Do our genes determine our behavior? Do education and environment have any influence at all? Do humans occupy a unique position in evolution? To clarify these provoking questions, the author takes the reader on an ambitious and entertaining journey through a variety of scientific disciplines. In doing so, he creates an image of human evolution that says that our entire individual knowledge is determined - to the smallest detail - by phylogeny. " ... before shocked humanists discard such radical theses as mere nonsense, they should not completely close their minds to the explanations of a biologist who says that we still know very little about the genetic determination of human behavior and that the invariance of many forms of behavior present in all cultures nourish the suspicion that the determining role of genes is probably far more comprehensive than we have ever dreamed."
Wolfgang Wieser, translated from his review in "Merkur" (Sept./Oct. 1999)

Nature Explains Nurture

1 The Myth of a Wonder of Nature
2 Evolutionary Epistemology or the Difficulties of Getting Started
3 To Be or Not to Be
4 Chance as Necessity
5 The Indivisible Individual
6 L=C
7 The Central Dogma Reformulated
8 Learning: Appearances are Deceptive
9 Edelman's Errors
10 On the Heritability of Jazzophilia
11 A Superfluous Law of Evolution
12 The "Wonder" of Language
13 Intelligent Sex: A Cognitivist View of Genetic Exchange Processes
14 How to Explain Consciousness
15 The True Nature of Scientific Revolutions
16 "Evolution Has Us in Its Grip"
17 The Survival of the Most Intelligent
18 The Cultural Struggle of Genes
19 Requiem for a Wonder of Nature
Literature
Acknowledgement of sources.