What Is It To Be Human?, Debate presented by the Institute of Ideas at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, Cheltenham, U.K., 11 October 2002, and: What Is It To Be Human?: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us (review)

Leonardo Digital Reviews Editor-in-Chief: Michael Punt Managing Editor: Bryony Dalefield Web Coordinator: Robert Pepperell URL: mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/ldr.html

Tony Gilland of the London-based Institute of Ideas brought together four writers in a panel discussion to consider aspects of "What is it to be human?"— the same question that titles a collection of essays published by the Institute in 2001. The publicity for the event couched the question of our indeterminate humanity in terms of genetic science and posthumanism, and the various panelists responded, at least initially, by addressing our biological nature. Steve Jones, the eminent geneticist and author of The Language of Genes(1995), pointed out with his usual good humor that it was not useful to define humans in terms of their genetic makeup. Besides the fact that humans and mice both have approximately 30,000 genes, we share 40% of our genes with bananas. Launching an immediate attack on the discipline of sociobiology, which understands current human behavior as a consequence of our evolutionary past, Jones dismissed the enterprise as "the ponderous affirmation of the 'bleedin[g]' obvious." At best, sociobiology is able to tell us that older men are often attracted to younger women, or at worst it introduces the concept of "duck rape" to account for certain sexual behaviors among ducks. In fact biology, and genetics in particular, can tell us very little about what it is to be human, concluding that "what makes us humans is that we're not animals."

Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine(2000), addressed the question of what makes humans unique by reaffirming her thesis of imitation. She asserted that what defines us is our "copying machinery"—that is, our capacity to imitate the behavior of others, which allows behavioral practices to spread amongst communities or species. As is well known, she regards such imitative behavior in "memetic" terms, as that of quasi-evolutionary replicating units, following the introduction of the concept by Richard Dawkins. Humans, she said, are unique in being able to harbor and spread memes, and our complex social organizations are a consequence. She then expounded the other thesis for which she is well known, the "illusion of self," which follows from the ideas of Daniel Dennett. For Blackmore, the idea that we have a specific, centralized sense of our own existence, or even a consciousness, is a delusion, partly caused by our acquisition of memes. These delusions do not mean that we do not have a self or a conscious life, she claimed, but simply that these things are "not what they seem." She concluded with the admission that she is "utterly baffled" by what it means to be human.

Kenan Malik, who wrote Man, Beast and Zombie(2002) as well as making the major contribution to the What Is it To Be Human?book, offered a more humanitarian and philosophical view. He rejected what he saw as the recent conceptual shift that stresses the continuities between humans and the natural world. He argued that the rejection of the idea of humans as something special made for bad science and bad politics. Humans are in the special position of being able to make moral decisions; in effect we are "self-conscious moral agents." Further, we are uniquely subjects and objects who can shape our own destiny. If we follow the pessimism inherent in "anti-humanism" (by which he may have meant posthumanism), we will lose many of the valuable social impulses that drive progressive science and politics.

Novelist Maggie Gee disagreed with Steve Jones's assertion that we are not animals. She was keen to insist on the primacy of our animal nature, and was then led to...