So Human an Animal
by René Dubos
Summary
René Dubos spent his working life as a microbiologist, the scientist who isolated tyrothricin and gramicidin from soil bacteria in 1939, among the first antibiotics ever drawn directly from nature, and who warned as early as 1942 that bacteria would eventually evolve resistance to the drugs built to kill them. So Human an Animal turns that scientific career toward a much broader question: what happens to human beings, physically and psychologically, when they build environments, cities, workplaces, whole ways of living, that move faster than the slow pace of biological evolution can keep up with.
Dubos argues that modern technological life, for all its comforts, risks producing a mismatch between the environments people actually build and the bodies and minds evolution shaped over a far longer span of time, and he insists that scientific progress has to be judged by its effect on human flourishing rather than by efficiency or output alone. The book draws on his own laboratory background alongside ecology and a broadly humanist reading of history, making the case that treating people as biological organisms embedded in an environment, rather than as abstract economic units, has to become part of how modern societies plan cities, workplaces, and medicine.
It is closer to an extended argument than to a narrative, written by a working scientist for an educated general audience rather than for other specialists, and it suits a reader drawn to early, serious writing about what later became environmentalism, arriving years before the term was common currency. Dubos writes with real conviction but without alarmism, more interested in reorienting how readers think about progress than in prophesying disaster.
Historical Context & Significance
Scribner published So Human an Animal in 1968, and it shared the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction with Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, a tie between a scientist's argument about human biology and environment and a novelist's account of an antiwar march, two books that could hardly have looked more different sharing the same prize. Dubos would go on nearly a decade later to popularize the phrase think globally, act locally, a line that grew directly out of the argument this book had already been making about environments and the people who live in them.
The book became an early and influential text in the environmental movement's intellectual history, cited later by writers examining the period's growing unease with unchecked technological progress; one 1976 study of engineering culture named it a central document of that unease. Dubos's scientific credentials gave the argument a weight that purely literary environmental writing of the same years did not always carry with skeptical readers.