快猫短视频

So You Think You鈥檙e Human? by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Oxford University Press, 拢14.99, ISBN 0192804170 Reviewed by Simon Ings

WE humans may like to think that we are unique, but our social skills, our inventiveness, our moral sense, our gift for languages, and more than 95 per cent of our genome are shared with other species. We are unique, 鈥渂ut not with any unique sort of uniqueness鈥�.

In So You Think You鈥檙e Human? historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto describes how humanity first convinced itself of its own specialness, only to see that specialness whittled away on two fronts: by awkward findings from the natural world, and by bitter (broadly speaking, racist) experiences from within the human community.

Fernandez-Armesto鈥檚 sympathetic handling of his subjects (human and non-human) makes this a playful and entertaining book. Nevertheless, its intellectual compass is huge: nothing less than a history of our most abiding aspirations and our most divisive prejudices.