What Makes Us Humans

Book excerpt: The knowledge on human biology is blooming. Progresses in genomics, epigenetics, neurobiology, human evolution, population genetics, and prehistory is extremely fast presently. However, few bridges have been launched between these fields on one hand, and human sciences (ethics, politics, psychoanalysis, philosophy) on the other hand. Now knowledge on human nature and on what makes us specifically humans do need tight collaborations between biological and human sciences.One of the specific goals of the book is to sort out, in our knowledge on human nature, what is: (i) strongly supported; (ii) still speculative; (iii) still extremely tentative; (iv) obviously (sometimes purposely) misleading; (v) definitely to be rejected. Such a sorting out is sorely needed, since this theme is politically loaded and full of propaganda, storytelling and "fake news". This kind of endeavor is urgent because there is now a strong tendency in the general public to lose confidence in science and to believe in alternate sources of knowledge with uncertain backgrounds (social networks, internet).This books uniquely offers a thorough discussion, based on biology as well as on human sciences, on major societal debates of the time, such as origin of humankind, human genetic diversity, biology of cognition, science in front of intolerant ideologies, science and religion, and science and creationism/intelligent design. Its specific feature is sorted by the present states of knowledge, what is robust, then still speculative, unintentionally or intentionally ("scientific fake news") misleading, and obviously wrong. Thorough updating is based on more than 300 references from the specialized literature as well as from the general media. The book, which is written in an accessible language and is completed with a glossary of specialized terms, will be therefore profitable to specialists of the concerned fields, university professors, teachers, students, as well as the general public.