Scientific developments have increasingly been transforming our understanding of the place of human beings in nature. The study of humanity, carried out in a variety of disciplines from anthropology and paleontology to genetics and neurosciences, is shedding new light on the origins and biological bases of human nature and culture. The findings of these relatively new hyphenated sciences have profound implications for the interpretation of human behavior within spiritual life no less than the material culture. This fine compendium serves as a splendid introduction to sociobiology. Sociobiology, now frequently being referred to by many as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology, first offered a radically selfish and individualist account of human nature. However, later researchers have moved away from such reductionisms, and into a sense of the common good that characterizes many species, and human brings as well. The emergence of discourses on the role of religion in understanding behavior in terms of moral considerations that permit people to live in community contexts has generated a lively examination within the new social sciences on the source of instinct, impulse, intelligence and interest. This compendium is clearly etched in a new and generous vision of human behavior that is at the same time rooted in the best of the current social sciences. "The Origins and Nature of" Sociality comes out of a symposium sponsored by the Program for Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and co-chaired by the editors. The contributors focus on the current status of research on sociality and the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behavior in nonhuman and human primates. They examine questions related to the evolution, cultural viability, and hormonal underpinnings of human sociality in specific detail, and describe patterns of sociality among nonhuman primates that many shed light on human social behavior. "Robert W. Sussman" is professor of anthropology, at Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared, among other places, in "The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Folia Primatology," and Zygon. "Audrey R. Chapman" serves as director of the Science and Human Rights program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington D.C.

This volume brings together experts in the fields of information ethics and health care to explore the impactions of these challenges as they impact what kind of care will be available, who will receive health care, and how the care is monitored. This fascinating study grew out of a project sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

As nations throughout the world emerge from periods of human rights abuses, systematic oppression, and collective violence, truth commissions have become indispensable to political transition. Such commissions are established as temporary bodies to investigate human rights violations and patterns of violence that occurred over a specified period of time. Their goal is to document conflict-to recover the truth-as a first step toward healing. Of the truth commissions to date, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has most effectively captured public attention throughout the world and provided the model for succeeding bodies. Although other truth commissions had preceded its establishment, the TRC had a far more expansive mandate: to go beyond truth-finding to promote national unity and reconciliation, to facilitate the granting of amnesty to those who made full factual disclosure, to restore the human and civil dignity of victims by providing them an opportunity to tell their own stories, and to make recommendations to the president on measures to prevent future human rights violations. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa provides a comprehensive evaluation of the TRC process and its impact on South African society. Based on a six-year study, the volume draws on an analysis of the victim hearings, amnesty hearings, institutional hearings, public opinion survey data, and extensive interviews with a range of TRC staff, people who worked with the commission, and members of different communities affected by the TRC. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa raises fundamental questions about the TRC, indeed about all truth commissions, their abilities to realize the mandates assigned to them, and particularly to achieve the difficult balance between truth-finding and reconciliation.

Arguing that health care should be a human right rather than a commodity, the distinguished contributors to this volume call for a new social covenant establishing a right to a standard of health care consistent with society's level of resources. By linking rights with limits, they offer a framework for seeking national consensus on a cost-conscious standard of universal medical care. The authors identify the policy implications of recognizing and implementing such a right and develop specific criteria to measure the success of health care reform from a human rights perspective.

"Health Care Reform" also offers specific and timely criticism of managed competition and its offspring, the Clinton plan for health care reform. Because health care reform will inevitably be an ongoing process of assessment and revision -- especially since managed competition has not been implemented elsewhere -- this book will last beyond the moment by providing vital standards to guide the future evolution of the health care system.

Written by a respected authority on human rights and public health, this book delivers an in-depth review of the challenges of neoliberal models and policies for realizing the right to health. The author expertly explores the integration of social determinants into the right to health along with the methodologies and findings of social medicine and epidemiology. The author goes on to challenge the way that health care is currently provided and makes the case that achieving universal health coverage will require fundamental health systems reforms.

Written by a respected authority on human rights and public health, this book delivers an in-depth review of the challenges of neoliberal models and policies for realizing the right to health. The author expertly explores the integration of social determinants into the right to health along with the methodologies and findings of social medicine and epidemiology. The author goes on to challenge the way that health care is currently provided and makes the case that achieving universal health coverage will require fundamental health systems reforms.

With vast new scientific and technological powers, we face unprecedented choices for which traditional ethics provide little direct guidance. What role can the religious community play in addressing the ethical and theological issues that even science now acknowledges as urgent? Chapman's work forges a method for integrating ethical reasoning with scientific data, focusing on four issues -- cloning, genetic engineering, patenting of life, and environmental alteration. For each, she reviews the work of religious thinkers, assesses the roles of the religious community, considers relevant confessional differences, determines how traditional theological and ethical concepts can be clarified, reformulated, and "operationalized" to meet the questions, and finally she formulates helpful methodological options. She calls for a scientifically informed religious ethics built dialogically from concepts in both science and theology.