That most complex of things—us. (And then you look at a spider web…)
Humans are not empty organisms, free spirits constrained only by the limits of our imaginations or, more prosaically, by the social and economic determinants within which we live, think and act. Nor are we reducible to ‘nothing but’ machines for the replication of our DNA. We are, rather, the products of the constant dialectic between ‘the biological’ and ‘the social’ through which humans have evolved, history has been made and we as individuals have developed.
—Steven Rose, Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene
looking up/looking down 