It was Galton who coined the phrase “nature versus nurture,” which still reverberates in debates today. (It was probably suggested by Shakespeare’s Tempest, in which Prospero laments that his adopted son, Caliban, is “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.”) What made him so sure that nature dominated nurture in determining a person’s talent and temperament? The idea first arose in his mind at Cambridge, where he noticed that the top students had relatives who had also excelled there; surely, he reasoned, such runs of family success were not a matter of mere chance.
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