Man, Beast and Zombie

Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature
by Kenen Malik
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20, ISBN 0297643053

On the shelf above me at this moment is a book entitled The Biological Bases of Behaviour. Nothing exceptional or controversial about this; science has long sought to reverse-engineer human and animal behaviour and explain it in terms of physiology, biochemistry and, latterly, genetics. Fundamental to this approach has been the rejection of dualism, the splitting of life into “mind stuff” and “body stuff”. While this materialist approach has been enormously productive, particularly over the last 50 years, it has brought with it profound and seemingly intractable philosophical questions. For example, is biology all that is needed to solve the riddles of human behaviour and personality? And are we on the verge of having to abandon any idea of uniqueness?
Are we simply living out a script already written in our genes, originating with our hunter-gatherer ancestors many thousands of years ago and with the sole objective of maximising our reproductive potential? Is free will simply a metaphysical abstraction? Man, Beast and Zombie is a bold and wide ranging attempt at discussing the attempts by contemporary scientists and philosophers to tackle these questions.
Malik, a former neurobiologist and research psychologist, examines the arguments of both the proponents and opponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as well as philosophers, cognitive psychologists and workers in artificial intelligence, and questions whether the differences between them are always as great as the fierceness of their quarrels over what it means to be human might suggest. To give a condensed but intelligent account of competing scientific ideas, place them firmly in their social and political context and supply a thoughtful commentary on a subject like human nature is a difficult trick to pull off but Kenen Malik manages it rather well.
The notes and references are comprehensive and the bibliography utterly daunting.