The first is "human nature," or the nature of human nature, or the nature of human nature in nature (sorry, I couldn't resist). Both explanations of human actions in past crises and guesses about responses to future crises are often based on what the author imagines human nature to be.

That is about the dumbest damn thing I have ever heard of. Yes, some people do imagine what they think human nature is. But no academic in his right mind would leave such an important concept purely to his imagination. Do you, or anyone else, think astronomers "imagine" what the heavens look like, or do they look through their telescope and study photographs of the stars and galaxies instead? Do geologists "imagine" what the earth's strata looks like or do dig and study instead. Likewise evolutionary psychologists do not leave the study of human nature up to their "imagination". Years of study by hundreds of psychologists give us an ever-widening window upon human nature. Yes, in the past, many anthropologists have stated that humans were a blank slate, that all violence, jealousy, aggressive behavior, and even infidelity was a learned behavior. But studies of present and ancient hunter-gather societies have proved otherwise. And studies of identical twins raised apart have shown that many aspects of personality are innate.

Are we inherently evil and self-centered, willing to steal from our neighbors just to stay alive, or are we good, or at least smart enough to solve the Prisoner's Dilemma without many iterations, working together to our common benefit?

As if it were either one way or the other? It is not! Most of us would be one way in certain circumstances and another way in another set of circumstances. But how you and I would behave is not the question. The question is how would the mass of humankind behave?

I personally stand with Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, on this question: we have a nature capable of both selfishness and altruism, and what we manifest is based on what the environmental context encourages.

Of course we do. We see both selfishness and altruism in human society. Therefore it would be the height of stupidity to say that we were not capable of both. And Quinn is exactly correct when he says we are capable of both depending on what the environmental context encourages. That is the crux of the whole damn argument! That is innate characteristics are triggered by environmental circumstances and events. One of the very best books ever written on this subject makes this very point, "Nature via Nurture" by Matt Ridley.

In any event, assuming human nature is one way or the other determines how we imagine the future.

Damn! That entire statemt is a total contridiction of the previous statement by Quinn! Human nature is never one way or the other. It can be either way, depending upon environmental circumstances. Environmental circumstances trigger this or that type of behavior. You may not think you are capable of stealing. But if your child was starving, with tear filled pleading eyes he begs you for food. Would you steal a morsel of food to feed him? I would and I believe anyone who says he would not is either a liar or a psychopath.

That is an obvious example. Let me give you an example form the past. When the word swept across America that the Atomic Bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and tens of thousands of men, women and children had their lives sniffed out in an instant, thousands of Americans jumped and cheered. Children in classrooms along with their teachers cheered. And I would lay odds if you had been a child or teacher in that day, you would have done the same. You see, the context was entirely different. We had been attacked by the hated Japs! The hated enemy was killing thousands of our young men daily. They were not thought of as fellow human beings and they did not think of us as fellow human beings. We were both the hated enemy to each other. Living under different circumstances for many years simply changed our way of thinking concerning the entire Japanese people.

We are all egalitarians today. The global community has led us to the insight that people everywhere are basically the same. But it is the height of naïveté to think that we would have behaved in the past any different than our ancestors did, or that we will behave any different in the future if we were faced with what we perceived to be a hated enemy. The behavior of Homo sapiens is determined by two things, our genetic makeup and the environmentsl circumstances we find ourselves living in.

Ron Patterson

For more than 50 years sane voices have called for an end to the debate. Nature versus nurture has been declared everything from dead and finished to futile and wrong--a false dichotomy,. Everybody with an ounce of common sense knows that human beings are a product of a transaction between the two.
Matt Ridley: Nature via Nurture