Beast and Man

Midgley's first book, subtitled The Roots of Human Nature, argues that human beings are animals and that this fact helps rather than threatens our understanding of ourselves. She criticises two opposite errors: the belief, common in the social sciences and existentialism, that humans have no nature and are infinitely shaped by culture, and the reductive use of evolutionary theory in early sociobiology. Drawing on ethology, the study of animal behaviour, she shows that animals are not the savage "beasts" of the human imagination; the wolf of myth bears little resemblance to the real one. Midgley distinguishes closed instincts, fixed behaviour patterns, from open instincts, general tendencies that need experience and learning to take shape, and argues that human reason and culture build on our motives rather than replace them. Later chapters treat the place of rationality, the differences between humans and other animals, and the link between facts about human nature and values.

It is a lucid, witty correction to both blank-slate and genetic-determinist views of human nature, and it shows how biology and ethics can speak to each other.