Originally published in 1977, the papers collected in this volume consider one of the most controversial issues in the human sciences: heredity versus environment. A.H. Halsey shows both pure geneticism and pure environmentalism to be over-simplified approaches to the explanation of human behaviour. He encourages the modern student of the human sciences to think in terms of interactive causation. Contributions to the study of heredity and environment are found in all the biological, psychological and social sciences and among the scholars represented in this book are geneticist W.F. Bodmer, ethologist N. Tinbergen, economist James Meade, anthropologist Mary Douglas and psychologist A. R. Jensen. There is a substantial introduction to the book by the editor, which adds significantly to the debate.

A.H. Halsey (1923–2014) was concerned with the issues of inequality, social mobility and education. He was one of the most prominent academic champions of the comprehensive school, and an adviser (1965-68) to the Labour education secretary Anthony Crosland. He edited Traditions of Social Policy (1976), a collection on the development of sociology and social work in Britain. His Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and Education in Modern Britain (with AF Heath and JM Ridge, 1980) explores the "political arithmetic" of how educational expansion has affected life chances and social mobility. The research he undertook with Ivor Crewe for the Fulton committee on reforming the civil service was published as volume three of its report (1969). Halsey was director of the department of social and administrative studies and fellow of Nuffield College, and from 1978 as professor, becoming emeritus in 1990. Academic honours followed in Britain and the US, including a fellowship of the British Academy. In 1989, Halsey edited an issue of the British Journal of Sociology entitled The Present State of Sociology in Britain. Towards the end of his career, Halsey took a special interest in higher education, expressed not only in his participation in the official Oxford History of the University, but also in his book Decline of Donnish Dominion (1992).