Abstract
This book investigates the image of humans in the works of several important biologists since about 1850 until the present day: Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Alfred R. Wallace (1823-1913), Edward O.
Wilson (born 1929), Adolf Portmann (1898-1982), Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1928-2018). In general, a particular view of humans, their origins, eventually development, but also their characteristics, nature, and behaviours are part of the very foundations of each society.
Such image of humanity is then also the starting point of a number of other fields of human activity, for instance ethics. Nevertheless, we often fail to take into account sociomorphic modelling, where each society views living nature, including humans, through a prism of its own functioning.
Each society tends to see as decisive and constitutive of nature those elements and phenomena which are of crucial importance to itself. So for instance classical Darwinism tended to see nature as being moulded by struggle for survival, competition for resources, and by the 'invisible hand' of natural selection, which was remarkably similar to the 'invisible hand' of the market.
In short, classical Darwinism saw nature as determined by the same forces as society of the Victorian era. It is not surprising that each society eventually comes to view itself as analogous to living nature, but from the vast 'supermarket' of manifestations of life it always picks those which confirm its own functioning.
The author also investigates differences between Anglo-Saxon and Continental - especially German - biological thinking. The book also analyses a variety of social phenomena and trends which were in some way reflected in the biological concept of humans, a generally rather sensitive affair, in the works of the abovementioned authors and during the period in question.