In this reflective afterword, Shinobu Kitayama traces how our understanding of culture and emotion has shifted from viewing emotions as biologically hard-wired to understanding them as dynamically shaped by culture. It articulates four themes as emerging from the edited volume The Cultural Shaping of Emotion: emotion as situated cultural practice, the centrality of meaning-making, emotion development as cultural apprenticeship, and the dynamic interplay between biology and culture. In sketching pathways for the future, Kitayama calls for an integrative approach that studies emotions as rooted in cultural meanings and practices as well as in biological processes. He also calls to study emotions beyond East–West dichotomies such that we can move toward a globally informed and inclusive science of emotion.

As it traces the emergence of organic life and the gradual transformation of species, Erasmus Darwin’s treaty in verse The Temple of Nature develops a poetics of what eludes our sense of sight, of the viewless and eyeless beings at the radical origins of life. The chapter thus retraces a poetic journey back to a perceptual framework in which sight does not yet exist. Erasmus Darwin tries to apprehend life before the first eye opened, to envision a world so young that sensation itself had just been born. That journey also goes back to the origins of the alliance of poetry and science in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and its poetics of corpora caeca, those viewless bodies that create entire worlds through blind contact. It lastly registers some of the aesthetic and epistemic aftershocks of Lucretius’ and Darwin’s poetics of blind bodies in the poetry of William Blake.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.

Conventional wisdom among philosophers has long held that Aristotelian teleological essentialism is incompatible with Darwinian evolutionary biology. I argue that the appearance of incompatibility here is ill-founded. For a start, Darwinism has no need of the extrinsicist, relational, conception of species sponsored by cladism. Indeed, it requires what Devitt calls intrinsic biological essentialism. The latter, for its part, has no need of eternal, unchanging, species, notwithstanding Aristotle’s own view. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with the claim that species evolve from one another and go extinct. (Those who deny this conflate species with species essences.) As to natural teleology, many philosophers assume that nature cannot contain final ends or goods – but this consensus is open to challenge. As functional biology demonstrates, biologists have never extruded final causation from nature at the local level; indeed, they rely on it, pervasively, in their explanations and descriptions of natural processes. This points, once again, to the compatibility between Aristotelian teleological essentialism and evolutionary biology, and to their deep mutual relevance.

This chapter explores the scientific connection between sex and sport. It begins by examining the meaning of sex and the criteria used to assign individuals to the male or female category. It ends by exploring the link between sex and sport and identifying the sex-related traits that have the greatest impact on athletic performance.

This chapter examines the arguments for transgender girls’ exclusion from girls’ sports that have dominated right-leaning public and political discourse. The chapter articulates the argument for exclusion based on fairness and contends that it cannot justify total exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports at every age and level. The chapter next uncovers the claims about human flourishing and personal dignity that also motivate arguments for exclusion and argues that such claims are too empirically dubious and normatively controversial to drive policy decisions.

This chapter identifies three distinct benefits of organized sports. Basic benefits are the physical and emotional benefits of sports that flow to all participants. Special benefits are the tangible and intangible rewards that flow only to the winners. Group benefits are the self-esteem and social-status benefits that nonparticipants receive from seeing a member of their group celebrated. The chapter argues that at the recreational and early childhood levels, the values governing the basic benefits of sports should drive eligibility rules and transgender girls should be included. At the elite level of varsity high school and college sports, the values governing special and group benefits should drive eligibility rules and transgender girls should be included, except where transgender athletes dominate the winner’s circle.

This chapter describes and assesses the arguments for transgender girls’ inclusion in girls’ sports that have dominated left-leaning public and political discourse. At core, the arguments focus on the subjective and objective harms of misgendering. The chapter describes and critiques subjective pain arguments as too indeterminate empirically and normatively to provide a basis for inclusion. The chapter next examines objective claims about human flourishing and hierarchies of oppression revealing their underlying assumptions and perhaps unintended consequences.

The introduction sets the stage by close reading two mid-century works by the poet Edward Young. Contrasting microscopy-inspired metaphors of the soul in Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) against organicist descriptions of artistic genius in Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), it shows how eighteenth-century biology (and, accordingly, aesthetics) might be characterised by a shift from images of permanence to narratives of development. This leads into the book's main subject, William Blake, who illustrated Young's works and presented a complicated response to this emergent evolutionist paradigm in his own writings. Situating the book against recent scholarship, the introduction establishes the book's central thesis, giving an account of the stakes of the matter, and provides an overview of how each chapter advances the book's argument.

Game theory in biology emerged as a theoretical and modeling approach to the evolutionary study of behavior and other phenotypes. It was inspired by the prominence of game theory in economics. This chapter gives a perspective on this influence of economic thinking on biology. Which ideas were taken from economics and the social sciences to biology, how were they modified, which biological phenomena were they applied to, and what are the successes, challenges, and the possible future of the field? It focuses on two of the earliest applications of game theory in biology, namely sex-ratio theory and animal contests.

Chapter 3 discusses the designations for the classes of objects (i.e. animals, plants – including flora and fauna – and minerals), as well as for the respective disciplines. In the early modern period, historia naturalis/natural history was the name applied to the study of natural objects, later to be known as biology and geology/mineralogy. The names for these and other subdisciplines emerged in the early modern period but at different stages and sometimes with divergent intentions and meanings.

This chapter introduces the three contributions that constitute Part III, “Population Dynamics, Learning, and Biology.” These contributions discuss biology and population dynamics in game theory. The chapters concern models of strategy adaptation: process models. Such models have refined our understanding of Nash and other equilibrium concepts, and the evolution of population shares through time is itself an object of interest from the perspectives of biological reproduction and of learning human (and artificial) agents.

It took some thirty years before the game theoretic ideas of Émile Borel became known to a wider audience, with the publication of the seminal book by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Similarly, it took thirty years for the evolutionary approach of Brown, von Neumann, and Nash to be taken up by a wider community. By now, a substantial set of potential updating mechanisms has been modeled and analyzed via game dynamics. Large as it is, it is yet unlikely to capture the full range of adaptive behavior used by human players. A closer relation between the dynamics of nonequilibrium play and empirical data on adaptation and learning is sorely needed. This is a topic where psychology and economics can fruitfully join hands.

In PA I.5, Aristotle encourages his audience to engage in a novel kind of philosophy: the scientific inquiry into animals and plants. What Aristotle is exhorting his readers to do, biology, is newly and originally conceived, but the literary technique employed – protreptic speech – is one of the oldest and most traditional kinds of philosophical discourse. In his earlier popular dialogue the Protrepticus, Aristotle had defended and promoted the Academic conception of philosophy and its preoccupation with theoretical and mathematical sciences such as astronomy by discussing the clarity of such sciences and the excellence of their objects. In the later protreptic to biology, he adapted these earlier arguments, arguing that biology also has excellent objects and offers a kind of clarity that may even surpass astronomy. These arguments turn out to be part of a general rhetorical strategy for comparing and rank-ordering sciences that was theorized in the Topics and Rhetoric.