In a person’s family relatives may say a person has his or her mother’s eye’s and has their father’s nose, or say that a person acts like his or her mother or father. Some say these factors can pass through a person’s genes and other’s say that some actions are human nature. In this paper Delores will discuss the biological and humanistic approaches to personality. She will also discuss how growth needs influence personality formation, describe biological factors that influence the formation of personality, examine the relationship of biological factors to Maslow’s theory of personality, and explain the basic aspects of the humanistic theory, which are incompatible with biological explanations of personality.
Biology revealed many aspects of how the human body works and what it needs to stay healthy. “In 1953 James D. Watson and Francis Crick discovered that DNA was structured as a double helix (Friedman & Schustack, 2009). This discovery was a huge accomplishment in the study of human biology. Charles Darwin took human biology a step further. Darwin used the fact that not one human being is the same to support his evolutionary personality theory. Darwin believes that humans are “people evolved directly from more primitive species (Friedman & Schustack, 2009).” For example, Brian G. Richmond and David S. Strait wrote an article called “Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor (Brian G Richmond and David S Strait 2000).” This article explains that evidence has surfaced proving that humans could have once been gorillas.
A Darwinian approach to that idea would be that over time conditions in the environment caused some gorillas to no longer need to walk on their knuckles, no longer needed huge nostrils in their noses, and so on. Also in that group of gorillas it could have been a need for longer legs and slimmer body sizes for the sole purpose of