Testing human nature

摘要

In Lord of the Flies - a novel about a group of young boys stranded on an island - William Golding asks "What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?" Golding's story is essentially a thought experiment about human nature. Fascinating as it is, hopefully it will always remain a thought experiment. Leaving a group of children on an island and seeing how it pans out will never be ethically acceptable. Literature is a good forum for such an exercise. But why should novelists have all the fun? Given what we know about biological and cultural evolution, it should now be possible to perform a more scientific version of the thought experiment to work out what would really happen. And so we went ahead (see page 30).