I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book. I found this book incredibly interesting the author really kept me hooked until the end. very well written I highly recommend.

This nonfiction chapter sample was hard to get through. It read a lot like an accredited college research paper, instead of the beginnings of a book. I was expecting some general information about this part of Darwin’s theories on Natural selection and how they related to the human’s and cannibalism. Instead, I felt like I was being crushed under all the information that was being thrown at me and it was only the first portion of the book. It also kept branching off from subject matter to subject matter, that I would get so lost about which topic we started off with. The writing was very argumentative and chaotic.
I received this ebook, via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

In general I find this book quite confusing. It was hard to focus and understand what the author mean. I believe the subject approached in this book is interesting but not well explored. I am a biologist myself and I though this would be a relaxing reading, but that was not how I felt. This is a sample just of the first chapter, but I wanted to gave up on reading it even before the end of the first chapter.

This book stinks too high heaven! Please avoid it at all costs!
In the second half of the 19th century, Charles Darwin published his two very famous books about evolution. But Mr. Darwin could not decide if human morality was a genetic adaptation or was rooted in human culture. In the end, he opted for culture as the correct answer. Regrettably, for Mr. Darwin, science has since the completion of the Genome Project in 2000 found that human morality has a wholly genetic basis. Simply put, it too has evolved and is today part of our DNA.
Sadly, James Miles has seen fit to not read about any of this compelling scientific research and instead persists in offering only a cultural explanation. Even worse, in Chapters 2 & 3 of his horrible book, he engages in almost endless name-calling that is completely unnecessary. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 are worth reading provided that you remember that they are 100% false (they do lay out the now discarded arguments that culture is the correct answer to Darwin's conundrum.)
Perhaps the author's very worst transgressions appear later in his book as he adopts newspaper stories as the sole basis for his now very outdated claims. For example, he trashed Robert Plomin's 2018 book, Blueprint, based solely on a review that appeared in the Guardian which is clearly the most left-wing newspaper in the free world.
JIn the end James Miles comes across as only an underinformed angry crank who refuses to remain current on the compelling scientific findings that have been unfolding during the last 20 years. Do not waste your money on this terrible tome! I would give it zero stars if I could.

I got a digital galley of this book via NetGalley. I find the book to be a bit confusing. The good thing is that it is a short book, so can be read quickly. I believe The Central premise that humans are born as amoral as any other animal and that it is only the culture that brings in the concept of morality seems to be true, at least to me. Though this might contradict a lot of religious concepts of humans, I find that the logical deductions point to this fact.

Overall, I thought that the book could have been structured a bit differently so that it could make reading and understanding the book easier.

I echo the first reviewer's damning assessment of this book (based on the Kindle sample which includes only its first chapter): it ignores huge swathes of work by evolutionary biologists and evolutionary-oriented psychologists, cognitive scientists and anthropologists on the nature and origins of morality. Perhaps its polemical thesis is worth exploring, but for reasons having little to do with a considered appreciation of the relevant literatures.