Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (Eds) Why we disagree about human nature. Oxford University Press, 2018. 206 pp. £30 hbk.

By Simon Jarrett

If one day a disturbingly precocious child were to ask what part you had played in the nature/ nurture war, what would you reply? Were you with the massed intellectual ranks who, since the philosopher David Hull’s ground-breaking 1986 classic ‘On Human Nature,’ have denied that there is any such thing as a common nature for all humans? Or did you join Stephen Pinker’s 2003 counter-revolution, when The Blank Slate sought to reclaim the ground for the Enlightenment, and the idea that there is something essentially the same about all humans across time, space and culture?

If you are not quite sure where you stand, or perhaps too sure where you stand, then this pleasingly eclectic collection of ten essays on human nature, and whether we can meaningfully talk about such a thing, will be of great help. Its contributors, who come from psychology, philosophy of science, social and biological anthropology, evolutionary theory, and the study of animal cognition, include human nature advocates, deniers, and sceptics. We could perhaps call the sceptics ‘so-whaters’ – they agree there may be something we can attach the label ‘human nature’ to, but query whether it really matters, or carries any explanatory weight. These people would take our (hopefully apocryphal) infant prodigy aside and say, ‘well there are some conceptual complexities here that make it quite difficult to give you a straightforward answer.’

Human nature remains, alongside consciousness, one of the great explanatory gaps, a question that permeated philosophical enquiry in antiquity, lay at the heart of Enlightenment ‘science of Man’, and now forms a central anxiety of modernity.  The over-arching problem is, in essence, this: are there traits and characteristics that are biological, and not learned or culturally acquired, which we can say form something called the nature of the human, and which not only define humans as a unified entity but also differentiate them from all other species? In which case, what on earth are they? Or: are we essentially constructed by culture, our traits and characteristics formed by experience, language, learning and social relations, and once we strip away these veneers we find no inner essence that unites us a human species, no meaningful shared oneness other than what we have made ourselves? In which case, what on earth do we mean by ‘we’?

As Hannon and Lewens’ title suggests, we all disagree about human nature and – as the final chapter warns us – are probably destined always to do so, not least because of the term’s epistemological slipperiness. However, one thing on which the contributors find consensus is that the essentialist concept of human nature – ‘that to be human is to possess a crucial “human” gene, or a distinctively “human” form of… intelligence, language, technical facility, or whatever’ (pp.2-3) – is dead. The essentialist idea was killed by Charles Darwin, because if species variation occurs across time and space then there can be nothing invariable in their form and structure, and therefore nothing that we can call a fixed, universal and unchanging ‘nature’. If humankind has adapted, evolved and varied over millions of years, and across numerous environments, what common nature can exist amongst all humans, past and present?

The death of essentialism, however, does not mean the death of the idea of a human nature. Four essays that defend the idea begin the collection, starting with a defence by Edouard Machery of his much-assailed (including in this book) ‘nomological notion’. By this Machery means identifying typicality in human beings, traits that are common to most humans, but which do not have to be universal, and do not even have to hold evolutionary significance. He includes only traits that are demonstrably biologically evolved, and excludes cultural processes, on the grounds that just because most people learn something, this does not become an essential trait of humanness. His theory falls far short of, and explicitly rejects, essentialism, but nevertheless argues that traits of groups of typical human beings, and of individual typical humans in particular life stages, constitute something we can call human nature: it is the properties that humans tend to possess as a result of evolution.

Grant Ramsey, in his contribution, calls Machery’s theory a ‘trait-bin’ account, which essentially assembles a series of typical traits and places them together into a single bin marked ‘human nature’ while assigning all other traits, cultural, environmental or whatever, to entirely separate bins. Ramsey proposes instead a ‘trait cluster’ account which, rather than assembling a collection of natural traits, captures the complex ways in which traits are related to each other, and the patterns created over life histories by their interactions. The sum of these patterns, seen as potential developmental trajectories at various stages of life, give us human nature. As Ramsey puts it: ‘trait cluster accounts hold that human nature lies not in which traits individual humans happen to have, but in the ways the traits are exhibited over human life histories’ (p.56). This is more encompassing than Machery’s account, which excludes atypical traits, but maintains that there is a nature to be derived from an exploration of all traits and their interactions.

Karola Stotz and Paul Griffiths offer a ‘developmental systems account’ which echoes Ramsey’s but argues for the adoption of the human developmental environment into an account of human nature. They use the idea of ‘niche construction’ – whereby organisms singly and collectively modify their own niches to transform natural selection pressures – to argue that there is a uniquely human developmental niche. This is the environment created for human infants comprising parental interaction, schooling and artefacts such as tool use and language. In this sense nature is culture, and humans create the selection pressures that act on future generations. Human nature is human development, environment is as important as any biological or genomic essence.

The final advocate of a specific human nature is Cecilia Heyes, who echoes Machery in believing that there are certain traits that comprise human nature, but builds into this a theory of what she calls ‘evolutionary causal essentialism’, a key element of which is ‘natural pedagogy’. This sees the teaching of human infants not as an exclusively cultural phenomenon, but as a heritable system whereby nature makes human infants receptive to teaching signals.

The reply of the sceptics to the notion of a ‘human nature’ begins with John Dupré’s ‘process perspective’, which argues that a human cannot be considered as a thing or substance (and therefore something which has a nature) but is rather a process. Humans comprise a life cycle, and are associated with different properties or traits at its different stages. In their very early stages, for example, and often in their latest stages, humans lack language. We cannot, therefore, associate humans with a fixed set of properties; they are instead a plastic process responding to changing environments, and sometimes changing those environments themselves. We could, if we like, call this process itself ‘human nature’ but such a ‘descriptive venture’ would carry little conceptual weight.

Kim Stereny’s ‘Sceptical reflections on human nature’ argues, in similar vein, that even if there is some set of traits shared by most humans – what he calls a ‘cognitive suite’ – describing these as human nature is ‘bland and uninformative’ and lacks any explanatory power. Such a descriptive account of human nature is little more than a ‘field-guide’ to our species – in which case, Serelny asks, do we need it?

Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown recommend that the concept of human nature simply be abandoned. It is, they argue, socially constructed in a number of ways. Evolutionary history is not easily separated into biological and cultural evolutionary processes, since each is dynamic and interacts with the other. Like Stotz and Griffiths they recognise the uniqueness and importance of the developmental niche in the human process, but see it as product of inseparable internal and constructive processes which cannot be incorporated into a theory of an evolved nature. More important is to build an understanding of the human condition over developmental and evolutionary timescales, in all its diversity and multiple processes.

Peter Richerson’s survey of major theorists from Darwin to Pinker rejects any form of strong human nature claim. The later theorists, he notes, all have a strong commitment to the ‘Modern Synthesis’ – a term popularised by Julian Huxley in 1942 – which, in very simple terms, seeks to combine evolution and heredity. For Richerson, the Modern Synthesis account of human nature, with its rejection of the fundamental role of cultural evolutionary processes against overwhelming evidence, has reached the end of the line.

Christina Toren weighs in with an anthropological broadside against the notion that some traits are products of nature rather than culture. Based on her own ethnographic studies, she calls for the rejection of notions of both nature and culture, and calls instead for a focus on ontogeny – the development of the human organism over its life cycle, and within its environments and social relations. Toren’s model focuses on the microhistorical processes that build each individual: ‘mind is a function of the whole person that is constituted over time in intersubjective relations with others in the environing world.’ No ‘nature’ can capture such complexity.

The collection ends with Maria Kronfelder’s elegant interrogation of the term ‘nature’, and the power relations lurking within its appropriation by intellectuals seeking to lay out a domain of study they can claim as their own. This welcome historicization of the subject begins in Greek antiquity and journeys through the Enlightenment, to the advent of heredity (which, Kronfelder notes, shifted from the adjective ‘hereditary’ to a nominal noun defining itself as a scientific field), and finally to Machery’s nomological account, where the book began. In each case the word ‘nature’ is used to denote a field-defining phenomenon in need of explanation – explanations which those using the term saw themselves as having the authority and capacity to produce. It was also used in contradistinction: to the supranatural, to nurture, to culture, and to other enemies which the ‘nature’ power claim could dismiss as irrelevant. Nature, in these claims, was ‘always what could be taken for granted… solid, authoritative’ and carrying some form of objective reality (p.202).

It falls to Kronfelder to explain why ‘we’ disagree, and will probably always disagree, about human nature. Firstly, when talking about our own nature, we fall into what she calls ‘essentialist traps’ involving normalcy and normativity, that we do not apply when more carefully describing other species. Secondly, we have traditionally tried to identify ‘what it means to be human’, which has led us to apply to human nature a description of what characterises our in-group, consequently dehumanising out-groups by placing them outside human signifiers. In this context, different human groups will always disagree about what it means to be human, and thus about human nature. Finally, we load the term ‘human nature’ with too many contradictory and incompatible meanings. Do we want it to be a description of a bundle of properties, a set of explanatory factors, or a boundary-determining classification? It can never be all three, but precisely which epistemological duty it is being asked to perform at any one time in any one context is often obfuscated. We will never agree, because we are arguing from parallel starting points that are invisible to one another.

At the heart of the human nature debate lies, since the collapse of the essentialist view, not only the issue of whether there is such a thing, but also whether such a thing is worth thinking about. If the account of human nature spreads so widely, becoming the set of genetic, epigenetic and environmental traits that we can observe in humans, then does it just become a conceptual mush, consisting of everything that humans ever do or experience? If purely descriptive, then does it lack any explanatory power, thereby rendering it conceptually worthless?  Or is there something about our nature that binds us, and is worth knowing? This is a defining issue for those who practice or study the human sciences, which after all is the study of humans from diverse perspectives. The collection is a hugely helpful trek across much of the best of the current scholarship, and an elegant framing of the key debates, for which the editors should be congratulated.

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Simon Jarrett is a visiting lecturer and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. His monograph on the history of ‘idiocy’ will be published in 2020. With Jan Walmsley, he is co-editor of Intellectual disability in the twentieth century: transnational perspectives on people policy and practice. (Policy Press 2019). His current research is on theories of consciousness in relation to the deficient mind.