Human, All Too Human

摘要

The basic premise of Dr. Carin Bondar's Nature of Human Nature is that human behavior and intentions and the adaptive strategies of ants, birds, spiders, non-human primates, and fish can illuminate one another. After a brief introduction explaining natural selection and introducing the question, Are humans a part of nature?, Dr. Bondar puts this premise to work in a series of vignettes that are divided into two main parts, "survive" and "reproduce." These are further subdi-vided into chapters, each of which focuses on a different aspect of survival or reproduction. Each chapter con-sists of two- to three-page unnumbered sections, each of which centers upon a different animal behavior. Dr. Bondar focuses on kinds of behaviors that might seem to us to be especially characteristic of our species, or perhaps unique to us.