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By Root 485 0

of animal behaviour, and virtually all students of human behaviour, were content to describe what they found without reference to a function. The gene-centred view of the world changed this for good. By 1980 no detail of animal courtship mattered unless it could be explained in terms of the selective competition of genes. And by 1990, the notion that human beings were the only animals exempt from this logic was beginning to look ever more absurd. If man has evolved the ability to override his evolutionary imperatives, then there must have been an advantage to his genes in doing so. Therefore, even the emancipation from evolution that we so fondly imagine we have achieved must itself have evolved because it suited the replication of genes.

Inside my skull is a brain that was designed to exploit the conditions of an African savannah between three million and a hundred thousand years ago. When my ancestors moved into Europe (I am a white European by descent), about a hundred thousand years ago, they quickly evolved a set of physiological features to suit the sunless climate of northern latitudes: pale skin to prevent rickets, male beards and a circulation relatively resistant to frostbite. But little else changed: skull size, body proportions and teeth are all much the same in me as they were a hundred thousand years ago and are much the same as they are in a San tribesman from southern Africa. And there is little reason to believe that the grey matter inside the skull changed much either. For a start, a hundred thousand years is only three thousand generations, a mere eyeblink in evolution, equivalent to a day and half in the life of bacteria. Moreover, until very recently, the life of a European was essentially the same as that of an African. Both hunted meat and gathered plants. Both lived in social groups. Both had children dependent on their parents until their late teens. Both used stone, bone, wood and fibre to make tools. Both passed wisdom down with complex language. Such evolutionary novelties as agriculture, metal and writing arrived less than three hundred generations ago, far too recently to have left much imprint on my mind.

There is, therefore, such a thing as a universal human nature, common to all peoples. If there were descendants of Homo erectus still living in China, as there were a million years ago, and those people were as intelligent as us, then truly they could be said to have different but still human natures.4 They might perhaps have no lasting pair bonds of the kind we call marriage, no concept of romantic love and no involvement of fathers in parental care. We could have some very interesting discussions with them about such matters. But there are no such people. We are all one close family, of one small race of the modern Homo sapiens people who lived in Africa until a hundred thousand years ago, and we all share the nature of that beast.

Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives, predicaments, feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff’s bombast, Iago’s cunning, Leontes’ jealousy, Rosalind’s strength and Malvolio’s embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature that we know today. Only his vocabulary (which is nurture, not nature) has aged. When I watch Antony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it is now. It is not necessary to explain to me why Antony falls under the spell of a beautiful woman. Across time just as much as across space, the fundamentals of our nature are universally and idiosyncratically human.

The Individual in Society

Having argued that all human beings are the same, that this book is about their shared human nature, I shall now seem to argue the opposite. But I am not being inconsistent.

Human beings are individuals. All individuals are slightly different.