The blank slate or something more subtle

Subject: The blank slate or something more subtle.

Can ethnicity produce characteristics which determines behaviour. Can gender predict emotional outcomes which are wholly the province of th

at particular cohort of gender species. Can we in fact describe gender as having a specialised characteristic or are the variables in the character of the combined gender so varied as to make any such characteristic meaningless.
Does the concept of us starting our lives as a 'blank slate' a slate on which the 'environment' writes its prose and determines who we are and what we will become does this expose us wholly to the caprice of where and to whole were born.
Is the notion that there are fixed norms in our behaviour patterns which come from nature, not nurture and that the eternal nature of the mind lies outside our involvement with the environment.
These questions are at the bedrock of our understanding of an individualistic/ collective 
social community which we attempt to conceptualise in our western set of values. Even the word values sets us thinking since where do values come from. 
Clearly they are different in different societies or, is it a case that values are all the same but that environmental bias holds them back for political and religious reasons. 
Do our values which might encompass, honesty, love, compassion, fairness, and so on, are these values innate in mankind or are they learnt. 
Is it a genetic component passed down through our parents and therefore a variable, given that the mutation between the actual male and the female chromosome arrangement, which manifests itself in the actual concept of male and female, does this arrangement of chromosomes determine everything. 
The religious concept of freedom (free will) defined by Eves choice to take the fruit of the tree rather than the dictate of god has enormous social implications since, if it has been decreed that we have free will to decide our destiny then the inherited traits which are locked in our genes make freewill almost impossible. We become determined by a chemical imposition which the concept of good and bad clearly has no meaning.
Our whole sense of a 'moral component to ourselves' in which ethical decisions are at the base of who we are varies from person to person, not just by our exposure to the philosophical test but by something much more innate, the structure of our chromosome chain.
As human beings we have prided ourselves with the idea that we are different and that the difference lies in the way we think and especially in the way we transfer these thoughts through language. It can be construed from this that language is an equally important component and that languages determine the way we transfer our thoughts and ideas. If a language is simplistic then the opportunity to progress with thoughts and ideas is also limited. 

The Bushman of the Kalahari, the isolated tribesman, living in the jungles of  Papua New Guinea or the Aborigine of central Australia are all limited in their language which largely describes only the day today experiences around them. They do of course have their strong affiliation to a spirit world but this is perhaps a more colloquial concept of life and death, life and death, one of the commonalities which we all have in common.