According to Mark Henderson the game is now up for cultural determinism and prejudices against the concept of 'a biological human nature'. He writes:
It [cultural determinism] has... become scientifically unsustainable. As research reveals more about inheritance, it has become abundantly clear that humans are not blank slates.
And referring to evidence derived from various scientific studies, he concludes:
These results show the sterility of the old nature-nurture debate. Nature works through nurture, and nurture through nature, to shape our personalities, aptitudes, health and behaviour. The question should not be which is the dominant influence, but how they fit together.
I have no quarrel with this other than to say that cultural determinism, in the sense of denying the reality and/or causal influence of a common human nature, has always been unsustainable. It is an absurdity. Plain facts of material life include that all people, everywhere, whatever their culture, share certain needs (to eat, to sleep, for oxygen, for recognition etc), certain antipathies (to extreme pain, to humiliation, to being cruelly slaughtered), certain abilities (for language, for complex conceptual thought) and so forth, and share these in virtue of their relatively permanent nature as the members of one species. Those who deny a common human nature and talk up the supposedly all-determining influence of socialization and culture have no credible answer to this. So they tend to come back with responses that are either false or beside the point.
Beside the point. They say: oh, if that's what you mean by a human nature, then yes, but it's too obvious to be worth insisting on. Well, it is what is commonly meant by human nature - a set of shared and enduring human characteristics - and the reason why it's obvious is that it's true that there is one, and therefore not true that we are blank slates.
False. They say: OK, in that sense there may be a human nature, but this is not very important for understanding or deciding anything. On the contrary, it's exceptionally important. That people need to eat. That they need to be protected against torture and other violations. That who they are, their identity, matters to them. Some of our most fundamental moral precepts and prohibitions are based on knowing what human beings need, what they can and cannot bear.