Explaining Humans
by Camilla Pang
Summary
Pang was diagnosed autistic at eight, and at five had asked her mother whether there was an instruction manual for humans, a manual for the species whose social rules everyone else seemed to have been issued at birth. Receiving no such book, she eventually wrote it, and this is it: a guide to human behaviour assembled from the sciences she trained in, by a bioinformatician who learned people the way she learned proteins, from first principles.
Each chapter takes a hard human problem and lends it a scientific model that genuinely illuminates. How to make decisions under uncertainty, taught through machine learning, when to think like a decision tree and when like a neural network. How to embrace difference, through proteins, whose wildly varied structures are each essential to the cellular team, her favourite metaphor and the book's warmest chapter. How to read the unwritten rules of politeness, through game theory; how to manage fear, through light refraction, the spectrum of a feeling separated into components; crowds and consensus through thermodynamics; relationships through chemical bonds, covalent to fleetingly ionic; memory and identity through waves.
The double exposure is the book's originality: it is simultaneously a science primer and a memoir of neurodivergence, the models presented not as whimsy but as the actual tools by which the author navigates offices, friendships and supermarkets, autism rendered from inside as a different operating system with its own advantages.
Around two hundred and sixty pages, direct and generous.
Best for readers who want science as survival kit, and the neurodiversity conversation advanced by a working scientist's own manual.
Historical Context & Significance
Explaining Humans won the Royal Society prize in 2020, and the win set records and precedents together: Camilla Pang, at twenty eight, was the youngest winner in the prize's history and its first winner of colour, a debut from a working postdoctoral scientist beating the year's established names. The Society's announcement called it an instruction manual for humans, adopting the book's own origin story.
Pang, who holds a UCL biochemistry doctorate and works in translational bioinformatics, became an immediate public voice for neurodivergence in science, the living counterexample to the field's stereotypes, and the book travelled into translation on the strength of that doubled identity.
Its prize year had its own weight: announced in pandemic lockdown, a season when the reading public's appetite for guides to disrupted human behaviour needed no explaining, and the judges' choice of warmth over spectacle read as exactly calibrated to the moment.