Chapter 4- Nature, Nurture, and Human Diversity

This was a very complex chapter. Parts of it interested me, but other parts were very hard to understand, probably because they went against previous beliefs of mine.
I thought that heritability accounted for more personality characteristics than it apparently does. The book said that heritable individual differences can describe traits such as height, but I thought things such as shyness, outspokenness, etc. could be attributed to genetics as well, when really, they are more often the result of our environment. It surprised me how much the chapter emphasized the influence our environment has on us, even though I felt like I knew most of what it was saying. The way I was raised just made it seem like how I turned out depended on my parents!
I disagree (and always have) with Darwins' theory of natural selection. I don't believe that the world came from a "big bang" and that it was "survival of the fittest cells" from there on forward. I believe that, as the book said, the world is so perfectly created that taking even "one number from the equation" would turn the earth to soup or destroy it completely. I believe that our universe is perfectly engineered, but I believe that it is because of the amazing works of God. By no means are the authors of the book or scientists who agree with Darwin's theory wrong or stupid, these are just my opinions.
A part of the chapter that has always interested me was the section about social and cultural norms. Our (American) expected behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and values are very unlike those of other cultures, yet completely acceptable and expected in our country. What would happen if each person in our psych class were told to adapt to just one cultural norm from a different part of the world for a week and document how people reacted to each of us? I think the result would be fascinating!
Finally, I learned that some people I have previously thought of as narcissists or arrogant may just have been "individualists," as the book described. At the end of this individualist/collectivist section of chapter 4 it asked which we thought we were. I honestly didn't know how to answer that question, because I believe I am somewhat both. Everyone likes to think of themselves as independant to some degree, but not to the point that we are disagreeable to groups or standoffish. It was a very thought-provoking section!