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Simon Cooke
posted 4 August 2006

Is there a universal core of human nature shared by all human beings in all places at all times? If so, in what characteristics does it inhere? How might such universals be identified? Are they determined, or revealed, in our biology or our culture? How can different perspectives - the literary and the scientific - collaborate in addressing these questions? And what is at stake in the conclusions we might draw?

Human Nature – Fact and Fiction brings together state of the art essays by a formidable assembly of novelists and academics in both the humanities and sciences to address these and related questions in the ‘human nature’ debate. Such luminaries as the novelists Ian McEwan and Philip Pullman, and scientific leaders in their fields including Simon Baron-Cohen, Steven Pinker, and Gabriel Dover, respond to one another on fundamental issues in an inquiry the philosopher AC Grayling describes in his foreword as 'one of the most important we (as a species) can have'. The result of papers delivered at a symposium held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2004, the collection thus has an expeditionary quality, with each contributor - whether writing in the vocabulary of genotypes or genres - making a genuine attempt to communicate specialised knowledge to the non-specialist, and to engage with the insights afforded by other disciplines.

While such accessibility befits a subject which, by definition, has a bearing on all potential readers, the book represents an intervention as much as an introduction. As various as the arguments may be, two unifying principles inform the collection as a whole: it is time, after several decades of postmodern critique, for the question of human nature, and humanism, to be brought back into intellectual sphere; and it is time, after an even longer period of academic specialisation, for interdisciplinary dialogue. As this and other developments in intellectual culture indicate - the Manifesto Club associated with this website, for example - humanism may itself be experiencing something of a renaissance. As the editors, Wells and McFadden (professors in literature and molecular genetics respectively), explain in their admirably clear introduction, the focus has shifted in the modern era from a question of what human nature is to ‘whether or not it is meaningful to talk about human nature at all.’

The humanist legacy of the Enlightenment - a belief in universal human rights, based on a universal core of essential humanity - was reviled by postmodern critics, as a ‘damaging form of ideological mystification’ the ‘real purpose' of which was 'to impose one set of male Eurocentric values onto the rest of the world’, as the editors characterise the argument. Simultaneously, the division between the humanities and sciences, famously lamented by CP Snow in his lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, widened. Anti-essentialism fostered a hostility to biological explanations of human nature, emphasising instead the power of culture and environment to shape human form and behaviour. This book, however, situates itself at something of a turning point at which dialogue between the 'two cultures' is imperative: 'genetic engineering, human cloning and gene therapy are likely to provide tools that nineteenth- and twentieth-century eugenicists lacked: the ability to engineer human nature'. It is no longer simply a question of whether the idea of human nature has been 'made up'; human nature itself, in instances at least, could now be 'made'. The Human Genome Project that ushered in the new century surely demands not only a revision of current attitudes to biology in the humanities, but the input of the humanities into the 'whethers' and 'hows' for a potential 'posthuman future'.

Arranged around the four session questions at the conference – ‘Is Human Nature Written in Our Genes or in our Books?’; ‘Can science and literature collaborate to define human nature?’; ‘What has biology to do with imagination?’; ‘Do we need a theory of human nature to tell us how to act?’ - the book is full of illuminating and stimulating insights. Ian McEwan offers a fascinating account of the presiding presence in the book, Darwin's reckoning with the discovery of the evolutionary principle. McEwan finds in Darwin’s belief in the 'common descent of man' a parallel with literature's timeless relevance. 'It would not be possible to read and enjoy literature from a time remote from our own, or from a culture that was profoundly different from our own, unless we shared some common emotional ground, some deep reservoir of assumptions, with the writer’. In perhaps the most surprising exchange, the literary critic Joseph Carroll takes this one step further, introducing what he heralds as a new critical approach, Literary Darwinism, which seeks to employ scientific methods - 'quantifiable phenomena that can be empirically tested'. But where Carroll finds biologically determined archetypes exhibited in literature, tending in his examples towards 'mythic figures' and tropes, of which individuality is, paradoxically, a central example, Gabriel Dover, a professor of genetics, argues that what literature can contribute to biology is that it 'captures the essential unknowability of each individual phenotype in a way that biology has not with its generalised talk of universals'. His argument emphasises the specificity of literature as an example to illuminate advanced genetics, arguing that there is 'no exact, repeatable link between human DNA, the genotype, and an individual human’s form and behaviour (phenotype). In every sexual species new phenotypes arise ‘that have never existed and will never exist again’.

The next two sections focus more on the question, not so much of what binds all human beings together, but what distinguishes us from other biological organisms (the rhetorical line tends to be 'Only humans...' as much as 'All humans...'). Imagination is one such frequently cited faculty, and Simon Baron-Cohen provides a fascinating account of the human mental faculties by which, while the 'content of the imagination is determined more by culture... the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than culture'. The biologically adaptive potential of imagination is immediately complicated by Catherine Belsey's detailed exploration of A Midsummer Night's Dream (which 'invites the audience to speculate on whether imagination constitutes an asset or a liability'). And the science writer Rita Carter draws attention to the way that departures from the normal functioning of the mind may not always be 'dysfunctional'. One reason for Einstein's genius was 'probably the missing groove in his brain which allowed information to flow between neurons that would otherwise be separated.'

The role of anomaly leads well into Ania Loomba's essay, the most critical in the volume of the idea of universal human nature. Pointing out that the competing visions of human nature are not necessarily fought between the sciences and the humanities, but that scientists, humanists and literary figures can be lined up in each camp, Loomba draws on the geneticist Richard Lewontin’s call for scepticism about ‘genomania', and 'alerts us to fact that the question of a genetic basis for human behaviour is, at its base, a political one': ''human nature' has never really meant everyone's nature; rather it is a concept that has been developed through ideas of difference or inequality'. If this seems to invoke postmodern scepticism, Kenan Malik responds with a critique of 'the retreat from humanism, and the rejection of human exceptionalism' as 'bad science because it is a view of humanness which ignores an essential quality of our being - agency'. Reviving Enlightenment rationalism, Malik argues that sentience, and rationalism, are uniquely human - 'all animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history'. This is the most frequently cited factor in human exceptionalism, and the philosophical distinctions needed to make this a qualitative difference of kind, rather than degree, are elusive, however vast the gulf. Philip Pullman closes the volume with a tutelary lesson to writers (as, arguably, one type of human) and a fitting conclusion to so diverse a range of possible stands on the debate. Whatever theory we adopt, we must not be enslaved to it. We must be able to embrace contradiction, 'like Schroedinger's cat, which is both alive and dead until you look at it'. And 'sometimes in order to be fully and freely human we have to be a little feline too'. 

A collection on so broad a question could not, of course, hope to be comprehensive. Several avenues of inquiry are opened up which warrant further investigation. There is the disparity between the academic hostility to the idea of 'human nature' and the unquestioned pervasiveness of the idea in the media and popular culture. Think of how quick we are to condemn human beings we disapprove of as 'inhuman', or their behaviour 'not natural': the cultural politics of 'human nature' would make an interesting focus, especially given the trial by media that rages on genetic engineering, genetic therapy, and IVF. The question of distinctly 'male' and 'female' human natures, given the Mars and Venus vernacular, also warrants additional exploration. Most significantly, while postmodern ideas about Western ideological universalism are well explored, by Ania Loomba particularly, the question of universal human nature would benefit from the inclusion of 'non-Western' thought itself. The dialogue must be intercultural as well as interdisciplinary if it is to avoid the charge of imposition levelled by postmodernity. But it is precisely the purpose, and value, of this endlessly stimulating volume that it instigate a much-needed debate.