Human Nature: Fact and Fiction

'Full of illuminating and stimulating insights ... it is precisely the purpose, and value, of this endlessly stimulating volume that it instigate a much-needed debate.' Institute of Ideas - Culture Wars website -- Simon Cooke 'The book is thought-provoking, cloying, rewarding, and irritating in turn, as scientists intersperse insight into, and ham-fisted respect for the significance of literature to human self-understanding, and as novelists and literary theorists exploit scientific ideas for literary adaptation. The editors juxtapose papers by scientific and literary experts so as to highlight both the contrasts and similarities in views between the two cultures.' Australian Review of Public Affairs, 'Scientific and Literary Musings on Who or What we Are', Susan Dodds, 28/08/2006 To follow * Blurb from reviewer * "... the book contains many sensitive and sensible little essays." -- Simon Blackburn * Financial Times * A little book that packs a lot of punch. (T)his book provides some genuinely new thought, incorporating evloution, culture, imagination, literature and genes. A heady mix. However where the real interest lies is in determining where these multiple perpectives align...being more anaylsis than synthesis, Human Nature allows its readers to find this golden section for themselves - a point that makes this book really stand out from the crowd. -- Ros Sitwell * Morning Star, The * (A) fascinating collection of essays. The result of a 2004 smposium that tried ti bridge the putative chasm between the science and the arts, Human Nature offers some intriguing insights. * The Guardian *

Robin Headlam Wells is Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. Johnjoe McFadden is Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey.

Contributors; Foreword, AC Grayling. Acknowledgements; Introduction, Robin Headlam-Wells and Johnjoe McFadden; Part I: Is human nature written in our genes or in our books?; 1. The biology of fiction, Steven Pinker; 2. Literature, science and human nature, Ian McEwan; Part II: Can science and literature collaborate to define human nature?; 3. Literature and evolution, Joseph Carroll; 4. Human nature: one for all and all for one?, Gabriel Dover; Part III: What has biology got to do with the imagination?; 5. The biology of the imagination: how the brain can both play with truth and survive a predator, Simon Baron Cohen; 6. Biology and imagination: The role of culture, Catherine Belsey; 7. The limits of imagination, Rita Carter; Part IV: Do we need a theory of human nature to tell us how to act?; 8. Human nature or human difference?, Ania Loomba; 9. What science can and cannot tell us about human nature, Kenan Malik; 10. The cat, the chisel, and the grave, Philip Pullman.