"Beast and Man" was an examination of human nature and a reaction against the reductionism of sociobiology, and the relativism and behaviorism she saw as prevalent in much of social science. She argued that human beings are more similar to animals than many social scientists then acknowledged, while animals are in many ways more sophisticated than was often accepted. She criticised existentialists who argued that there was no such thing as human nature and writers such as Desmond Morris who she understood as arguing that human nature was "brutal and nasty". Instead, she argued that human beings and their relationship with animals could be better understood by using the qualitative methods of ethology and comparative psychology, and that this approach showed that "we do have a nature and it's much more in the middle."