In my own personal experience there is a huge misconception in the US at least that men cannot be feminists, or that somehow the choice to be a feminist is of necessity emasculating. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth - there is nothing more empowering as a man than having a strong, equal partner.

I also believe strongly that gender relations can and do evolve, and that evolution is one of the keys to our survival as a species. No joke: I think gender equity, equal representation, women's reproductive rights, equal opportunities to childhood education - the importance of these things cannot be understated in raising up the next generation to do a better job of asking the right questions than this one has.

Wow. Isn't this an interesting question. It's kind of the ultimate "nature versus nurture" question, with a twist. If I understand it right, the question is, "What is definitionally human nature, versus what are the things that we learn from our parents (which includes fathers!), and which of the latter is misconception?"

One way to get at this question is to look at how different populations of people have evolved in the ways that they "do life" and how they differ from other people groups. There are notable differences, for example, between people groups who are still living in tribal communities versus the executives that live on Madison Avenue. Which of these differences, though, actually reveal misconceptions is the real and interesting question.

Here are a few that I see often:

• That someone who has a lot of money is inherently a more successful person.

• Or the inverse view that someone with a lot of money, as goes an in-vogue belief in the US today, is probably a bad person.

• Or that people deserve what they have earned solely because of their hard work, versus the confluence of a lot of contextual factors that supplement the hard work to yield what they have.

• Almost any belief that boils down to something we would call a "human right" is nurture. At our most fundamental level, we are not naturally born with the concept of "rights." While I agree with many of the "rights" we observe in the States, for example, I would also say that any view that holds that a human being has any "right" outside the mutual agreement of those with whom he/she is in community is a misconception. Rights are created.

• I liked Paul's riff on gender roles, although I would say that an interesting offshoot misconception in the States that I observe is that, given that we are men and women, we are sexist if we embrace the opportunity to be fully men or fully women. There is almost an "I'm sorry for being such a dude" or "I'm sorry for being such a gal" ethos these days that I'm still having trouble getting my head around.

It's funny that you guys immediately brought up gender roles, I was going to use that as an example of what I'm talking about. I think maybe because gender differences in behaviour (sexual dimorphism if you're feeling fancy) are so pronounced in some species, some people tend to assume we must have some significant ones as well. And even if we do - and it' is likely we have SOME given the physical differences - do we necessarily know what they are? Maybe they exist, but we have them all wrong? Some differences show up at very early ages, for example I learned once that female toddlers are more cooperative at play and male toddlers more competitive. But... can we trust that even those differences are nature and not nurture? See, unlike all those other animals, our behaviour is very, VERY influenced by nurture. Some people start speaking at six months. Take a moment to appreciate how enormous a feat language is, and think of how early that is. So I say no, we have to open to the possibility that just about anything is nurture. That is, the toddlers could easily be learning gender roles from their parents.

Is laughter nature? "Well," you might say, "laughter has proven positive effects on health", but even that isn't proof! Maybe laughter is a learned behaviour that we associate so strongly with pleasure that they become interchangeable, and so laughter is be merely CORRELATED with the health effects. Maybe laughter is natural in origin, but the particular WAY we laugh is learned. If a new group of humans were grown in complete isolation from the rest of humanity, how different would they be? Would they laugh by clacking their teeth? By waving their arms? Would they live in groups of 30-40, as we assume is "natural" because modern hunter-gatherers do it, or will their first inclination be to live in groups of five, or five hundred? Will the males be larger and stronger than women, or is that just an extreme learned placebo effect? "Testosterone helps female athletes grow muscles too" you might say. Well... what if THAT's partially a placebo effect? So obviously I'm taking this idea very far, maybe I'm way off, but I don't think we know for certain that I am. "But Mormious, surely the fact that isolated populations can have a lot in common indicates that there is human nature?", "Isolated? Spatially isolated maybe, MAYBE, but not temporally isolated. We were all one tribe as late as 40,000 years ago.", "But 40,000 years is a very long time!" "Is it? Who are you to say what a long time is, we have only one example!" And so on... :P

One continuing misconception, that's gradually emerging as such to my mind and which I find moderately disconcerting, is that of our species as consisting of rational actors. There appears to be no limit to human stupidity, whereas our collective ability to learn from our mistakes strikes me as depressingly lacking. How many times in the twentieth century, for example, have people solemnly sworn "never again", as in 1918, only for history to repeat itself after all too short a interval? I suppose we learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

Then again, I can't exempt myself from any of this -- I know I'm a walking mass of biases and prejudices, and conflicting interests. Our behavior as a species is in some ways just the aggregate of our individual misconceptions about ourselves and our interactions with the world. If people take other people more seriously by virtue of how they're dressed, rather than what they're saying, if people claim to prefer coffee "A" over coffee "B" because "A" is more expensive, even though the coffee is the same in each cup, if we give in to peer pressure because we value fitting in with the group over standing up for what we believe to be true -- and if we persist in the face of all the evidence in believing that we're making rational decisions in the light of objective data, then it's no surprise that history repeats, because we always persuade ourselves that this time around it's different and it'll all be over by Christmas.

Sorry, ranting this morning, but you get the idea.

Yeah, but Joseph - don't you think that, if the idea that human beings are rational in nature were untrue, so many economic constructs that we consider to be more or less law would not apply? Totally agreed that, within the aggregates, you can find so many pockets of absolute craziness in individual decision-making that it's hard to believe. But don't we know that, when everyone is taken in aggregate, the overall theory of human rationality is backed up in the overall wash?

I've thought about this at some length, and I think my answer is that it does, and I'm just going to be left to wonder at how exactly that happens. Similar to you, I find myself to be a walking mass of contradictions. I simultaneously desire, for example, to be connected with those around me and to have those around me leave me completely alone. I simultaneously desire to have the comforts that come along with riches, but not the accountability and responsibility that goes along with it. And these conflicting desires come out in my behaviors and decision-making. I am, in short, a mess, and I'm pretty sure everyone else is too.

MORMIOUS - pretty sure we're getting off track from your thread, but let me see if I can respond to a couple things that you said. In your last response, you definitely went super-philosophical, because you're now on to the place of entertaining ideas that are not going to be tested (and really testable) within our lifetimes, or 100 lifetimes. But they are interesting thoughts; I had never considered the idea that laughter could be learned.

My question - is there a pragmatic or more application-related goal in the back of your mind that is driving all of this? What if, for example, laughter is learned. Where does that get you?

@Brent's question: laughter being learned doesn't get us anywhere much (that I can think of right now), but really the idea I'm suggesting is that the range of human behaviour is much greater than we think, and that there are a lot of things we can do we didn't know about. What if complacency or apathy are not static human traits, just cultural baggage from a time when the average person did not have as much responsibility - did not have a vote, did not have much money or influence, did not even have the opportunity to educate themselves - and so did not feel any need to concern themselves with the affairs of noblemen and priests. Now, every ten year old westerner can go online and criticize the king. I mean prime minister. Maybe that's why we're so bad at public discussion of important issues, let alone doing things about them - as a culture, we're out of practice. Okay, but how do we apply this idea? Well the first thing that comes to mind is that we should shed all of our preconceptions of what children are or aren't capable of learning. "Children can't handle computer programming" "An eight year old can't learn calculus" "Young people think science is boring, and don't really care about the fate of the earth" "boys like sports more than do girls" Ummmm... why? How do we know? We think that way because that's the way it's been so far. But is that because we're genetically hardwired to be bad at calculus, or is it merely a cultural thing? Many people have difficulty in school, but is that a function of what the subject matter is, or just a reaction people have whether you're teaching multiplication of matrix multiplication? A lot of people are talking about ways to reform education, but I that they focus on didactics and changing class sizes and stuff, and don't focus enough on re-evaluating our EXPECTATIONS of the next generation. Um... that's it for now :P.

My only comment to this string is this: I don't know if you've ever spent time around little boys and/or girls, but it occurs to me that some of the preferences and behaviors are pretty evolved, if they are learned. For example, I am around a very young boy (2) right now who fell in love with construction sites on his first viewing. He had never been exposed to them before, and he literally was in love. He can sit and look at a construction site (particularly if the machines are moving around) as long as you will let him. I don't think that was learned; there really is no way. I think there are several examples like this one.

I should have mentioned before that I don't have children. I also admit that I have a strong bias against gender roles being real. So I could be completely wrong about the gender thing, but that's fine, I'm really just discussing nature v. nurture here, and using gender roles as an example.

I don't want to argue with you about your own experiences (it's really annoying when people do that to me), so just to continue based on your example: can you confidently say that if you had brought a girl that she would have reacted differently? There are a few possible sources of bias here. Children tend to react to big, moving, noisy, novel things in primary colors. Could your interpretation of a completely gender-neutral reaction have been affected by your own assumptions about what a boy likes? Also - and this is more of a question to people with more experience with children than me - can a child be sensitive enough to an adult's unconscious behavior to take cues? Like the "clever Hans" effect?

As for this preference being evolved: maybe there can be a preference for the concept of building shelter, but bulldozers definitely aren't a part of our evolutionary history. Anyhow, based on my general knowledge, there is a "primitive" society where women do all the building (mud huts), another where women gather food by carving it out of a tree (its juice is edible) with axes, lumberjack style. In fact, in most the primitive societies I know of, men do the hunting, and little else. I think the reason men have all of the active, outdoor roles today is that permanent residences provide a safe place for children while work is done elsewhere and since agriculture is so time consuming and labor intensive, most of the tribe will have to be out working while other tribe members stay to watch everyone's kids and make clothes and stuff. If some kids are still nursing, the stay-at-home group will have to include their mothers.

Well, I have to admit first that I did not read every word on this string, but think I gather the overall dialogue. first, I really want to thank Mormious for starting this conversation! I love the question!

As a woman raised in a very open and feminist culture with strong female role models around me and as a preschool teacher for nearly 8 years, studying young children, their development and physchology, I have to say it is pretty much all nuture and never little nature.

I helped raise a little girl several years back who was fascinated with construction sites. She was 2 years old at the time and loved just sitting and watching the machines and workers. Children are formed by their environment and what they are exposed to. There is so much gender stereotyping that we are NOT unaware of. Even if we never expose a child to TV, media, etc. they will learn gender roles by simly existing in a generized world: seeing advertisements on the side of a bus that sexualize women or magazines at their level in the grocery store of what a "powerful woman" looks like. A young boy can learn from the cover of a box of cereal what a "powerful" man looks like. Gender is everywhere as is race. And when we are of the dominant culture, whether we are white or male or heterosexual or have access to wealth, it takes intentional living to look through another lens because nothing challenges our day to day reality, especially here in the US.

So in saying that, I would answer the question you posed by saying that one of the major misconceptions of our time surrounds power, what power looks like, how to access it, how to use it. What is power? For many power is seen as brute force or domination. Or it can be wealth, elitism. It can be physical appearance. Power can be resistance or rebellion against the mainstream power structures. People strive to have power over their own lives or be viewed as powerful within their community. It can be judging another's religion or way of life. Regardless power has mostly been equated to superiority.

The misconception is that people lack the awareness of the inherent power they possess and lack the foresight to define their own concept of power. Its easier to play the game within a framework that already exists than to create your own framework and new rules.

Before I get too philosophical, I want to clarify some real tangible applications. When we look at power as coming from mainstream power structures, ie, money, we assume that if we give money to something, we give that "thing" power. This is a dangerous misconception for relief work around the world. People that have access to wealth (as we do here in Harnu, simply by the fact that we have time and resources -technology- to engage on this site) have a false assumption that giving money to an NGO or Human Rights or Environment organization empowers people and therefore they feel empowered. I'm not at all saying anything to undermine the important work of NGOs and orgs.

I am saying that our concept of human nature and concept of power are deeply interconnected and need to be untangled for future evolution. We need to untangle an antiquated view of power-that of domination over others- whether it be in war or in philanthropy. When I talk of inherent power that we possess, I do not infer that everyone should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and harness their own power or that philanthropy or even war itself is not necessary.

But as a collective psyche, the West especially needs to check itself, give up the power that it has been born into, excommunicate itself from the concept of domination over others or belief that we "know best" and evolve a new definition of power. I could not agree with you more, about the fact that the current western dogma underestimates the degress to which human nature can change. We are evolving here and now. I look forward to a growth of self-awareness, whether it be about gender or the relationship each of us individually has with power.

Mormious!!! LOVE your POST!!! Human nature is an intriguing phenomenon for me as well! One that captures my imagination because I find it both fascinating, confusing, multi-layered & even troubling from time to time. Who am I? Why am I here or what is my purpose? Why do I act the way I do? Why do I feel the way I do? Why do I think what I think? What it means to be human? What really sets us apart? Our ability to love? Our ability to think and process information? Our ability to relate with one another? It seems impossible to define what human nature is in the broader sense. There are no two individuals that are exactly the same but I think I may've just found someone on Harnu whom I can relate to...thanks for the post!!

And I agree with you that we all have many misconceptions ...& yes absolutely I agree that part of what constitutes human nature is simply learned behavior not just passed on from mother to daughter but also society at large. It's amazing to me how much society shapes who we become...it's almost as if we're all slaves to society because it's a bondage that only a few can escape. Having learned that to "think wrong is better than to not think at all"---not sure whose quote this is...but having learned this has one realize that as humans, we're more than our country we represent or the religion/spiritual path we embrace...there is way more to us then the veil that we put out for the world to see.... human nature is mind boggling also because usually people show more of what they think they should be versus who they really are on the inside which is what really matters. Sorry for the scattered thoughts...but yeah I totally relate to what I think you're saying. Thanks!