Human Nature: Fact and Fiction

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.

'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