Robert Winston: Human Instinct

By MARGIE THOMSON

Robert Winston has been a most endearing presence on our screens in series such as The Human Body and Super-human (rescreening now on TV One), and Human Instinct also accompanies a television series, albeit not one planned for our screens yet.

This time we travel back to the savannah, where we lived almost all our lives, the first almost 5 million years, before the blip that was the last 100,000 or so. It was there that the instincts that drive our behaviour were developed, instincts for survival, sexual drive, competition, aggression, altruism, our search for knowledge and our need for something more, perhaps divine.

There is a tension between our Stone Age instincts and the stresses and strains imposed by post-industrial civilisation, he writes. He incorporates the enormous sweep of human behaviour, and the vast amount of theorising and research being carried out into it, but Winston is unfailingly accessible, and this is a fascinating book.

Bantam

$65