Human nature is an excuse people use to justify their own behavior and to place a label on something they don't understand.

If you wish to talk about human nature, you can relate it to human needs. From the time we are born we need clean air, clean water, nourishing food. As an infant we need someone to take care of our health and well being physically and emotionally so we may survive long enough to be able to take care of our self's. To provide nourishing food we also need access to arable land. We need shelter to survive extreme temperatures in turn avoiding associated illnesses. These needs are basic to every human on the planet.

It is when these needs are not provided fairly or in adequate amounts that you get certain traits that you wouldn't otherwise get. Less informed individuals tend to label this as"Human Nature." Professors of Neuroscience and Psychology refer to it as Human Behavior.

A popular myth is that human nature means we are naturally selfish, destructive, violent, egotistic, competitive, inconsiderate. That we are born this way, cursed to be "evil." We now know that this is owed to environment, for the critics, environment does not begin at birth, it begins as soon as you have an environment as a fetus. You are subject to mom's circulation, hormones, levels of nutrients. "Dutch hunger winter"fetuses who were in the 2nd or 3rd trimester, 50 years down the line were more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome and obesity. Their starving bodies at that stage of the pregnancy were programmed to become extremely stingy with sugars and fats in turn storing every bit of it. Mothers that were very stressed or abused during pregnancy had children that were predisposed to addictions of substances. Also the war time expecting mothers had children that had a higher rate of schizophrenia than others. There is a lot of evidence to support that prenatal effects have a major impact on the development of human beings.

This subject goes hand in hand with my previous post on free will, If you wish to understand how environment shapes behavior you have to observe how different groups of people around the world behave.

Popular belief is that man can think and/or reason. We have to take these two and attempt to understand what they are.

"Thinking is talking to yourself."- Jacque Fresco.

It is very hard to think outside of your culture unless you have been exposed to a different environment. If you were a child growing up in a witch hunting village, with a family of witch hunters, nothing in your environment that contradicts the idea with an argument that appeals to you. You will be a"good" witch hunting child. If you were born with a brain that had high quality tissue, sensors that operate according to the expected level, quality neurons, no significant amounts of neurotoxins and more neurotransmitters you would become an efficient witch hunter faster.

As we know, today there is no evidence to support the existence of witches, ever. Back in the day when witch hunting was popular, the deal was, if you found a witch you would get all her possessions. So if you were in any way an outcast, a misfit, the new one in the village with different values that went against the villages beliefs- you where primary suspect number 1.

Do you think those people went home feeling terrible, after catching and burning alive a fellow human being? No, they went home that night and slept really well - one less witch, and more property. They believed that the person was a witch, their leaders, influenced by their environment as well (brainwashed), would support this view. A lot of legends and stories of witches would be told around a fire and people would fear the thing called witch. If humans were capable of thinking (able to distinguish without external influences what is saner behavior) and/or reason (using"common sense.") we wouldn't allow leaders and culture to influence our behavior to the extent that we hurt our environment and fellow man.

The mind is a responding mechanism, it reacts to different stimuli. Associative memory helps us learn how to react with the environment.

Everything is learned from language all the way to behavior. You can not remember learning your behavior because it is like trying to remember the date and time you first spoke.The process was gradual, you first understood communication when you started crying as a baby and noticed your parents would come to you. So with the inability to formulate words, you kept this action pattern to the detriment of your parents sleep. Normally to have their attention- nappy change, milk, or plainly that you are awake and want some company. Yes some children cry more than others and sometimes for no obvious reason, but this has to do with the type of environment (as discussed in my free will post) the child endured as a fetus and still endures as an infant- namely a stressed environment. Stress for a child is not only angry adults but type and amount of nutrition, lack of affection and attention, unfavorable constant external noise (varies between individuals.)

To return back to the point of learning your language gradually, your parents taught you words like mama, papa, milk, kaka, pipi and so on. Eventually you came to say full sentences by listening to people talk around you, or reading to you, or listening to the television. All of this helped you learn communicate in your environment. This is exactly how gradual behavior is, subtle and unsubtle lessons you pick up as you grow up both relevant and irrelevant. Just as you speak the language of your culture, you also behave with the behavior of your culture.

This includes prejudice, bigotry - everything.

If you want to study human behavior, what you are actually studying is the reactions of humans in a given environment. One of the claims of the pseudoscience community is that behavior is caused by genetics, this is a very deterministic way of thinking, and is not backed up by any science as described on my free will post. The Pseudo-scientists say that you can't change this behavior and you shouldn't even try- because it is fixed, inevitable.

There is a very small amounts of diseases that are genetically determined but this is a predisposition from the genes, this is not the same as predetermination.

As an example schizophrenia, mental diseases, breast cancer and ADHD is NOT genetic at all, nothing like this is genetically programmed. Studies of suicide victims, found that if the suicide victim was abused as a child, this caused a genetic change in the brain when compared to people that were not. This is the activation and deactivation of certain genes. With people who had a predisposition to violence genetically, it was found that if they were not abused as children (or put in a certain environment which activated the "abnormal" gene) then they showed a lower tendency to be violent than the children who didn't have the gene.

People who are have been adopted(but not unique to them) have a higher tendency to have strong emotional upset if they perceive being rejected.(They cannot recall the separation, because it is stored in the implicit memory, but this implicit memory stores the emotional memories.) The strong addicts, have shown in most cases to be significantly abused as children or suffered severe emotional loss. What is stored in their memory is that of a world that is not safe, not helpful and caregivers are not to be trusted(doctors, nurses etc.) Also relationships are not safe enough to open up to vulnerably. They don't trust the world because of things they don't even recall.

Everybody has a common enemy called perceived scarcity. Jealousy, is scarcity driven. If someone has something you don't but want, you will be jealous/envious. Anything from affection, love, car, money to food and water, could develop this type of trait. Jealousy between partners is often caused by(but not limited to) having the illusion that this person is rare and hard to come by. This is owed to the fact that many people they have met in the past have displayed, for example, maximum 20 qualities that they liked out of 40 requirements. While this current person displays 30 qualities out of 40. This is perceived as a scarce person. The idea of losing this person is a horrible thought for the individual, because he/she would have to settle for the low 20's again. When they do lose them they get depressed, it is the expectation that the person would not leave them that made them depressed. Everyone seeks for the the "right person" but the right person mentally might not be the right person physically, or vice versa. Then we get angry and feel betrayed when our partner leaves us. The expectation that they would stay is what we get upset about.

Scarcity in money will make the person do whatever he needs to, to eat and/or feed his/her family. In a system which has automation replacing the worker, the worker is not moved to another department or sent back to school to learn a new skill. They are fired. Being fired leads to no or very low income (unemployment benefits/ minimum wage job) which in absence of any options this results in possible criminal activity. The person who will refuse to turn to this behavior is sometimes the person, who as a child stole and got caught in the majority of the times, which conditioned him/her to give up trying. In this case they say the person is moral, no, he/she just knows that he is bad at stealing which has been stored in his implicit memory and doesn't even know about it or has not been equipped with tools that help him/her steal more efficiently.This of course brings morality into question.

Are you moral for the fear of getting caught and/or punishment from the deity or authority? What if we didn't have punishment for action that are perceived as "immoral?" How would you behave? How would you reference your behavior?

It seems to me, that if you pledge your allegiance to the protection of the environment and all human beings (one and the same) then your values are based on a much more saner reference.

Society seems to pick and choose what they use from science and religion, normally the one that helps the leading group. Darwin spoke about the survival of the fittest in the context of how, for example, animals manage to survive. So predators who lived in an area with only fast running animals, the cheetah is more likely to survive than other slower predators. People took this and installed this in our society by saying the person who works harder, and is more vigorous will have a better life than the guy who is not as good at what he does. So our educational institutions and our workplace support competitive type behavior. This in turn brings out qualities of more selfishness, ego and inconsiderate behavior. If you consider every poor person, then when you go home and switch on your light, you won't have it, because you won't have enough to pay your own bills.

Therefore all moral rules and laws fail because the system is designed to make them fail. You cannot have a system that generates poverty and say "do not steal or do not kill." People will do whatever it takes to survive. In a time that we can generate abundance through a resource based economy as proposed by The Venus Project, there is no valid excuse to support this outdated monetary system any longer.

People say, "surely perversity is human nature," well turns out that primitive tribes in Tuamotu walked around nude. When the man climbed trees they would cover their genitals, so they don't get caught in the branches. Other than that they all walked around naked. In this primitive society, there was no raping of children, no raping of women or men. Everyone appreciated each other as beings. When they had sex they stroked the whole person not specific body parts. They didn't have fetishes like we do today. They didn't hang up pictures of naked people in their huts, they didn't sneak to have a look at girls bathing.

"On the Islands of Tuamotu, I found no evidence of tit men, ass men and so on. There was no, "hey get a load of that chick," type behavior. The stroked the whole person they didn't stop at the boobs, it's like when you pat a dog, you pat the whole dog you don't stop at the balls. It's when the missionaries arrived on the island and they started putting clothes on the girls."- Jacque Fresco. When you cover somebody up you create a scarcity and scarcity has consequences that we see today in our "modern" culture.

Twins who are raised in the "same" environment might display two different characters, and people will say, "Twins were raised in exactly the same environment, why are they different?" The moment you pick one child up and say "I love you very much," and you don't pick up the other at the same time you are creating a different environment for those children. The moment you send one child on more errands than the other, you are creating a different environment for them. If you raise children watching mickey mouse and Cinderella you will produce blobs. People say that these are used as tools to build up imagination. Imagination can be built up by learning about dinosaurs, evolution and natural selection, all the creatures that walked this earth and didn't make it to today. The formation of planets, how plants grow, and so on. There is a wondrous world out there that they can learn from. The fact that "we" (everything in the universe) are all made of the same stuff as the stars we gaze upon, namely Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Helium and other is mind blowing.

Neil degrasse Tyson said that all children are born scientists, when they are hitting 2 pots together they are conducting an experiment on acoustics. When they are breaking something they are conducting an experiment getting to know the world around them. If you stop them in fear of losing a 10$ object, you are stopping relatively cheap education. "We spend the first years of their life teaching them to stand up and speak, and we spend the rest of it telling them to sit down and shut up."

Animals such as chimpanzees, like human beings, communicate about things such as food, predators, water etc basically things that they can see, feel, touch,hear and smell . Human beings namely adults, also speak about these things but also speak about things that are pigments of imagination such as the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, money, democracy etc. "Its not the children who have to worry about, it's actually our adults." Neil Degrasse Tyson.

I could continue, but I surely would be repeating the post on free will and proving that environment shapes behavior over and over again. Whole books are written about this topic, but this is a summary of human nature vs human behavior. It is important to rethink our values, place them under the microscope and examine them and instead of blaming the individual try to shape the environment in such a way as to to shape human behavior to be more relevant, always relative to the physical world.

Please type your negative critique in a form of a questions so as to give me a chance to clarify something for you with a well researched answer.