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Human nature is the range of human behaviour that is believed to be invariant across long periods of time and across very different cultural contexts. Sometimes debate on this subject is phrased as the quarrel over 'nature versus nurture', but that phrase can be misleading.
When "nature" is contrasted with "nurture" the meaning of "nature" is often narrowed to "genetic," and a falsely dichotomous cast is given to the discussion. But if "human nature" is understood as any invariant element in human behavior, then this element can have characteristics not derived from the gene code -- derived, say, from the physical characteristics of neural tissue, (see Weber-Fechner law) or from pre-natal experience.
Very few consider all of human behavior to be invariant or all of it socially malleable.
All individuals and all societies have a similar facial grammar. Everyone smiles the same, and how we use our eyes to convey cognition or flirtatiousness is the same.
No success has ever been scientifically demonstrated in re-assigning an individual's handedness. Although an individual may change their external behavior (picking up scissors with the right and instead of the left, for instance), their internal inclination never changes. Even people who lose a limb, who physically do not possess the ability to pick up scissors with their left hand, will try to do so if they are 'left handed.' The percentage of left-handers in all cultures at all times remains constant (because left-handedness is a recessive trait).
Newborn babies, far too young to have been enculturated to do so, have measurable behaviors such as being more attracted to human faces than other shapes and having a preference for their mother's voice over any other voice.
The Duke of Wellington is said to have become indignant upon hearing someone refer to habit as "second nature." He replied, "It is ten times nature!"
William James likewise referred to habit as the fly-wheel of society. Habits, though, are by definition acquired, and different habits will be both the effect and the cause of very different societies.
The role for nurture comes not from the absense of innate impulses in human nature, but from the plethora of such impulses -- so many, and so contradictory, that nurture must sort them out and put them into a hierarchy.
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