During the last two centuries the world became a global village. The contemporary migrant streams have thoroughly transformed the planet. The most developed metropolises in the world became globalized beehives, bursting with people from all corners of the world, representing all of the races, ethnicities, religions, languages and traditions. Our families have also changed, and they became more democratic, more multicultural, and very nuclear. I welcome this development because I like diversity and I want to experience different cultures daily.
However, my research got my thinking about the argument of nature versus nurture, or what is more important, what’s written in our genes, or which values we learned from our parents, our neighborhoods, schools, communities, and nations. Today even the adoptions are transcontinental, so many children from Asia, Africa and the Americas are adopted in Europe and vice versa, which is a very positive development. It means that the world became far more diverse and more tolerant. And the evidence shows that the nature argument (and the arguments of the racists and other chauvinists) are totally false and rebuffed by the reality. Adopted children assume their adoptive parents’ values and they are fully integrated in their adoptive communities, becoming top scientists, artists, managers, politicians, and professionals.
The contemporary world now has large migrant communities, and they also refute the nature argument. Just look at the Macedonian or the Turkish or Algerian national soccer team. Over half of these national teams are made of migrant children who were born all over Europe, in the Macedonian case, in Germany, in the Turkish case, or in France, in the Algerian case. If the nature argument is true and it is all about the genes, than most probably only one or none of these players born abroad would have made it in their national team. But the difference is in the nurture. Even though the migrants completely share the genetic pool of their ancestral countries, the difference is the educational systems, the sports infrastructure, the community support for the talented sportspersons. In other words, the socio-economic, the socio-cultural, and the political differences (institutions) produce different outcomes where a tiny minority (migrant communities) are overrepresented in the sports national teams, even though they share exactly the same genetical pool as the majority (the population of their ancestral homelands). This phenomenon is the most visible in sports, but it can also be observed in all the other facets of life such as politics, buisness, culture (literature, balet, painting, opera, etc.), science, research and entertainment.
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