Following my ‘First Anniversary' post, this would be a good time to mention more about the mentality I bring to this blog. My undergraduate degree was in Human Biology, as studied at the University of Surrey. There the course and department flourished between the 1970s and early 1980s, but now neither exist. Its demise began in the early 1980s with university cutbacks. Deemed more economically viable, an undergraduate nursing degree program ultimately took Human Biology’s place.
Interestingly, while the course did exist, no strict definition of the course title was ever given. What ‘Human Biology’ was, or how it should be understood, was never strictly prescribed. Whether it was a deliberate decision to remain uncommitted to a strict definition of ‘Human Biology’ is unclear. However, I think that this lack of definition was ultimately a good thing. We were left as students to discover what human biology was—and what it could be—for ourselves. Furthermore, whatever it was was not necessarily the same for every student. The course had many different and quite diverse facets. Each of us was allowed to develop our specific interests to the full. Each of us was a human biologist in our own particular ways. That is not to say that some commonality did not unite us.
There was a book that might be called the ‘book of the course.’ That was Human Biology (Harrison, Weiner, Tanner, & Barnicott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Even though that book considered many of the facets of the course, it gave only a flavour of the breadth of our course. More importantly, what it gave was a sense of the ethos of the course. Nowhere was this better set out than in the Foreword written by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sir Peter Medawar (1915-1987). In it he describes how he understood human biology. It is worth quoting from it extensively. Medawar suggested that...
"Human Biology is not so much a discipline as a certain attitude of mind towards the most interesting and important of animals. Human Biology portrays mankind on a canvas that serves also for other living things. It is about men rather than man: about their origin, evolution, and geographical deployment; about the growth of human populations and their structure in space and time; about human development and all that it entails of change in size and shape. Human Biology deals with human heredity, the human genetical system, and the nature and import of the inborn differences between individuals; with human ecology and physiology, and with the devices by which men have met the challenges of enemies and of hostile environments. Human Biology deals also with human behaviour - not with its wayward variations from one individual to another, but rather with the history and significance of, for example, family life; of love, play, showing off, and real or sham aggression. Finally, and most importantly - because most distinctively human - it must expound and explain the nature, origin and development of communication between human beings and the non-genetical system of heredity founded upon it."
(NB Writing in 1964, we must allow for how he refers to ‘men’ and ‘man.’ While it does not sound inclusive, human beings in every manifestation are included. If that were not implicitly the case, then Human Biology would be worthless.)
Reading for a degree, one does not usually read books from cover to cover. One typically omits prefaces, forewords, etc. It was only some years after graduation, when studying Medawar’s philosophical thought for a Master’s dissertation, that I bothered to read that foreword. Ironically, it was only then that I read a description of what I had already found to be the case for my undergraduate course. I am particularly drawn to the sentence, “Human Biology is not so much a discipline as a certain attitude of mind towards the most interesting and important of animals.”
Human Biology then is a way of thinking about ourselves.
