Recent research achievements in molecular biology-specifically in genetics and neuroscience-have done much to blur the boundaries between feeling and reason, mind and body, and normal and abnormal. This dissolution of binary oppositions is giving rise to a new concept of humans, and some British novelists, such as Ian McEwan, Simon Mawer and David Lodge, are responding to this movement. They are trying to obtain a comprehensive understanding of humans which derives not only from philosophical knowledge but also from biological one, thereby establishing a new type of humanism.