The chapter introduces Churchill’s army career between 1895 and 1900, but does so from an important new perspective: using his exploits in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa to explore the origins of his lifelong interest in intelligence and clandestine operations. It argues that his first foray overseas to Cuba was in the ‘well-established tradition of the British amateur spy’ but that he maintained his interest in military intelligence thereafter through the connections he made to support his writing and journalism on the Indian north-west frontier, while attached to Kitchener’s expedition in the Sudan and later as a war correspondent and then soldier in South Africa. The author looks at the intelligence lessons that Churchill learned, including the power of guerrilla insurrection, the importance of properly resourced intelligence services, the comparative roles of the civil and military intelligence arms and the need for a managed relationship with the press.

This chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Boucicault, Gregory, Walsh, and Lloyd are counterpointed to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and What Where, which theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than ideological determination.

Chapter 12 considers why Homo sapiens needs a new name.

Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

Chamberlain and Churchill’s characters and attitudes to war are compared as a partial explanation of their different reactions to events in the 1930s. The two men are placed in the context of how foreign and defence policy was formed, and the principal people with whom they interacted in Whitehall are introduced. Particular attention is paid to the limitations of the intelligence services and to Churchill’s contacts and sources of information, including membership of an official committee on air defence.

This chapter discusses the ways in which natural selection has acted on the animal and primate brain, demonstrating that the human brain is better at some tasks, whereas other animals are better at certain others (e.g. special memory and chimpanzees). Human brains are the results of selection for very specific tasks, largely relating to social information. It also discusses the role of metabolism in brain evolution, reviewing the ‘expensive tissue hypothesis’. It summarizes brain anatomy, and shows that, anatomically, the human brain is essentially a scaled-up primate brain. Finally, it discusses the idea of consciousness, the ways we evaluate it in other animals, and how it may have arisen.

Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Myside bias is displayed by people in all demographic groups, and it is exhibited even by expert reasoners, the highly educated, and the highly intelligent. Surprisingly, however, the degree of myside bias shown is not predictable from individual difference variables that we would expect to be associated with it. For example, it is not attenuated by cognitive sophistication, as measured by cognitive ability or thinking dispositions. Another way in which myside bias is an outlier bias is that, in most circumstances, it shows very little domain generality and appears to be very content dependent. Individuals who display high myside bias on one issue do not necessarily show high myside bias on another, unrelated issue. Because of these unusual characteristics, myside bias needs a different type of model – a content-based model, such as those deriving from memetic theory.

In this chapter, the philosopher Christoph Durt elaborates a novel view on AI and its relation to humans. He contends that AI is neither merely a tool, nor an artificial subject, nor necessarily a simulation of human intelligence. These misconceptions of AI have led to grave misunderstandings of the opportunities and dangers of AI. A more comprehensive concept of AI is needed to better understand the possibilities of responsible AI. The chapter shows the roots of the misconceptions in the Turing Test. The author argues that the simplicity of the setup of the Turing Test is deceptive, and that Turing was aware that the text exchanges can develop in much more intricate ways than usually thought. The Turing Test only seemingly avoids difficult philosophical questions by passing on the burden to an evaluator, who is part of the setup, and hides in plain sight his or her decisive contribution. Durt shows that, different from all previous technology, AI processes meaningful aspects of the world as experienced and understood by humans. He delineates a more comprehensive picture according to which AI integrates into the human lifeworld through its interrelations with humans and data.

Belief in biological races remains prevalent in the early 21st century despite opposing logical arguments and an abundance of converging evidence from multiple scientific disciplines. Structural and interpersonal racism, among the most salient issues today, are empowered and perpetuated by false claims and misconceptions about human origins, kinships, and differences. The best current science and historical knowledge make clear that races are cultural inventions that are not aligned with biological realities. Acknowledging the errors and falsehoods that provide the framework for biological race belief is not an attempt to deny real genetic variation or the importance of cultural races. This chapter reviews critical challenges to biological race belief and presents examinations of three of the most contentious and confounding race topics: IQ tests and intelligence, health and healthcare disparities, and sports as a popular source of misinterpretation and confusion. An evidence-based perception of humankind offers both laypersons and scientists a more productive position from which to understand our diversity and alleviate racism.

This chapter highlights the close interconnection between cosmology and human nature in the Timaeus. According to Timaeus, human beings are not merely part of the cosmos; they play a crucial role in explaining how the cosmos came to be. The cosmos must contain three kinds of mortal beings in order to be complete, and all three derive from human beings, as a result of varying degrees of moral and cognitive failure. Recognizing the distinctive role human beings play in completing the cosmos complicates the standard picture of Timaeus’ cosmology, as well as his account of human nature. While in large part the cosmos is a product of divine craft, in some part it is the product of the inevitable disturbance of immortal souls due to mortal embodiment. Human beings have a special status as the first generation of mortal beings, as well as the only ones produced solely by divine craft. However, this distinction does not extend beyond the first generation, nor does it include any women. Ultimately, Timaeus’ account of human nature blurs the lines between humans and gods, as well as between humans and non-human animals.

This chapter discusses the practice of measurement in psychological research. Here, where we cast doubt on the basic assumptions and endeavours underlying the act of measuring in mainstream psychology. Next, we introduce the processual alternative, which stresses the study of activity as situated and coupled with an environment. This chapter explains how a process approach to ‘measurement’ is thus fundamentally different from the standard one, and can remedy existing issues related to non-ergodicity and the ecological fallacy. These ideas are illustrated by means of the concept of intelligence, which is undoubtedly one of psychology’s show-pieces of measurement.