The Beast Within: Humans as Animals

Summary

How different from animals are we really?

Are humans the only creatures who love, laugh, cry, possess morals, and wage war? In The Beast Within, scientific researcher and ethologist Jessica Serra upends the assumptions that underpin our very human hypothesis that we possess a superior place in the hierarchy of organisms on Earth. How did we come to think of our animality as standing in opposition to our humanity—and does this reasoning have a scientific basis?

Through the fascinating discoveries made by ethologists, anthropologists, and archeologists, Serra deciphers our behaviors in light of their animal roots and demystifies ideas about how different animals are from humans. She compares human behaviors with those exhibited by other species in chapters spanning topics as varied as sex, morality, emotions, intelligence, and family. Exploring the evolution of various animal species, as well as the evolution of historical ideas about humanity and animality, Serra theorizes that human behaviors and motivations may hold more in common with those of animals than we think. These explorations of scientific findings encourage us to reconsider how much we have truly removed ourselves from "the beast within."