You'll just never run out of folk willing to embarrass themselves over the absurd claim that there's no such thing as an enduring human nature. A few years ago I highlighted the fact that Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman seemed to know of people for whom a belief in human nature was 'incendiary', and I then followed up on his failure to come up with anything persuasive in response to what I'd said.
Now there's a post by Jesse Spafford taking me to task for having cited the denial of human nature as an example of a deepity (a concept explained by Daniel Dennett). But, according to Spafford, while I do establish satisfactorily that the denial of human nature is manifestly false on any straightforward reading of that claim, I don't successfully show what reading of the claim makes it true but trivial. Sorry, Jesse - you just missed it, is all. Here is the true but trivial sense: 'So it turns out that the denial of an enduring human nature amounts to some changeable or non-universal features of the human character not being unchangeable. What else is new?' Spafford thinks the prevarication of those who deny a human nature can be rescued because what they're really meaning is that 'people aren't necessarily selfish [or] dominance-seeking' - which is a significant proposition. It is. But if that's what they really meant, that's what they could really say. To deny there's a universal human nature, only to fall back on the thesis, when pressed, that there's the human nature there is but not the one there isn't, is a fool's game.
Spafford has trouble, likewise, with my treating the denial of biological differences between men and women as a deepity. Well, to say there are no such biological differences when what you actually think is that there are only the biological differences between men and women that there are, is a waste of people's time. You'd start out on a sounder footing if you tried to distinguish, through empirical research, biological differences from non-differences.