A look within

摘要

Some 2,500 years ago, legend has it, visitors to the Oracle at Delphi in Ancient Greece had to pass by an inscription bearing the words gnothi seauton - know thyself. That advice is as wise today as it was then - and as hard to follow. Modern science can help, but using it to uncover truths about ourselves can also be fraught with difficulty. Consider, for example, that an important first step towards understanding contemporary human behaviour - establishing the evolutionary context in which it emerged - means piecing together odd scraps of evidence left by our hunter-gatherer ancestors tens of thousands of years ago. The paucity of data makes it all too easy to come up with untested, and even untestable, Darwinian versions of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Another major challenge for researchers is being objective about a topic as philosophically, politically and ethically charged as human nature. Take the sociobiology wars of the 1970s and 1980s. Left-wing scholars rejected biological explanations for phenomena such as gender roles, religion, homosexuality and xenophobia, largely because they feared such explanations would be used to justify a continuation of existing inequalities on genetic grounds. The resulting debates became hugely political.