No Two Alike Human Nature And Human Individuality

"A display of scientific courage and imagination." —William Saletan, New York Times Book Review Why do people—even identical twins reared in the same home—differ so much in personality? Armed with an inquiring mind and insights from evolutionary psychology, Judith Rich Harris sets out to solve the mystery of human individuality.

Harris takes on the "experts" and boldly questions conventional wisdom of parents' role in their children's lives, asserting that it's not the home environment that shapes children, but the environment they share with their peers.

Follows a pair of birds on a snowflake-filled journey through a winter landscape, where everything everywhere, from branches and leaves to forests full of trees, is unique.

If he had been pressed, Macaulay would probably have admitted that there are cases in which human acts and impulses to act occur independently of any idea of an end to be gained by them. If I have a piece of grit in my eye and ask some one to take it out with the corner of his handkerchief, I generally close the eye as soon as the handkerchief comes near, and always feel a strong impulse to do so. Nobody supposes that I close my eye because, after due consideration, I think it my interest to do so.

A superb introduction to the timeless struggle to understand human nature, this book compresses into a small volume the essence of such thinkers as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean Paul Sartre, B.F. Skinner, and Plato.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK How much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out welt? How much blame when they turn out badly? Judith Rich Harris has a message that will change parents' lives: The "nurture assumption" -- the belief that what makes children turn out the way they do, aside from their genes, is the way their parents bring them up -- is nothing more than a cultural myth. This electrifying book explodes some of our unquestioned beliefs about children and parents and gives us a radically new view of childhood. Harris looks with a fresh eye at the real lives of real children to show that it is what they experience outside the home, in the company of their peers, that matters most, Parents don't socialize children; children socialize children. With eloquence and humor, Judith Harris explains why parents have little power to determine the sort of people their children will become. The Nurture Assumption is an important and entertaining work that brings together insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology to offer a startling new view of who we are and how we got that way.

A must-read for anyone who has ever wondered why people do what they do, from the popular author of The Naked Ape. This study concerns the city dweller. Morris finds remarkable similarities with captive zoo animals and looks closely at the aggressive, sexual and parental behaviour of the human species under the stresses and pressures of urban living. ‘Compelling and absorbing...Morris is concerned with the tension between our biology and our culture, as it is expressed in power, sex, status and war games’ New York Times

Man is the Cruelest Animal features four main themes and essays on the human-animal link: History, Cruelty, Activism and Perspectives. Each theme is comprised of four peer-reviewed essays. In History, the centuries-old animal protection societies that preceded the modern animal rights movement of the 1970s are described. Cruelty highlights what drives animal activist campaigns, especially practices involving the (ab)use of animals in food production, research, entertainment and hunting. Activism analyses the strategies—persuasion, protest, non-cooperation and interference—and the associated tactics of animal activists in the USA, the UK and Australia. Perspectives identifies some of the conflicts involving counter movements against the theory and practice of animal rights and the prospect of achieving common cause in resolving the worst features of human-animal interactions. The concluding section of the book is in two parts: Part 1 focuses on Pandemics and Life Chances, a topic that is of obvious relevance in the current era, while Part 2 features an annotated guide to recommended reading on the four main themes covered in the book.