I

Since the question, "Is there such a thing as human nature?" continues to be posed, and to be answered by some in the negative, it seems necessary to being by exploring the meaning of this question and showing why it cannot, in any meaningful form, have any but an affirmative answer. The question raises doubts about whether aspects of the human condition can be considered inevitable outcomes of biological elements in the human makeup. In extreme forms, such doubts are dubious. If I assert that it is human nature to require a diet supplying eight essential amino acids, to walk bipedally, and to speak a language containing nouns and verbs, there are only a few ways to question the validity of the claim.

For example, it is possible to point to a small number of individuals who, from birth onward, are poisoned by an amino acid essential to all others, or who are never able to walk or speack, but these observations—which might be called the "rare-defect objection"—do not detract from the power of the generalizations. Second, and somewhat more interesting, it is easy to show that great variability exists in the way these generalizations are fulfilled by individuals and groups and that most of this variability is due to cultural or environmental causes. But these observations, the "cross-cultural objection," do not address the point that there is, in each of the systems in question, a core of features that do not vary. Third, there is the "freedom-of-will" objections: some individuals perfectly capable of walking will choose never to do so, while others may learn to walk faster or more gracefully than anyone in the world, or even to walk on their hands.

There are several answers to this objection, but two are decisive. First,

such freedom of will exists, but the rarity with which it is exercised, at least at the extremes of the distribution of behavior, is not irrelevant to the question at hand. This answer resembles the reply to the rare-defect objection but is directed to motivation rather than capability, and it implies that motivations as well as capabilities may be legitimately included in the definitional sphere of human nature, a point to which we will return.

Second, within the definable but admittedly broad band of variation in patterns of walking resulting fromt he exercise of freedom of will, it is possible to show lawful relations between human choices and physiological outcomes. After the choice has been exercised—for a given daily amount of walking, say—there follow predictable consequences for the structure and function of muscle, bone, and the cardiopulmonary organs. These, in turn, have consequences for behavioral capability, health, and life span. The laws relating the precise specturm of choices to the predictable outcomes are also part of what is meant by human nature. (Here perhaps a counterobjection will be raised: "But that is just what I mean. Human behavior is flexible, so much so that biology itself is under the sway of human choices." Of course it is; but predictably so, and with thresholds and limits provided by human nature—by the genes—and not by human choices. Biological concepts such as facultative adaptation, range of reaction, and bounded learning, among others, have been developed to describe parallel phenomena in nonhuman species.)

Finally, the "so-waht objection" holds that the sorts of characteristics legitimately subsumed under the rubric of human nature are trivial and uninteresting. "Of course everybody can walk; so what? It's the variations that are interesting." It might be pointed out that every person who can walk exhibits a relatively stereotyped heel-toe progression with synchronized alternate arm swinging, reflecting a very complex wired-in coordinating pattern involving many millions of neurons. Or that every child assumes the ability to walk within a narrowly defined age period because of the maturation of certain parts of the nervous system, the growth of which are under genetic control. But then each successive complexity pointed out becomes subsumed under the ho-hum or sowhat rubric, so that as soon as it is shown to be biologically determined, it will be deemed uninteresting. "That's not what I mean by human nature" will retreat to encompass only that which has not yet been given a biological basis.

Of course, what most of us mean by human nature is not primarily the dependence on certain nutrients or the ability to walk and talk but the condition of being subject to certain patterns of motivation that seem to constrain human freedom, and to this extent, the so-what objection really does apply to the characteristics we have considered so

far. I will insist int he end that human nature fairly includes, in fact must include, certain characteristically human—that is, genetically coded, wired-in—perceptions, cognitions, competencies, response systems, and motor action patterns as well as motivations. Indeed, it is doubtful whether motivation can meaningfully be defined so as to exclude such other psychological characteristics. But it is necessary at this point for us to leave the safe realms of amino acids and coordinated locomotion for the more treacherous realms of love, fear, sacrifice, selfishness, lust, and violence, which come most readily to the mind when the concept of human nature is invoked, and to establish the extent to which these realms are subject to the kinds of arguments applicable in the safer ones.

To do this properly requires a series of intellectual strategies directed at exploring the phylogenetic origins of the pattern; the evolutionary, principally selective forces that have operated and continue to operate on it; the cross-cultura and other variability in it (or lack thereof) and the lawful relationships between the variability and variations in the environment that might be expected to influence it; the immediate physiological antecedents of the pattern; the sequence of development of the pattern, including both the maturational and environmental components; and the genetics of the pattern, as explored through both classical Mendelian methods and the methods of molecular and developmental genetics.

Each of these intellectual strategies has progressed so far in the last two decades as to render suspect any opinion on human nature that does not give clear evidence of having kept abreast of their progress. It is not possible here to review their implications even in relation to one of the motivational patterns of interest. However, it is possible to touch on some of the highlights relevant both to human motivation in general and to a legitimate concept of human nature (Konner 1982b ).