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Renowned philosopher Mary Midgley explores the nature of our moral constitution to challenge the view that reduces human motivation to self-interest. Midgley argues cogently and convincingly that simple, one-sided accounts of human motives, such as the 'selfish gene' tendency in recent neo-Darwinian thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic. Such neatness, she shows, cannot be imposed on human psychology. She returns to Darwin's original writings to show how the reductive individualism which is now presented as Darwinism does not derive from Darwin but from a wider, Hobbesian tradition in Enlightenment thinking. She reveals the selfish gene hypothesis as a cultural accretion that is just not seen in nature. Heroic independence is not a realistic aim for Homo sapiens. We are, as Darwin saw, earthly organisms, framed to interact constantly with one another and with the complex ecosystems of which we are a tiny part. For us, bonds are not just restraints but also lifelines.

Is our motivation to be moral determined totally by our genes, or are there other factors at work? This is the only book to examine the field in its entirety, starting with Darwin and moving on to explore how morality could have evolved, and what we can learn from the discovery of so-called genes for human behaviour. In a powerful conclusion, Levy argues that while our moral motives are products of evolution, so are our immoral ones. We are only truly human when we rise above our ‘selfish genes’.