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RichardKennaway comments on Rationality Quotes June 2014 - Less Wrong
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Not Michael Anissimov.
Various people.
Anissimov may be correct in his description of Naomi Wolf and Elliot Rodger (although it seems to me that the room he admits for "cultural reasons" is large enough to contain the entire discourse of both). But the quoted soundbite is an anti-rationality template.
"That people die" is not "part of human nature" in the sense intended by that quote, which means something like "how people think and react".
Furthermore, you can't actually put any assertion you like in that template because the template only works with true assertions.
"How people think and react" was Anissimov's subject of the moment. Many things, including both that one and human mortality, have been asserted to be "part of human nature". Look up anyone arguing against life extension. It won't take long to find the argument that "mortality is part of human nature". Literally. It took me less than one minute to find this:
The original source of what is there paraphrased is here (PDF, see pp.189-190).
It works -- that is, can be sincerely said -- for anything the writer believes. It shares this attribute with bald assertion, but surrounds the assertion with an applause light frame.
"X is part of human nature" can mean
-- X cannot be changed
-- X should not be changed
-- X has particularly deep connections to human psychology
"How men and women are attracted is part of human nature" normally has the third meaning. "Death is part of human nature" normally has the first meaning, and so isn't comparable. In your quote, "death is part of human nature" has the second meaning; that is indeed a fallacy, but has no bearing on the original statement since that doesn't use the same meaning.
By your reasoning nobody should ever say anything about a true statement that is not a proof of it, since whatever they say could have a false statement substituted and would be a fallacy.
It always and only means the third of these (with minor variations, e.g. theists will talk about souls created by God). The first and second are then drawn as implications of the third.
It has the third meaning, as you could have discovered by consulting the sources I gave. The whole purpose of the authors of that report was to address the question, if various enhancements to human bodies, of which life extension is one, can be made, should they be made?The "human nature" argument presented there was based on our mortality having "particularly deep connections to human psychology".