Subtitle: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us about Human Nature
Author: Kenan Malik
Subject: History of Science
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3122-5
Pages: 468 pp.
Description: A fascinating examination of what science can and cannot explain about human nature.
Are humans unique? Can animals think as we do? Will machines ever have consciousness? What is free will? For centuries, attempts to answer these questions have been the stuff of both bar-room debates and intense theological and philosophical dispute. Now scientists claim they can solve these riddles of human existence once and for all. In so doing, they promise to upset many of the accepted ideas about morality and human nature.
Man, Beast, and Zombie is an original and accessible book. Vast in its scope, it draws on cutting-edge sciences such as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence to assess what, precisely, science can and cannot explain about human nature. Kenan Malik explains the histories of these sciences (and the philosophies that underpin them) and analyzes the complex relationship between human beings, animals, and machines to explore what really makes us human.
Malik demonstrates that much current thinking about human nature is flawed: how there is more than one way to design a mind; why the lifestyles of contemporary hunter-gatherers do not illuminate the lives of our prehistoric ancestors; and what intelligent machines really reveal about human consciousness. He shows, too, how the scientific debate about human nature is as influenced by politics as by science.
Man, Beast, and Zombie is both a defense of scientific reason and a challenge to some of todays most cherished scientific theories. It deftly interweaves philosophy, science, and history to answer the most fundamental question of all: what is a human being?
Kenan Malik was a research psychologist at the Centre for Research into Perception and Cognition at Sussex University. The author of The Meaning of Race, he is now a writer and lecturer.
Praise for Man, Beast, and Zombie
"Malik asks, What data have scientists produced about human origins, human behavior, the human mind, and so on? What is . . . being said through particular interpretations of this data? He then proceeds to examine the scientific arguments, their philosophical background, and how they were influenced by past cultural and intellectual changes. His effort is both scholarly and well written. And its the best of all attempts to see what science has had to say on this broad subject."HMS Beagle, the BioMedNet Magazine
"Man, Beast, and Zombie is sure to take its place as the most thoughtful and insightful assessment of the contemporary claims of science. Kenan Malik is even-handed between sciences friends and foes, and he steers a course all of his own. Not least, he is a most accomplished writer."Roy Porter
Excerpt from Man, Beast, and Zombie
"Science is as much part of culture as is art. Science does not stand impassively above the hurly-burly of everyday life. It is part of that hurly-burly, helping create it, and drawing sustenance from it. To explore how science constructs the idea of what a human is and what it can do, we need also to explore the ways in which the idea of humanness is made meaningful by the culture that scientists inhabit."from Man, Beast, and Zombie
