my mother, the bulk of my tendencies, habits, and behaviors match that of my father. A random example is that when I listen to something intently, I always subconsciously being crossing my legs, shaking my foot in a horizontal movement, and cocking my head to the right. Some more examples are bad puns, this horrible dance that I do where I twist my legs in a funny way, and almost identical logical processes when making a decision. These things probably don’t mean much to you all since none of you have seen my father, but I believe that all of these things are behaviors that were genetically acquired versus learned. One cannot learn the logical processes of another’s mind. Also, my father was not involved in my growth at all. I hardly saw him except for when he would come out from his bedroom to go to the bathroom. All of my time or growth was spent solely with my mother and as previously stated I seem to have very little in common with her other than the size of my hips.

Yet even if I agree with Pinker in a way, I do not pretend to think that environment plays no role in our development as humans. The genetics, I believe, are the building blocks of our personality. Yet the shaping of these blocks is done solely by our experiences. These are two completely different fields working with completely different areas of the mind. Its like a growing plant, the genes we acquire are the roots while the experiences (wind, rain, sun) determine how that plant will eventually grow. My experiences have taken those genetic traits and formed them into an English major, while the experiences of my father took him down an almost opposite path. The influence of experience is substantial.

An interesting article that I found in Time Magazine (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951968-2,00.html), though it may not be directly related, called “Why DNA Isn’t Your Destiny” talks about the epigenome and how it affects how your genes are expressed. I am not a biologist and the logistics of this phenomenon is too difficult for me to explain in detail, but the analogy that the article used is this: “if the genome is the hardware, then the epigenome is the software. ‘I can load Windows, if I want, on my Mac,’ says Joseph Ecker, a Salk Institute biologist and leading epigenetic scientist. ‘You're going to have the same chip in there, the same genome, but different software. And the outcome is a different cell type.’”
The epigenome affects how strongly our genes are shown. “It is these epigenetic "marks" that tell your genes to switch on or off, to speak loudly or whisper.”(John Cloud)

Like I said, this article may not be directly related to the discussion of environment or genes, but I believe it gives an interesting spin to the possibilities.