The nature vs nurture debate is as old as recorded history. Apparently, during the uprising against Qin rule in 209 BCE, Chen Sheng—the leader of the uprising—asked the rhetorical question as a call to war: “Are kings, generals, and ministers merely born into their kind?” Modern approaches to developmental biology reveal the question to be somewhat misguided, and yet the debate continues. This essay argues that it is time to let go of an artificially dichotomous approach to the bases of phenotypic variation and accept the following conclusions of decades of research: (1) Measures of so-called heritability are not particularly informative, especially in humans; (2) Genes and environments interplay in complex and non-linear ways that simply do not allow the two components to be meaningfully disentangled; (3) Despite our best efforts, there is little we can say about gene-environment interactions in humans, except that genes do have pervasive effects and that such effects are sometimes radically modulated by the environment. Anything beyond that is likely to be ideologically driven and unsubstantiated by the available evidence.