Officious

\uh-FISH-uhs\, adjective:
Marked by excessive eagerness in offering services or advice where they are neither requested nor needed; meddlesome.

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Perhaps some of the difficulty in pinning down human nature is sapience—thoughtful self-reflection. Having the capacity to examine ourselves and our actions and make judgments about whether or not to change in many ways undermine what we normally think of as nature.

To me, at least, nature seems often a static thing—an internal referent that, when mentioned, explains the manners and predilections of an individual or thing. When we talk about nature on Earth, it is often my inclination to think of the overarching collection of flora and fauna that compose the planet, and to think of this, while being interactive, as a fairly static thing. This inclination is wrong, however—even things like trees and animals change as the eons go on, and their inherent traits mutate.

And this regards things that do not reflect. However, noticing this apparent difficulty is not enough to rob the word nature of any sensible explanation—certainly there are still vast commonalities among humans that we can reference as being inherent, or natural to human beings.

I suppose in my rambling discourse here I am merely musing about the peculiar hurdle in defining human nature—whether we say humans are cooperative, compassionate, selfish, foolish, political—most of the traits that we can claim inherent are, by another valuable piece of human nature, capable of being overrun. And that ability is self-reflection.

Continued later.