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.

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.

This chapter sets out the central argument of this book – that personal bioinformation has critical roles to play in our construction of self-narratives that are capable of remaining coherent and inhabitable when confronted by our embodied and socially embedded experiences and of supporting us in making sense of and navigating these experiences. It suggests that our lives and experiences are inescapably those of embodied beings and outlines what is entailed by this claim. It proposes that any satisfactory account of narrative self-constitution must accommodate the significance of our embodiment as the context in which we construct our self-narratives and as the source of both narrative contents and limits upon unfettered self-definition. From these premises, this chapter argues that personal bioinformation – to the extent that it provides reliable and meaningful insights into our bodily and biological states, capacities, and relationships – can provide vital constitutive and interpretive tools for the interpretation and construction of our embodied self-narratives. This discussion distinguishes its position from suggestions that personal bioinformation gets us closer to narrative ‘truth’ and responds to concerns that proposing a narrative role for bioinformation commits us to the view that our identities are defined by our biology or bodies as objects.

Future biologists require a profound understanding of leading biological concepts, mechanisms, methods, experimental design and data analysis on top of subject-specific expertise. Early and continued exposure to undergraduate research (UR) formats offers a central key to train the next generation of biologists, to drive student motivation and to facilitate early career decisions. UR formats can be classified at different pedagogical levels. At the highest level, students conduct their own independent research and create new knowledge. Course-based research experiences (CUREs) are suitable for larger groups and produce outcomes similar to research internships but require increased creativity on the side of faculty, depending on the respective framework and group size. To implement UR represents a challenge for faculty, as roles change from teaching toward mentoring, increasing the workload. Nevertheless, biology offers a wide variety of anchors for UR formats that are most suitable as an active learning element in biology education to balances pedagogical and research goals and increase student motivation.

Chapter 2 argues that although the Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment offers an argument for the necessity of teleological judgments of organisms, Kant is ultimately interested in the conceptual purposiveness of nature as a whole. He constructs an argument from the organism to this conclusion, because it allows him to assimilate characteristic features of a dialectic, specifically the fact that it ensnares ordinary understanding. This serves the end of showing that although the principle of the purposiveness of nature is a transcendental principle of reason, employing it is free of the sort of contradictions that typically beset reason. It has a legitimate and indeed necessary role to play in experience. The chapter further argues that the discussion of the methodology of biology is of great philosophical interest. For Kant all causal explanations are mechanistic and he develops a unique model for mechanistic explanations of the processes through which organisms produce or organize themselves. Teleological judgments of organic nature are not therefore a threat to the project of the comprehensive mechanistic explanation of the natural world. The chapter demonstrates this by examining Kant’s views of contemporary theories of generation, Blumenbach, his papers on human races and his evolutionary speculation.

Dental cementum, enveloping the tooth root and buried under the gingiva, was the last of the dental mineralized tissues to be discovered. Details of human cementum structure were not revealed until the advent of compound microscopes and invention of advanced histology techniques. The function of cementum in tooth attachment was not appreciated until nearer the end of the 19th century, when the anatomy of the periodontal complex was more fully realized. There are several unanswered questions and controversies remaining about cementum biology, however, there is no question about its critical role in tooth retention and oral health, and by extension, in overall health and quality of life. In this introductory chapter, we will summarize current knowledge of cementum biology, including cementum formation, types, composition, and clinical aspects necessary when employing and interpreting TCA measurements.

The rise and ease of genome-editing technologies, like CRISPR, has ushered in communities of “biohackers,” do-it-yourself enthusiasts for molecular genetics who perform experiments outside traditional institutional laboratory settings. Conventional wisdom posits that such research is beyond traditional modes of regulation or legal enforcement and that new biohacking laws are needed. This view, however, is incorrect; both public and private regulators currently possess–and in other contexts, use–many of the tools needed to regulate the safety and ethics of biohacking. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for example, has expansive authority over “biologics,” which includes many of the biohacking kits currently in use. Patent holders and community laboratories similarly have the power to impose ethical and safety restrictions on biohacking activities. Rather than new laws or stiffer enforcement, regulators should do what they do for other industries: actively engage with the community to educate and promote the advancement of technology.

The interest taken by Surrealists in alchemy has been well known since the late 1940s, but knowledge of their preoccupation with modern science is more recent. This chapter observes the Surrealist penchant for premodern, occultist epistemologies before focusing on their take up of modern physics in the early 1920s. The theory of relativity (1905 and 1915–16) and developments in quantum mechanics (1922–7) were then undergoing popularization. Apart from popular articles in newspapers/journals, this occurred partly through physicists’ own writings and partly through the philosophy of science. This chapter indicates the importance to Surrealism of the writings of the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard. It also features a case study of the work of German physicist Pascual Jordan whose attempt to extend the findings of quantum mechanics to biology was known to Max Ernst and used by the Surrealists to justify the rejection of positivism. So modern physics became a means of retrospectively comprehending the Surrealists’ turn towards automatism and Ernst’s own natural history incursions. His response to Jordan’s writings offers an alternative way of reading his work.

Sea of Cortez is part travelogue and part marine biology textbook that Steinbeck coauthored with his friend Ed Ricketts. This chapter examines Steinbeck’s interest in science, in species, and in the possibility of a shift in human consciousness offered by his encounter with Mexico. Placing Steinbeck’s book in the context of theories of the borderland and ideas of the Global South, together with his education in biology and “non-teleological thinking” gained from Ricketts, we uncover Steinbeck’s ecological vision that rejects progressive, goal-directed thinking. Sea of Cortez imagines an ideal of humanity, in harmony with its environment, found in moments of deep observation and passive description of other species. This descriptive method enables a complete understanding of other animals, an ecological sense of species interrelationship, and the possibility for new ways of being on the planet in the face of human extinction. The chapter ends by tracing Steinbeck’s understanding of Mexico’s indigenous population, which offers the potential of a holisitc, non-teleological existence, even as Steinbeck cannot fully transcend the barriers and prejudices of race.

This chapter offers an overview of the reception of Aristotle’s biology in antiquity and beyond. It argues that Aristotle’s biology remained largely at the margins of the philosophical tradition even after the so-called return to Aristotle in the first century BC. The relative lack of engagement with Aristotle’s biological works reflects a change in the philosophical agenda. While Aristotle placed great emphasis on the philosophical dimension of his biology, his immediate successors considered biology an expendable part of their agenda. For a full appreciation of what Aristotle achieved in the field of biology, we have to go beyond antiquity. The reappropriation of Aristotle’s biological writings was a gradual process that began in the Arabic world and continued in the Latin world.