This chapter focuses on the figure of the Cyclops and the use of ‘the animal’ in thinking human difference. It presents the animalizing of certain humans (the attribution of animal features to them) as a potent strategy to dehumanize and thus marginalize certain ways of being human. In the ethnographic imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, the margins of the known world are shown to coincide with the margins of the human. The chapter further illustrates that this spatial concept of the human did not remain restricted to the ancient world but carries on into the modern: The figure of the Cyclops, whose problematic humanity is in sharp contrast to the enlightened, educated, and cunning Odysseus, in many ways anticipates that of ‘the savage’ as the quintessential ‘other’ in the modern Western ethnographic literature. And yet the question arises as to whether the ancient story does not already expose the kind of hubris at play when we normalize certain ways of being human while dismissing others.

Chapter three engages in the investigation of the meaning and role of natural selection, teleology and chance in evolutionary processes. From Aristotle and Aquinas, through Darwin and the twentieth-century evolutionary synthesis, to the most current philosophy of evolutionary biology, the fate of the notion of goal-directedness is traced and it is defended as indispensable and intrinsically related to chance in processes that affect the fittingness of organisms, which is tested by natural selection.

General introduction contextualizes research presented in the project and presents the three main conversation partners that are taken into account. First, it explains crucial stages of the development of evolutionary theory – from Darwin’s proposal, through the neo-Darwinian contribution and the two stages of the twentieth century evolutionary synthesis, until the most recent expanded evolutionary synthesis. Second, it lists foundational categories in the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics that become relevant in the context of contemporary evolutionary biology. Finally, it refers to the classical theology of creation as grounding a constructive model of the most up-to-date Thomistic version of theistic evolution that will be developed in the book. Introduction ends with a general plan of the project.

The best way to characterise the pleasure of thinking is to retrace its development. Chapter 2 thus approaches the pleasure of thinking from the perspective of developmental psychology. After a presentation of the meta-theoretical frame of a sociocultural, constructivist, developmental approach, the chapter first presents the classical observations made by Charles Darwin and Jean Piaget, both of whom identified manifestations of pleasure in young children. Second, the chapter examines the literature based on close analysis of parent-infant observations, which shows that from 3 or 4 months of age, children may experience playfulness, a shared pleasure in humorous situations, and the positive experience of being the author of their actions. Third, it presents literature on curiosity, humour, and interests in the preschool years, which reveals that children’s curiosity can be cultivated into interests. In school years, fourth, pleasure is often considered at the margin of the classroom, but also in relation to mathematics and, incidentally, in interactions. In the final section, the chapter rereads longitudinal data, retracing the conditions in which children may develop pleasure in learning and thinking.

Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

This chapter develops a novel reading of ‘Teleology’. The chapter shows why there is application for the concept of purpose if an objective process can be conceived of as realising an end. ‘Teleology’ examines what the relevant objective process must consist of. Hegel advocates that where there are causal processes that produce themselves by their peculiar configuration and dynamism, there are purposes that are carried out, provided that such self-production occurs at the expense of objectivity. The implication is that only where there is self-production and because of it, there is purposiveness – inner purposiveness, to be exact. As a consequence, the concept of inner purpose (or end in and for itself) captures the only paradigmatic meaning that the concept of purpose has. In light of Hegel’s argument, the claim that what is made of mechanical processes can truly be an end in and for itself becomes intelligible.

Tolstoy’s day-to-day engagement with nature shaped who he was and how he conceived of himself; it is reflected, abundantly, in what he wrote. But while the natural world remained an essential touchstone for Tolstoy for the whole of his life – a reservoir and measure of what was authentic and good – as he grew older this regard was tinged with ambivalence. He came to believe that not everything that was natural (war, violence, predation, sex) was necessarily good, and he appears to have doubted whether humans could live in a way that was at once fully natural and fully moral. This essay explores this central paradox of Tolstoy’s thinking, and focuses particular attention on the following aspects of his relationship with the natural world: the "green" creation myth that Tolstoy self-consciously fashioned about himself; the close link between nature and Tolstoy’s sense of the divine; Tolstoy’s presciently ecological conception of life in nature as a realm of both ceaseless "struggle" (war) and overarching harmony (peace); Tolstoy’s environmentalism.

This introduction asks what Darwin’s writings still offer to contemporary criticism and humanist thought, highlighting the implications of his work on ecologies, human difference, and aesthetics.

The ability of conscious human subjects to modify their behavior and adapt their institutions to changing circumstances has never been in question. Lamarck and Darwin innovated by making natural species the outcomes of adaptation to environmental pressures: thus, not only human institutions, but natural kinds, fell under the heading of choice and change. This plasticity raised the question of heritability, or the persistence of somatic learning across generations. Attempts to formulate a physical basis for inheritance through the second half of the nineteenth century relied on analogies drawn from technology and culture and, in return, suggested new ways of describing and explaining cultural facts. Neo-Lamarckianism in France spurred the creation of analogies involving biology, chemistry, psychology, and aesthetics, as a protest against the reduction of inheritance to features of the gene.

This chapter highlights passages from Darwin’s early writings that explore phonetics and phonology in the natural world, illuminating how sound lies at the heart of Darwin’s observational methodology. Darwin’s handwritten notes and early manuscripts, for example, demonstrate that his writing process relies upon experiencing the sonic texture and physiological dimension of nature. In order to communicate this sonic texture, Darwin uses elaborate metaphors and descriptions to recreate his own auditory experience within the mind’s eye (or ear) of his readers, in a process of auditory ekphrasis. Darwin’s attempts to represent birdsong, as well as his admittedly imperfect attempts to compare the sounds of a variety of animals, informed his understanding of the boundaries that differentiated species from each other. Ultimately, Darwin’s approaches to labeling sound at the intersection of different physiological, behavioral, and cultural registers exemplify the productive nature of a sound studies methodology in Victorian studies and beyond.

This chapter demonstrates ways in which Darwin challenged aspects of Enlightenment thought, including racial and sexual hierarchies, gendered stereotypes and androcentric perspectives. In doing so, he called into question Cartesian dualism—the separation of mind and body—and its colonial implications in configuring the body as unruly and in need of subjection to a scientific control that was masculine and European. Situating Darwin’s work in relation to contemporary political debates over race, slavery, and sex, it explores the forceful argument against innatism presented by Darwinian evolution, which undid biologistic arguments for biologically determined roles or behaviors, and shows that while he is often assumed to have occupied a separate and opposing camp to John Stuart Mill, which foregrounded biology rather than ethics, Darwin and Mill in fact shared notable common ground. It argues that, in a climate emergency and at a time of devastating and rising global poverty, Darwin’s strong sense of interdependence and interrelations counters authoritarian disregard for the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

Darwin’s theory of sexual selection has presented queer and trans theorists with a number of stumbling blocks, in that it centers heterosexual reproduction orchestrated between aggressive males and coy females. Some critics have suggested rectifying this problem by imagining sexual selection only with the pursuit of pleasure and aesthetics. But because it severs sexual selection from the “economy of nature,” this split is not able to offer a robust theory of how sexual object choices come into being or circulate. This chapter suggests that Darwin’s thinking about domestication may prove more useful for queer theory because it encompasses criteria pertinent to both sexual and natural selection and entails theorizing how it is that aesthetic criteria matter within the economy of a world in which an organism finds itself.

This chapter traces some of the lines of descent that race has followed since Darwin’s Origin of Species. Far from his work putting an end to the Species Question (whether human races constituted separate and unchanging species), race flourished not only in “social Darwinism” and eugenics, but also in various academic disciplines, law, social policy, and everyday life. The chapter discusses how race served as an organizing concept within natural history and remained such in the emerging sciences of life: in biology and sociology; in critical race theory’s uncritical use of scientific evidence that challenges racial categories; and in the way Darwin’s intervention into “the truth of race” remains central to notions of diaspora, homeland, identity, and the structural racialism of everyday life, even as his work is invoked to naturalize stereotyped racial phenotypes and to support racialized technologies, especially in robotics and applications of artificial intelligence.

At the heart of Charles Darwin’s place in environmental thought is a crucial tension: on the one hand, his work thoroughly dismantles the arguments for human exceptionalism, and dramatically minimizes the significance of the human species within the vast unfolding of geological and evolutionary history. On the other hand, his theorization of ecological interactivity laid the groundwork for conceptualizing the ways in which (some) human beings were having a massively outsized and growing impact upon the Earth’s ecosystems, including on the biosphere itself. As this chapter shows, questions about the proper scalar framework with which to understand the place of humanity and the scope of human agency within the natural order—questions which Darwin posed in profound and groundbreaking ways—continue to swirl around the Anthropocene concept and contemporary conversations about how to address the many interconnected ecological crises we face.

Modernity started with Darwin and probably reached its philosophical peak with Einstein. The appearance of modernity is associated with the rise of science as a dominant source of philosophical authority, and worldwide recognition of the rights of citizens, particularly women (the vote, birth control, etc.). For the first time, the orientation of philosophy was towards the future rather than the past, and ancient sources of knowledge, authority, and wisdom, were challenged. Some countries (e.g. Turkey under Ataturk) abandoned their past almost overnight. However, this is also the period of time when there were multiple challenges to the modern world view (based on democracy, the rights of citizens, and science). Religious reactionaries explicitly rejected modernity, whether it be in the form of creationist challenges to Darwinism or suppression of the burgeoning rights of women by the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Also, democracy as a model for government was challenged by fascism in the middle of the twentieth century, culminating in the mid-century wars of modernity: the Spanish Civil War and World War II. This chapter reviews the example of modern China, where the current government accepts some parts of traditional Western modernity while rejecting others.

This chapter provides an outline of Mendelian and molecular genetics, with a particular emphasis on how DNA provides evidence of a single origin for all living things. It discusses the role of genetics in serial homology, and how that demonstrates genetic relatedness among vertebrates especially, and it shows how homologous HOX genes provide the head–tail orientation and body plan segmentation for animals as diverse as the house fly and human, and that we see this same pattern of segmentation as far back as the Cambrian. It also explains how the independent DNA of mitochondria and chloroplasts provide evidence for a deep history of symbiosis between the host and parasite for both plants and animals. This chapter provides a support for later chapters reviewing principles of evolution and the evolutionary history of complex organisms.

Drawing on narrative theory, performance studies and the history and philosophy of science, this chapter explores the distinct kinds and functions of what we might call plant narratives – the stories we tell about botanical life, but also the stories that plants tell us. Charles Darwin’s botanical studies developed various techniques to study plant behaviour and record their movements in time. These methods drew scientific observers into an experimental ‘dance’ that aligned human and plant actions in order narratively to reconstruct evolutionary histories, especially histories of exaptation. These culminated in his last study, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), which uses extensive illustrations to record and then reconfigure these individual micro-histories as what Darwin termed the ‘life history of a plant’. Ultimately, its holistic account integrates these individual narratives and evolutionary history through a unified narrative, a conclusive Bildungsroman detailing a generic plant’s experiences over the course of its life.