Yes, There’s Something Called Human Nature

The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has made a solid career for himself promoting the popular idea that — like other all animals on earth — we humans have an identifiable “nature,” a way of dealing with the world that is uniquely our own as a species. Exactly why this should be true is often left far from obvious.

Sometimes the explanations offered are as vague and unsatisfying as “that’s just how we have been made to act,” or “it’s how our genes tell us to behave.” Alternatively, the claims are at times highly specific, as in the enduring prejudicial notions that there must be genes for behavior we ourselves may find repulsive such as homosexuality, cross-dressing, or favoring Heinz Ketchup over French's Dijon Mustard lavishly applied to an American hot dog encased in a partially split bun.

The obvious counterclaim, of course, is the belief that there isn’t anything universal about how we humans deal with the world and one another that can legitimately be called human nature.

Anthropologists, in particular, and other sorts of social scientists, too, are often ridiculed by evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists (Pinker is not the only one) for blindly denying that biology (nowadays specifically “our genes”) has anything to do with how all of us behave as human beings.

However, what is commonly labeled as the "nature vs. nurture" debate is more smoke than fire, indeed a fine example of folks talking past one another. A decade ago the late physical anthropologist Robert Sussman succinctly said what needs to be said whenever this old debate gets resurrected: “Is there something we can call human nature? Of course there is. Humans generally behave more like each other than they do like chimpanzees or gorillas.”

Granting, therefore, that there is something we can call human nature, what is it? Probably not what you have been told it is.

Our defining ways and means

Biologists rightly insistent that our species—like all species—is the product of natural circumstances and events, not supernatural ones. Whatever talents or special characteristics we possess are not simply God-given. Our defining ways, our defining abilities or capacities, to do some things astonishingly well (arguing about the U.S. presidential election in November, say), other things perhaps not as well (leaping tall buildings in a single bound, say), and a great many things scarcely not at all (such as flying without artificial means)—came about over the course of countless generations due to entirely down-to-earth natural causes and events.

What is key here (which is why I made them bold above) are the words abilities and capacities. As my son Gabriel and I discuss in a book we just wrote together about the human mind, and as I will be exploring further in this series of posts called Being Human 101, “human nature” does not have to mean what everyone everywhere on Earth does and must do to deserve being called human. Instead, the challenge of understanding what is human nature lies in understanding how evolution (or God, if that is how you see things) has made it possible for us to do some things well, some things not so well, and other things not at all.

Source: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

The Great Human High Five Advantage

Seen from this perspective, Gabe and I think there are at least five things setting us off as a species. Importantly, it is the combination of these characteristics, not any one of them alone, that sets us apart as a species, and has enabled us to evolve to be the creatures we are today. This is why we call them The Great Human High-Five Advantage.

What are these characteristics? We like to use the fingers on our right hands to keep them sorted out in our own minds. I will do so here, too. In this single blog post, however, I only have the space to describe them briefly. Each will be discussed at greater length in later posts in this series at Psychology Today.

• Pinky — obligate social nurturance — our willingness and desire to care for our young. If we weren’t prepared to do so, our offspring would not make it past the first days of their lives.
• Ring finger — obligate social learning — our willingness to teach and learn from others of our kind. This finger stands for how dependent we all are on what we learn about life from others of our kind, and indirectly from the generations of human beings who lived before us.
• Middle finger — our social networks — our networking skills extending the richness and diversity of our social, emotional, and practical resources. We are a highly social species that flourishes best when we are linked far and wide with others in productive and enduring social networks.
• Index finger — fantasy and imagination — our inner fantasy lives that may well be what is most distinctive about our species. This finger represents our species’ highly advanced powers of fantasy, imagination, and creativity.
• Thumb — social collaboration — our talent for combining individual fantasies with productive social participation. The kind of creativity that does make a difference in the real world of give-and-take is dependent on our evolved human capacity to work more or less well with others to get things done.

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Is being clever also being wise?

The 19th century composer Frédéric Chopin wrote beautiful études — musical compositions — cleverly designed to exercise all five fingers of a pianist’s hand. Clearly all of the fingers in the Great Human High-Five as we have defined them help make us unquestionably clever animals. Do they also make us wise?

According to conventional wisdom when Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century labeled us as Homo sapiens, he was acknowledging that what makes us special is that we are sapiens, wise. This isn’t true. At first Linnaeus classified us in his masterful Systema Naturae simply as Homo without any second term pinning us down more specifically. He only added the word sapiens in 1758 in the 10th edition of this influential classification of life on earth. Before then, he had simply coupled the word Homo with the side remark nosce te ipsum, words in Latin meaning “know thyself.” Even after adding sapiens, he apparently was still only implying that what distinguishes us from other species is our ability to see ourselves as human.

Whether there is wisdom in our being able to so is another matter altogether.

Next up – Being Human 101: No, language is not what makes us special