WHAT IS MAN?:
Adam, Alien or Ape?
By Edgar Andrews
Elm Hill (Harper Collins). 327 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 595 556 844
The subject couldn’t be more important. This book deals with the leading intellectual question of the day: how does humanity ‘fit’ in the world of Science – are human beings, like the waxing and waning of the moon, just physical phenomena?
Closely related to that is an increasing discomfort with science itself: has the discipline lost sight of its original calling to ‘follow the facts wherever they lead’? Has it become a propaganda machine for scepticism? The author is in no doubt. As his extract in the September en puts it ‘… science is today commonly recruited to promote agnosticism, atheism or mere indifference to anything of a spiritual nature…’.
