Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel

4. Nature and Human Nature

4. Nature and Human Nature Human nature is . . . a hodgepodge of special genetic adaptations to an environment largely vanished, the world of the IceAge hunter-gatherer. —Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (1978) No animal was ever intended to steal fire from the tops of mountains. You have transgressed the established laws of nature . I’ll have a little of that antelope now, Oswald. —Roy Lewis, What We Did to Father (1960) Human Nature in Literature Many of those great literary works that succeed in offering profound insights into human nature, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603–4), Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), or Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890), do so very indirectly. Such works provide elaborate psychological portraits of protagonists whose difference from the average person is striking. We are likely to gauge from contact with such works our own unrealized potential by analogy, or our own shallowness by contrast, but little about, for example, how the human species in general differs from its nearest nonhuman relatives. Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), on the other hand, approaches the question of the specificity of human nature more directly. Moreover, it does so by using a stratagem rather similar to pf, namely, by providing an account of our origin in order to explain or “justify” how we are in the present. It does so, however, from a theological, dogmatic perspective that is unlikely to be shared in a secular, skeptical age, notwithstanding the grandeur of Milton’s vision and the brilliance of his execution. And even here, it is an exceptional individual (Satan), one who is not even himself human, who offers (again very indirectly) the deepest insights into human nature. 103 ▲ Works of good sf, emerging from an age in which the scientific method had become the dominant epistemology, can offer more direct insights into human nature. One of sf’s most typical strategies is to bring mankind, represented by one or more everyman characters, into contact with nonhuman aliens. This encounter allows the reader to observe the significant differences between “us” and “them” and thereby to infer something of the characteristic nature of our species beyond individual differences. Notable works in this vein include H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Good pf, of the kind that plausibly dramatizes one or more phases of hominization, can enable us to confront more directly than any other kind of literature our human nature viewed as the result of an evolved process. Indeed, perhaps pf’s highest function as a literary genre is to cast light on human nature in our post-Darwinian age. But how is human nature to be defined? For current purposes, it will be understood to include those innate qualities that all human beings share as a result of our genetic membership in the species that immodestly denominates itself Homo sapiens sapiens. In fact, there are surely two distinct, if overlapping, human natures— a male and a female. This chapter will confine itself for the most part to the overlap, while the next will focus on the sexes’ differing natures. Furthermore, human nature will here be supposed not to include the cultural elements that divide people, namely, those differences that we acquire and transmit through education. Attention to such differences will be deferred until chapter 7, which devotes itself to some central elements of culture. Hereafter, when I seek to represent the perspective of early writers operating in a more uncritically patriarchal age, I shall use “Man” with an uppercase M. These writers often used “Man” to refer to our whole species, usually under the assumption that a male protagonist—an everyman—would better represent human virtues or embody our nobler flaws. All this said, with our species it is almost impossible to separate nature from culture. After all, human nature is often supposed to have been determined by our separation from “nonhuman” Nature (hereafter spelled with an uppercase N), and in particular from the animal kingdom—a separation given a positive emphasis in Judeo-Christian Scripture and in the ethics derived from it. To take two examples: according to the Bible, God created Man in His image and gave him dominion over animals (Genesis 1:26–27); in law, to kill another human Thematic Evolution 104 ▲ being deliberately is...