The Edge Of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, And Doctor Moreau Hardcover

Ronald Edwards

The book presents a re-reading of H. G. Wells' novel "The Island of Doctor Moreau" as a key to addressing the controversies of our own humanity. Ron Edwards is a broadly-experienced researcher and teacher specializing in evolutionary theory, as well as a long-time participant in animal care oversight at a leading research institution. His careful examination in this book looks strictly at the novel's actual story to rehabilitate it from the widespread distorted version, and argues that the real story provides an outstanding means to confront human exceptionalism, a prevailing stopping-point for science and ethics. It integrates literature, history, and science; it bluntly criticizes, discloses, and advocates; and it combines accuracy with clarity, directed toward a lay audience. Finally, the book also raises a genuinely new and relevant issue: with human exceptionalism abolished, where do ethics come from?

9780190212094

English

Oxford University Press Inc

21/Apr/16

296

Ron Edwards is an author and most recently served as an Assistant Professor, DePaul University

Edwards takes us on a thoughtful exploration of the many far-reaching implications of a profoundly important, though often deeply disturbing, scientific fact: that we humans are animals. Furthermore, Edwards revisits The Island of Dr. Moreau, the classic, but widely misunderstood, 19th century novel by HG Wells, written to address the false human-animal dichotomy, and thus providing a refreshing literary approach to this topic for a general audience. --Dustin Penn, Head of the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, Department of Integrative Biology and Evolution, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna