Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene

In Lifelines, neuroscientist Steven Rose offers a theory of life that insists that we as humans - along with all living creatures - create our own futures, though in circumstances not of our own choosing. Placing the organism at the centre of life, Rose directly confronts the ideology of reductionism and ultra-Darwinism, with its headline-grabbing insistence that all aspects of human life from sexual preference to infanticide, political orientation to violence, make domination to alcoholism, are in our genes and are the inevitable consequence of natural selection. Rose asserts that such claims are not merely socially naive, but fundamentally misunderstand the active and irreducible nature of living processes.