Human nature is the fundamental nature and substance of humans, as well as the range of human behavior that is believed to be invariant over long periods of time and across very different cultural contexts. Human behavior is the collection of activities influenced by culture, attitude, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion and coercion. ... Look up Culture in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Wikinews has news related to this article: Culture and entertainment Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Cultural Development in Antiquity Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Culture and Civilization in Modern Times Classificatory system for cultures and civilizations, by Dr. Sam Vaknin...

Metaphysics and ethics

There are a number of perspectives regarding the fundamental nature and substance of humans. These are by no means mutually exclusive, and the following list is by no means exhaustive:

• Philosophical naturalism (which includes materialism and rationalism) encompasses a set of views that humans are purely natural phenomena; sophisticated animals that evolved to our present state through natural mechanisms such as evolution. Good and evil are regarded as labels placed on how well individual behaviour conforms to societal expectations, and is the result of our psychology and socialization.

• Abrahamic religion holds that a human is a spiritual being which was deliberately created in the image of God, and exists in continued relationship with the God. Good and evil are defined in terms of how well human beings conform to God or God's law.

• Polytheistic or Animistic notions vary, but generally regard human beings as citizens in a world populated by other intelligent spiritual or mythological beings, such as Gods, Demons, Ghosts, etc. In these cases, human evil is often regarded as the result of supernatural influences or mischief (although may have many other causes as well).

• Holistic, Pantheistic, and Panentheistic spiritual traditions regard humanity as existing within God or as a part of Divine cosmos. In this case, human "evil" is usually regarded as the result of ignorance of this universal Divine nature. Traditions of this kind include Vedic religions and other forms of eastern philosophy (including Buddhism and Taoism), and western philosophy such as Stoicism, Neoplatonism, or Spinoza's pantheistic cosmology. Certain kinds of Polytheism, Animism, and Monism have similar interpretions.

Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that reject the validity of explanations or theories making use of entities inaccessible to natural science, that is, supernatural phenomena: phenomena beyond the natural world that we measure using the scientific method. ... Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are comprised of material. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by... Rationalism, also known as the rationalist movement, is a philosophical doctrine that asserts that the truth should be determined by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith, dogma or religious teaching. ... Phyla Porifera (sponges) Ctenophora (comb jellies) Cnidaria Placozoa Subregnum Bilateria  Acoelomorpha  Orthonectida  Rhombozoa  Myxozoa  Superphylum Deuterostomia     Chordata (vertebrates, etc. ... Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution by natural selection. ... Psychology (Classical Greek: psyche = soul or mind, logos = study of) is an academic and applied field involving the study of behaviour, mind and thought and, frequently, the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals daily lives and the treatment of mental illness. ... An Abrahamic religion is described by some, for the purposes of comparative religion, as any religion derived from an ancient Semitic tradition, supposed to be traceable to Abraham, a great patriarch described in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran. ... A spirit or spiritual being is a non-corporeal entity found in many religions and belief systems throughout the world. ... The term God (capitalized in English language as a proper noun) is often used to refer to a Supreme Being. ... Polytheism is belief in, or worship of, multiple gods or divinities. ... This article is in need of attention. ... This article is about a system of myths. ... This article is about deities or gods from a non-monotheistic perspective. ... The demon Satan In folklore, mythology, and religion, a demon is a supernatural being that is generally described as an evil spirit, but is also depicted to be good in some instances. ... This article is about the paranormal. ... Holism (from holon, a Greek word meaning entity) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ... Pantheism (Greek: pan = all and Theos = God) literally means God is All and All is God. It is the view that everything is of an all-encompassing immanent God; or that the universe, or nature, and God are equivalent. ... Panentheism (Greek words: pan=all, en=in and Theos=God; God-in-all) is the view that God is immanent within all Creation or that God is the animating force behind the universe. ... The religion of the Vedic civilization is the predecessor of classical Hinduism, usually included in the term. ... In the West, the term Eastern philosophy refers very broadly to the various philosophies of the East, namely Asia, including China, India, Japan, and the general area. ... Statues of Buddha such as this, the Tian Tan Buddha statue in Hong Kong, remind followers to practice right living. ... For other uses of the words tao and dao, see Dao (disambiguation). ... Western philosophy is a line of related philosophical thinking, beginning in Ancient Greece, and including the predominant philosophical thinking of Europe and its former colonies up to the present day. ... A restored Stoa in Athens, Greece. ... Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) was a school of philosophy beginning in the 3rd century A.D. It was based on the teachings of Plato and Platonists; but it interpreted Plato in many new ways, such that Neoplatonism was quite different from what Plato taught, though not many Neoplatonists would admit... Baruch Spinoza Benedictus de Spinoza (November 24, 1632 - February 21, 1677), named Baruch Spinoza by his synagogue elders and known as Bento de Spinoza or Bento dEspiñoza in the community in which he grew up. ... Polytheism is belief in, or worship of, multiple gods or divinities. ... Animism is the belief that personalized supernatural beings (or souls) inhabit all objects and govern their existence. ... Monism is the metaphysical view that all is of one essential essence, substance or energy. ...

Free will and determinism

The issue of free will and determinism underlies much of the debate about human nature. Free will, or agency, refers to the ability of humans to make genuinely free choices (in some sense). As it relates to humans, the thesis of determinism implies that human choices are fully caused by internal and external forces. Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that our choices are ultimately up to ourselves. ... Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. ...

• Incompatibilism holds that determinism and free will are contradictory (i.e. both cannot be true). Incompatibilist views can either deny or accept will.
  • Incompatibilist views holding to free will include:
    • Libertarianism holds that the human perception of free choice in action is genuine, rather than seemingly genuine, so that some of our actions are performed without there being any compulsion by internal or external forces to do so (i.e., indeterminism).
    • Thomism holds that humans have a genuine experience of free will, and this experience of free will is evidence of a soul that transcends the mere physical components of the system.
  • Incompatibilist views that deny free will include:
    • Fatalism refers to the belief that humans do not have freedom, but rather that our decisions stem from environmental, biological, or theological factors, that the appearance of free will is an illusion, and that human deliberation and actions are pointless because things have to be the way they have to be.
    • Predestination is the position that God orchestrates all the events in the universe, human and otherwise, according to his will; in essence a theistic form of fatalism.
    • Biological determinism and Social determinism are the views that human actions are determined by their biology and social interaction, respectively. The debate between these two positions is known as Nature vs. nurture.
• Compatibilism is the view that free will and determinism coexist. Compatibilist views include:
  • Humian compatibilitism is the view that they are compatible because free will is merely the hypothetical ability to choose differently if one were differently disposed according to the physical factors of determinism.
  • Molinism is the view that God is able to pre-destine all events on Earth because he knows in advance what people will freely choose.
  • Contemporary compatibilists seek definitions of free will that permit determinism.

Compatibilism, also known as soft determinism and most famously championed by Hume, is a theory which holds that free will and determinism are compatible. ... Free will is the philosophical doctrine that holds that our choices are ultimately up to ourselves. ... In philosophical debates about free will and determinism, libertarianism is generally held to be the combination of the following beliefs: that free will is incompatible with determinism that determinism is false, and that human beings do possess free will. ... Indeterminism is the philosophical belief that free will and determinism are incompatible, and that there are events which do not correspond with determinism. ... Thomism is the philosophical school that followed in the legacy of St. ... The soul according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance — spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) — particular to a unique living being. ... Fatalism is, roughly, the view that the future is already set and therefore, that human deliberation and actions are pointless because things have to be the way they have to be. ... The social environment of an individual is the culture that he or she was educated and/or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts. ... Biology studies the variety of life (clockwise from top-left) E. coli, tree fern, gazelle, Goliath beetle Biology is the science of life (from the Greek words bios = life and logos = word). ... Theology is literally rational discourse concerning God (Greek θεος, theos, God, + λογος, logos, rational discourse). By extension, it also refers to the study of other religious topics. ... Predestination is a religious idea, under which the relationship between the beginning of things and the destiny of things is discussed. ... Categories: Biology stubs ... Social determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone determine individual behavior (as opposed to biological or objective factors). ... This article needs cleanup, so as to conform to a higher standard. ... Compatibilism, also known as soft determinism and most famously championed by Hume, is a theory which holds that free will and determinism are compatible. ... Hume is the name of several people and places: David Hume is an 18th century philosopher from Scotland. ... Molinism, named after 16th Century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, is a religious doctrine which attempts to reconcile Gods omniscience with human free will. ... The term God (capitalized in English language as a proper noun) is often used to refer to a Supreme Being. ...

Spiritual vs. natural

Another often-discussed aspect of human nature is the existence and relationship of the physical body with a spirit or soul that transcends the human's physical attributes, as well as the existence of any transcendent purpose. In this area, there are three dominant views: In religion and spirituality, the term spirit has two core meanings: The nature and essential substance of human souls, through which each is connected to all others, and by the experience of such connection is a primary basis for spiritual belief. ... The soul according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance — spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) — particular to a unique living being. ...

• The philosophical naturalist position is that humans are entirely natural, with no spiritual component or transcendent purpose. Subsets of the naturalist view include the materialist and physicalist positions, which hold that humans are entirely physical. However, some naturalists are also dualists about mind and body. Naturalism, combined with the natural and social sciences, views humans as the unplanned product of evolution, which operated in part by natural selection on random mutations. Philosophical naturalists do not believe in a supernatural afterlife. While philosophical naturalism is often assailed as a unacceptable view of human nature, it is endorsed by many prominent philosophers and thinkers. The philosophical naturalist often will view religious belief as similar to superstition and as the product of unsound or magical thinking.

• In contrast to materialism, there is the Platonic or idealist position. It can be expressed in many ways, but in essence it is the view that there is a distinction between appearance and reality, and that the world we see around us is simply a reflection of some higher, divine existence, of which the human (and perhaps also the animal) soul, spirit, or mind may be part. In his Republic, Book VII, Plato represents humankind as prisoners chained from birth inside an underground cave, unable to move their heads, and therefore able to see only the shadows on the walls created by a fire outside the cave, shadows that, in their ignorance, the cave dwellers mistake for reality. For Plato, therefore, the soul is a spirit that uses the body. It is in a non-natural state of union, and longs to be freed from its bodily prison (cf. Republic, X, 611).

• Between materialism and idealism lies Thomism, which is, in essence, a synthesis of Christian theology and the philosophy of Aristotle. The Thomist view of human nature is that we are in essence a "rational animal" -- a single, undivided being that is at once animal and rational. The soul is seen as the entirety of the human being -- no division is made between the "physical" and the "spiritual." As such, the human soul is not a spirit that reluctantly uses the human body as with Platonic idealism, but is instead "the individual substance of a rational nature" -- that is, the soul is the human in his entirety, with both material and rational or spiritual components. This position differentiates Thomism from both materialism and idealism. Unlike idealism, it holds that the visible universe is not a "mere shadow" of a transcendent reality, but instead is fully real in and of itself. However, unlike materialism, thomism holds that empiricism and philosophy, when properly exercised, lead inevitably to reasonable belief in God, the human soul, and moral objectivism. Thus, to a thomist, it is obvious from the evidence that there is a God and an eternal soul.

Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that reject the validity of explanations or theories making use of entities inaccessible to natural science, that is, supernatural phenomena: phenomena beyond the natural world that we measure using the scientific method. ... Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are comprised of material. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by... See also the old text of this article Physicalism/Larrys text. ... In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of beliefs which begin with the claim that the mental and the physical have a fundamentally different nature. ... Philosophy of mind is the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, and consciousness. ... The lunar farside as seen from Apollo 11 Natural science is the study of the physical, nonhuman aspects of the Earth and the universe around us. ... Terms like SOSE (Studies of Society & the Environment) not only refer to social sciences but also studies of the environment. ... Natural selection is a process by which biological populations are altered over time, as a result of the propagation of heritable traits that affect the capacity of individual organisms to survive and reproduce. ... Mutations are permanent, sometimes transmissible (if the change is to a germ cell) changes to the genetic material (usually DNA or RNA) of a cell. ... Afterlife - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Superstition describes a provably-wrong belief or a set of behaviors that are related to magical thinking, whereby the practitioner believes that the future, or the outcome of certain events, can be influenced by certain specified behaviors. ... Magical thinking is a term used by historians of religion to describe one kind of non-scientific causal reasoning. ... Platonic idealism is the theory that the substantive reality around us is only a reflection of a higher truth. ... In general parlance, idealism or idealist is also used to describe a person having high ideals, sometimes with the connotation that those ideals are unrealisable or at odds with practical life. ... A phenomenon (plural: phenomena) is an observable event, especially something special (literally something that can be seen from the Greek word phainomenon = observable). ... In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a noumenon or thing in itself (German Ding an sich) is an unknowable, indescribable reality that, in some way, lies behind observed phenomena. ... The word reflection (also spelt reflexion in British English) can refer to several different concepts: In mathematics, reflection is the transformation of a space. ... Divinity is seen as the existence of some entity or entities which are greater than humankind. ... PLATO, an apronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation, was one of the first generalized Computer assisted instruction systems, originally built by the University of Illinois (U of I) and later taken over by Control Data (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. ... Shadows on a pavement A shadow is a dark shape, e. ... Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, or a willful lack of desire to improve the efficiency, merit, effectiveness or usefulness of ones actions. ... Thomism is the philosophical school that followed in the legacy of St. ... Synthesis (from the Greek words syn = plus and thesis = position) is commonly understood to be an integration of two or more pre-existing elements which results in a new creation. ... Christian theology practices theology from a Christian viewpoint or studies Christianity theologically. ... Aristotle (sculpture) Aristotle (Greek: Αριστοτέλης Aristotelēs; 384 BC – March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher. ... The soul according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance — spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) — particular to a unique living being. ... Empiricism (greek εμπειρισμός, from empirical, latin experientia - the experience) is generally regarded as being at the heart of the modern scientific method, that our theories should be based on our observations of the world rather than on intuition or faith; that is, empirical research and a posteriori inductive reasoning rather than... The term philosophy derives from a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom. ... The term God (capitalized in English language as a proper noun) is often used to refer to a Supreme Being. ... The soul according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance — spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) — particular to a unique living being. ... Moral objectivism is the position that certain acts are objectively right or wrong, independent of human opinion. ... The term God (capitalized in English language as a proper noun) is often used to refer to a Supreme Being. ... Eternal links here. ... The soul according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance — spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) — particular to a unique living being. ...

State of nature

State of nature refers to philosophical assertions regarding the condition of humans before social factors are imposed, thus attempting to describe the "natural essence" of human nature. State of nature is a term in political philosophy used to describe the hypothetical or empirical condition of humanity when or if government did not exist. ...

• Views which see humans as inherently good:
  • According to John Locke, humans in the state of nature have perfect freedom to order their actions according to the laws of nature, without having to ask permission to act from any other person. People are of equal value, and treat each other as they would want to be treated. People only leave the state of nature when they consent to take part in a community. [1]
  • According to Rousseau, humans in the state of nature are naturally good, and bad habits are the product of corrupting civilization;
• Views which see humans as morally neutral:
  • According to Pelagius, humans in the state of nature are not tainted by original sin, but are instead fully capable of choosing good or evil.
  • According to social determinism and biological determinism, human behavior is determined by biological and social factors, so they are neither truly to blame for actions generally considered "bad" nor truly credited with actions generally considered "good."
• Views which see humans as inherently bad:
  • According to Hobbes, humans in the state of nature are inherently in a "war of all against all," and life in that state is ultimately "nasty, brutish, and short." To Hobbes, this state of nature is remedied by good government.
  • According to Original sin, humans in the state of nature are tarnished by the sin of Adam, and can only be redeemed by the grace of God;
  • According to Bertrand Russell moral evil or sin is derived from the instincts that have been transmitted to us from our ancestry of beasts of prey. This ancestry originated when certain animals became omnivorous and employed predation (killing and thievery) in order periodically to ingurgitate the flesh as well as the fruit and produce of other once-living things to support metabolism in competiton with other animals for scarce food-animal and food-plant sources in the predatory environment in which we evolved. Thus, the simple fact that we humans must eat other life or else starve, die and rot is the probable primordial origin of contemporary and historical moral evil; i.e., the bad things we do to each other by lying, cheating, slandering, thieving and slaughtering.

John Locke John Locke (August 29, 1632–October 28, 1704) was a 17th-century philosopher concerned primarily with society and epistemology. ... Rousseau is a French surname. ... For other people called Pelagius, see Pelagius (disambiguation) Pelagius was a British monk who lived from approximately 360 to 435 [1]. Background A preacher, Pelagius visited Rome, and became concerned about the moral laxity of society he saw there. ... Original sin is the doctrine, shared in one form or another by most Christian churches, that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (called the Fall), changed or damaged human nature, such that all human beings since then are innately predisposed to sin, and are powerless... Social determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone determine individual behavior (as opposed to biological or objective factors). ... Categories: Biology stubs ... This article is about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. ... Original sin is the doctrine, shared in one form or another by most Christian churches, that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (called the Fall), changed or damaged human nature, such that all human beings since then are innately predisposed to sin, and are powerless... Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM (18 May 1872–2 February 1970) was an influential British mathematician, philosopher, and logician, working mostly in the 20th century. ...

Morality

There are a number of views regarding the origin and nature of human morality Morality in the strictest sense of the word, deals with that which is universally regarded as right or wrong. ...

• Moral realism or Moral objectivism holds that moral codes exist outside of human opinion -- that certain things are right or wrong regardless of human opinion on the topic. Objective morality may be seen as stemming from the inherent nature of humanity, divine command, or both.
• Moral relativism holds that moral codes are a function of human values and social structures, and hold no meaning outside social convention.
• Moral absolutism is the view that certain acts are right or wrong regardless of context.
• Moral universalism compromises between moral relativism and moral absolutism and holds that there is, or should be, a common universal core of morality.

Moral realism is the philosophical doctrine that moral claims are cognitive claims that are at least sometimes true. ... Moral objectivism is the position that certain acts are objectively right or wrong, independent of human opinion. ... Moral relativism is the position that moral propositions do not reflect absolute or universal truths. ... Moral absolutism is the position that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, regardless of the context of the act. ... Moral universalism is a humanist view that claims that the fundamental basis for a universalist ethic—universally applicable to all humanity—can be derived or inferred from what is common among existing moral codes. ...

Purpose

• Materialism and philosophical naturalism hold that there is no external purpose to human life. Proponents of this view often adopt the philosophy of secular humanism.
• Teleology holds that there is inherent purpose to human existence. This purpose may arise from the inherent nature of humanity itself (what a human is "supposed to be," as in the case of objectivist philosophy), from mankind's relationship to the divine (what God wants humanity to be, as in the case of religion), or from both (as when the divine commands are seen as being in accord with the inherent nature of humanity and humanity's best interests)

Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are comprised of material. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by... Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that reject the validity of explanations or theories making use of entities inaccessible to natural science. ... Secular humanism is that branch of philosophy that advocates the use of reason, compassion, scientific inquiry, ethics, justice and equality in addressing issues of a worldview centred upon human beings. ... Teleology is the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose. ... Objectivism is the philosophy of Russian-born American philosopher and author Ayn Rand. ... The concept of the divine or of The Divine, meaning matters relating to a god, forms an important ingredient in many religious faiths (but compare Buddhism, for example, or Scientology). ...

Psychology and biology

A long standing question in philosophy and science is whether there exists an invariant human nature. For those who believe there is a human nature, further questions include:

• What determines/constrains human nature?
• To what extent is human nature malleable?
• How does it vary between people and populations?

Since human behavior is diverse, it can be difficult to find absolutely invariant human behaviors that are of interest to philosophers. A lesser (but still scientifically valid) standard for evidence pertaining to "human nature" is used by scientists who study behavior. Biologists look for evidence of genetic predisposition to behavioral patterns. Genetic predispositions can be influenced by the environment, so penetrance of genetically predisposed behavioral traits is not expected to reach 100 percent. A type of human behavior for which there is a strong genetic predisposition can be considered to be part of human nature. In other words, human nature is not seen as something that forces individuals to behave in a certain way, but as something that makes individuals more inclined to act in a certain way than in another. Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour considered as a branch of zoology. ... A genetic predisposition is a genetic effect which influences the phenotype of an organism but which can be modified by the environmental conditions. ... Penetrance is a term used in genetics that describes the extent to which the properties controlled by a gene, its phenotype, will be expressed. ...

Tabula rasa

John Locke's philosophy of empiricism saw human nature as a tabula rasa. In this view, the mind is at birth a "blank slate" without rules, and data is added and rules for processing it are formed solely by our sensory experiences. John Locke John Locke (August 29, 1632–October 28, 1704) was a 17th-century philosopher concerned primarily with society and epistemology. ... Empiricism (greek εμπειρισμός, from empirical, latin experientia - the experience) is generally regarded as being at the heart of the modern scientific method, that our theories should be based on our observations of the world rather than on intuition or faith; that is, empirical research and a posteriori inductive reasoning rather than... Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet, though often translated blank slate) is the notion that individual human beings are born blank (with no built-in mental content), and that their identity is defined entirely by events after birth. ...

An alternative view is seen in E. O. Wilson's sociobiology and the closely related theory of evolutionary psychology. E.O. Wilson with Dynastes hercules E. O. Wilson, or Edward Osborne Wilson, (born June 10, 1929) is an entomologist and biologist known for his work on ecology, evolution, and sociobiology. ... Sociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines that attempts to explain behavior in all species by considering the evolutionary advantages of social behaviors. ... Evolutionary psychology (or EP) proposes that human and primate cognition and behavior can be better understood in light of human and primate evolutionary history. ...

Behavioral genetics

The nature vs nurture debate. Behavioral genetics This article needs cleanup, so as to conform to a higher standard. ... Behavioural genetics (behavioral genetics) is the field of biology that studies the role of genetics in animal behaviour. ...

Human diversity

Population genetics Population genetics is the study of the distribution of and change in allele frequencies under the influence of the five evolutionary forces: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, migration and nonrandom mating. ...

Arguments for invariance

All individuals and all societies have a similar facial grammar. Everyone smiles the same, and the way we use our eyes to convey cognition or flirtatiousness is the same. Evaluations of facial attractiveness are consistent across races and cultures with a preference for symmetry and proportion which are explained by scientists as markers of health during physical development attributable to good genes or a good environment. Human females find male faces that are rated more masculine and less caring, more attractive during the part of their menstrual cycle when they are most fertile. In utero exposure to testosterone (normal for the male fetus) alters brain development toward greater spatial and mathematical potential, greater physical roughhousing during childhood play, and to find females attractive once puberty is attained. Female brain development with its emphasis on verbal fluency is the default, absent exposure to testosterone. The phrase menstrual cycle ( or period) refers to the recurring physiological changes in a females body that are under the control of the reproductive hormone system and necessary for reproduction. ...

No success has ever been scientifically demonstrated in re-assigning an individual's handedness. Although individuals may change their external behavior (picking up scissors with their right hand instead of the left, for instance), their internal inclination never changes. Even people who lose a limb, who physically do not possess the ability to pick up scissors with their left hand, will try to do so if they are 'left handed.' The percentage of left-handers in all cultures at all times remains constant (because left-handedness is a recessive trait). It has been suggested that Left handedness be merged into this article or section. ... Different types of scissors - sewing, kitchen, paper Scissors are a tool used for cutting thin material which requires little force. ... A limb (from the Old English lim) is a jointed appendage of the human or animal body; a large or main branch of a tree; a representative, branch or member of a group or organization. ... In genetics, the term recessive gene refers to an allele that causes a phenotype (visible or detectable characteristic) that is only seen in a homozygous genotype (an organism that has two copies of the same allele). ...

Newborn babies, far too young to have been acculturated to do so, have measurable behaviors such as being more attracted to human faces than other shapes and having a preference for their mother's voice over any other voice. Pocahontas, in England, as Mrs John Rolfe, 1616: engraving after Simon Van de Passe Acculturation is the obtainment of culture by an individual or a group of people. ...

Arguments for social malleability

The Duke of Wellington is said to have become indignant upon hearing someone refer to habit as "second nature." He replied, "It is ten times nature!" The Most Noble Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, GCB, PC, FRS (1 May 1769–14 September 1852) was an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, widely considered one of the leading military and political figures of the 19th century. ... A habit is the usual condition or state of a person or thing, either natural or acquired, regarded as something had, possessed, and firmly retained. ...

William James likewise referred to habit as the fly-wheel of society. Habits, though, are by definition acquired, and different habits will be both the effect and the cause of very different societies. William James William James (January 11, 1842, New York - August 26, 1910, Chocorua, New Hampshire). ... A flywheel is a heavy rotating disk used as a repository for angular momentum. ... ...

Different human societies have held very different moral codes. Thus, regardless of whether objective morality exists or not, humans are clearly capable of imposing a wide variety of different moral codes on themselves.

Some have argued that the role for nurture comes not from the absence of innate impulses in human nature, but from the plethora of such impulses -- so many, and so contradictory, that nurture must sort them out and put them into a hierarchy. Innate is an adjective meaning inborn (possessed at birth) or inherent. ... In classical mechanics, an impulse changes the momentum of an object, and has the same units and dimensions as momentum. ... A hierarchy (in Greek hieros, sacred, and arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things. ...

Identical twins have identical genes, and therefore identical innate behavior. If all behavior were innate, one would expect identical twins to behave in perfectly identical ways all the time. However, this is clearly not the case. In particular, twins who grew up separated (and in different environments) show the greatest differences in behavior. Fraternal twin boys in the tub The term twin most notably refers to two individuals (or one of two individuals) who have shared the same uterus (womb) and usually, but not necessarily, born on the same day. ...

There is no single universal law of behavior that holds true for all human beings. There are many such laws that apply to the majority of individuals (for example, the majority of individuals try to avoid dying), but there are always exceptions (some individuals commit suicide). Most animals, including humans, have an innate self-preservation instinct (fear of injury and death). The fact that humans may override this basic instinct is seen as evidence that human nature is subordinate to the human mind, and/or various outside factors. The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David, 1787 Suicide (from Latin sui caedere, to kill oneself) is the act of willfully ending ones own life; it is sometimes a noun for one who has committed or attempted the act. ...

Finally, it has been noted that recent advancements in biology have opened the door to genetic manipulation. This means that we will soon have the possibility of altering our genes and therefore changing the instincts that are coded in those genes. Main articles: Life All organisms (viruses not included) consist of cells, which in turn, are based on a common carbon-based biochemistry. ... Genetic engineering, genetic modification (GM), and gene splicing (once in widespread use but now deprecated) are terms for the process of manipulating genes in an organism, usually outside of the organisms normal reproductive process. ...

Influential views of human nature

As a general rule, any -ism important enough to be both defended and attacked, probably states or implies a distinctive view about human nature. Platonism, Marxism and Freudianism may serve as examples of this rule. Platonic idealism is the theory that the substantive reality around us is only a reflection of a higher truth. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... Sigmund Freud His famous couch Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior. ...

Plato took a conception of reason and the examined life that he learnt from Socrates and built both a metaphysics and, more to our point, an anthropology around it. There was an intellectual soul, resident in the human head, and there was a appetitive beast, resident in the belly and genitals. The duty of the former is to keep the latter tamed and, in time, to welcome death as an escape from this uncomfortable co-habitation. PLATO, an apronym for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operation, was one of the first generalized Computer assisted instruction systems, originally built by the University of Illinois (U of I) and later taken over by Control Data (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. ... In philosophy, reason or rationality (adjective can be either rational or reasonable, each giving a slightly different meaning, and both of which are also related to the word logical) describes a type of thought or aspect of thought, especially abstract thought, which is felt to be especially human. ... Socrates This article is about the ancient Greek philosopher, for all other uses see: Socrates (disambiguation) Socrates (June 4, ca. ... // Metaphysics (Greek words meta = after/beyond and physics = nature) is a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of first principles and being (ontology). ... Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος = human) consists of the study of humankind (see genus Homo). ... Intelligence is a general mental capability that involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. ... The soul according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance — spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) — particular to a unique living being. ... For other uses of the word head, see head (disambiguation). ... The appetite is the desire to eat food, felt as hunger. ... Template:In progress The human abdomen (from the Latin word meaning belly) is the part of the body between the pelvis and the thorax. ... A sex organ, or primary sexual characteristic, narrowly defined, is any of those parts of the body (which are not always bodily organs according to the strict definition) which are involved in sexual reproduction and constitute the reproductive system in an complex organism; namely: Male: penis (notably the glans penis... Tame can mean several things: One of the two River Tames in England: The River Tame (Yorkshire) The River Tame (West Midlands) The town of Tame, Colombia The act of domesticating wild animals This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the... In Western culture, skeletons are often the symbol of death. ... Cohabitation is a situation in a semi_presidential system of government, in which the President and Prime Minister are of different political parties. ...

In one disguise or another, Plato's dualism was immensely influential. It insinuated itself deeply into Christian theology — a process that began, perhaps, as early as the Gospel of John. Descartes' famous contrast between the soul that thinks and the body that is extended is a distinctive take on Plato, as is Kant's contrast between the noumenal and the phenomenal aspects of human nature. The term dualism is the state of being dual, or having a two fold division. ... Theology is reasoned discourse concerning God (Greek θεος, theos, God, + λογος, logos, word or reason). It also refers to the study of other religious topics. ... The Gospel of John is the fourth gospel in the sequence of the canon as printed in the New Testament, and scholars agree it was the fourth to be written. ... René Descartes René Descartes (IPA: , March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), also known as Cartesius, worked as a philosopher and mathematician. ... Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 – February 12, 1804) was a Prussian philosopher, generally regarded as one of Europes most influential thinkers and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment. ...

What all these views have in common is the following structure: "there exists an invariant human nature, and my theory discloses it better than other theories." This structure does allow for progress in history — because coming to know ourselves better is progress. But human nature itself, as the object of that knowledge, is considered a constant. Indeed, in Kantianism, human nature in the really-real sense can't be said to change because change requires time, and time is a feature only of the less-real, phenomenal, world. Progress can refer to: The idea of a process in which societies or individuals become better or more modern (technologically and/or socially). ... Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. ... 8:17 am, August 6, 1945, Japanese time. ...

Hegel represents an important break with this Platonic hegemony. Building on his concept of the dialectic, everything is, so to speak, up for grabs: as humans come to know themselves better, the object of knowledge necessarily changes. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ... Broadly speaking, a dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική) is an exchange of propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a disagreement. ...

Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic, and with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history.” Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness.” The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is — social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, the main feature of human nature is adaptability. Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association, two of whose books in particular, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich Engels), laid the... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ...

"Human Nature" is often used as a counter argument to Marxism. However, it is not that Marxists entirely reject the concept of human nature, rather they contend that many of the behaviours exhibited by humans in Western capitalist societies - particularly excessive self-interest, and lack of social responsibility - are by no means fixed or innate.

In one sense, this position is as far from Plato as is possible. But in another sense, it comes back around to a Platonizing dualism, except that the beast and the mind aren’t at war within each human body, as Plato suspected — for Marxists, the beast is the past and its burdens, while the mind awaits in the future.

In this spirit, Marx once wrote that all of what we call history would be better seen as pre-history, and that once the abolition of social classes and communism are achieved, only then will the true history of the human race begin. This page is a candidate to be moved to Wiktionary. ... This article is about communism as a form of society and as a popular movement. ...

The Austrian school of economics, in the years around 1871–1940, developed its own views largely in opposition to Marx, and in opposition to a group of historicist scholars. In the process, they developed a distinctive view of human nature. The Austrian School is a school of economic thought which rejects opposing economists reliance on methods used in natural science for the study of human action, and instead bases its formalism of economics on relationships through logic or introspection called praxeology. ... 1871 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... 1940 was a leap year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... The Historical school of economics was a mainly German school of economic thought which held that a study of history was the key source of knowledge about human actions and economic matters, since economics would be culture-specific and not generalizable over space and time. ...

In structural terms, their view returned to that of the thinkers mentioned in this survey prior to Hegel. Like Descartes or Kant, these thinkers believed that there exists an invariant human nature, but that progress is possible in history through the more complete understanding of that nature. They conceived of human nature in terms of bounded rationality and of the pursuit of marginal utility, and they believed that the pursuit of this utility in the marketplace would create a condition of spontaneous order that will be more rational than any alternative that might be planned, given the bounded rationality of any possible planners. Many models of human behavior in the social sciences assume that humans can be reasonably approximated or described as rational entities, especially as conceived by rational choice theory. ... In economics, marginal utility is the additional utility (satisfaction or benefit) that a consumer derives from an additional unit of a commodity or service. ... Spontaneous order is a term that describes the spontaneous emergence of order out of a seemingly chaotic context, as the result of a (temporary or permanent) balance of forces, or some sort of natural selection process. ...

During the same period of time, Austria also hosted the development of psychoanalysis. Its founder, Sigmund Freud, believed that the Marxists were right to focus on what he called "the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes." But he thought that the Marxist view of the class struggle was a too shallow one, assigning to recent centuries conflicts that were, rather, primordial. Behind the class struggle, according to Freud, there stands the struggle between father and son, between established clan leader and rebellious challenger. In this spirit, Freud heavily criticized the Soviet Union, writing in 1932 that its leaders had made themselves "inaccessible to doubt, without feeling for the suffering of others if they stand in the way of their intentions." Psychoanalysis is a family of psychological theories and methods that work to elucidate connections among unconscious components of patients mental processes, and to do so in a systematic way through a process of tracing out associations. ... Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939) was an Austrian psychiatrist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior. ... 1932 is a leap year starting on a Friday. ...

Compare with:

• tabula rasa
• human condition

Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet, though often translated blank slate) is the notion that individual human beings are born blank (with no built-in mental content), and that their identity is defined entirely by events after birth. ... The human condition is a term which encompasses the totality of the experience of being human and living human lives. ...

External reference

• http://www.human-nature.com
• 1986 Seville Statement on Violence -- http://www.unesco.org/shs/human_rights/hrfv.htm
• Introduction and Updated Information on the Seville Statement on Violence -- http://www.culture-of-peace.info/ssov-intro.html
• Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT 1998).
• [2] - Newcastle University debate on Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate