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Hello, on NRTIME this week we will be discussing nothing less than human nature. Some argue that we are born as blank slates, and our nature is defined by upbringing, experience, culture and the ideas of our time.

Others believe that some of the essential figurations of human nature are innate and predestined, regardless of time and place.

And there are others who believe that human nature's uniqueness is debatable.

Is there really such a thing as human nature, and if there is, can it be changed?

Does the truth about human nature mean we should stop astraying for progress, or should it give us course for optimism, and how important is the human race in the wider scheme of things?

Joining me to discuss these questions is Stephen Pinker, Professor of Psychology, and Director of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author most recently of the blank slate.

Janet Ratley-Fritchitz, Philosopher, Reavering Biothics at University College London, and author of Human Nature after Darwin, and John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and author, most recently, of Straw Dogs.

Let's start at the very beginning, Stephen Pinker. What do you understand by the term human nature?

It's a set of emotions and learning abilities and ways of conceptualizing the world that are common to all humans, and that allow us to learn and make culture.

So all of us have similar natures, whatever sort of person we are, whether we're born, whatever time, background, opportunities and so on.

That's more or less what I would call human nature as what we all have in common, and acknowledgement of human nature is simply that there is a long list that goes in that category, that it's not negligible.

Although you say that very straightforwardly, and people will cut none to that immediately, there has been an argument for many centuries about where human nature comes from,

what it really is, how it should be more closely defined. Can you give us some idea of the passage of those arguments?

Certainly in modern intellectual life, in, say, Britain and the United States, there is the creationists, the people who derive their beliefs about human beings from religion.

Then many people influenced by 20th century social science, believe in a kind of blank slate, namely the human nature really doesn't have much to it other than a few simple drives like hunger, thirst and sex.

I think it was Ortega Agassette who said, man has no nature, he only has a history, perhaps the clearest statement of the doctrine of the blank slate.

Does the idea of the noble savage still linger? Do you think the idea of Leviathan as man, solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short, or life is? Do you think that still lingers?

Absolutely does. I think there is a widespread belief in the noble savage, the idea that were it not for corrupting social institutions, people would be inherently peaceable and unselfish.

You see it, for example, in repeated declarations that violence is learned behavior. Now that's not totally wrong, obviously the prevalence of violence varies from time to time and place to place in ways that have nothing to do with genetics.

But in the other hand, one would think that something about our nature would help us understand why violence occurs when it occurs, nonetheless the statement is repeated by scientific, social scientific cultural organizations all the time.

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