Neuroscientist Steven Rose offers a theory of life that insists that we as humans - along with all living creatures - create our own futures, though in circumstances not of our own choosing. Placing the organism at the centre of life, Rose directly confronts the ideology of reductionism and ultra-Darwinism, with its headline-grabbing insistence that all aspects of human life from sexual preference to infanticide, political orientation to violence, male domination to alcoholism, are in our genes and are the inevitable consequence of natural selection. Rose argues that life depends on the elaborate web of interactions that occurs within cells, organisms and ecosystems, in which DNA plays one part among many.