Andrew Sullivan, back from his break, calls it the story of the week. I'm underwhelmed. But rather than address the merits of the story itself, I want to focus on one of Sullivan's underlying points. Conservatives, Sullivan points out, have long argued that human nature is constant and unchanging.
This claim has always baffled me. If you go back far enough in the evolutionary history of human beings, it is clear that this simply cannot be true. Go back far enough, and at some point our distant ancestors weren't anything like us. Move forward from there and the similarities gradually increase, but until you arrive at the very recent past - recent in evolutionary terms, that is - you won't necessarily see behavior that is identical to ours. And identical is the key word here. For human nature to be unchanging, it must be exactly the same throughout all of human history. But we know that humans themselves have changed, as has their behavior, and to think otherwise is simply a failure of imagination.
Adding... the point here, made more simply, is that when someone argues that something is "unchanging, what they're doing is claiming an infinite timeline back into the past. And given that the past is a very, very long way away, I cannot see how such claims make any sense.
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