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the problem with nature vs nurture is that personalities are neurologically innate.

However, many nurture factors shape how that personality expresses itself.

Also, things like IQ are determined by nutrition and pollution and contamination in the environment (lead can occur naturally in water, or from industrial contamination, and can lead to ADD.)

And IQ can improve with stimulation. For example, at the turn of the century, both the Irish and the Jewish immigrants were considered "retarded" by those who believed in eugenics. Nowadays, the highest college graduation rate is in Jewish and Irish children...look at all the comments about dumb rednecks. That was because of poor nutrition and hookworm that was recognized and eliminated in the 1930's. And in Africa, the tribal people were smart, but when I worked in a city, many I worked with were very slow mentally, which surprised me, until I realized that tribal Africans were breastfed for two years, and the city children were breast fed only a few months and then given formula and (because formula was expensive) mainly carbohydrates in their diet, leading to poor brain development.

LadyDoc wrote:

the problem with nature vs nurture is that personalities are neurologically innate. However, many nurture factors shape how that personality expresses itself.

I found Pinkers views on our 'innate' abilities & behaviors, and how he ties them into political consequenses, to be the best part of this essay:

-- A principal theme of Dr. Pinker's argument is that the blank slaters — the critics of sociobiology and their many adherents in the social sciences — have sought to base the political ideals of equal rights and equal opportunity on a false biological premise: that all human minds are equal because they are equally blank, equally free of innate, genetically shaped, abilities and behaviors.

The politics and the science must be disentangled, Dr. Pinker argues.
Equal rights and equal opportunities are moral principles, he says, not empirical hypotheses about human nature, and they do not require a biological justification, especially not a false one. Moreover, the blank slate doctrine has political consequences that have been far from benign, in Dr. Pinker's view.
It encourages totalitarian regimes to excesses of social engineering.
It perverts education and child-rearing, loading unmerited guilt on parents for their children's failures.

In his book he reproaches those who in his view have politicized the study of human nature from both the left and the right, though in practice more of his fire is directed against the left, particularly the critics of sociobiology. They have created a climate in which "discoveries about human nature were greeted with fear and loathing because they were thought to threaten progressive ideals," he writes.