The Introduction explores the concept of the year book and some of its recent iterations. It sets out the major concerns of this work, which is essentially to read texts, events, and lives through the shared medium of 1859. It sets out the relationship between the three key themes of the book, that is, custom and the experience of history, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the life and writings of George Eliot, and introduces the argument that will shape the work. This concerns the workings of history and of its dominant form in 1859: custom. The Preface also sets out the methodology of the book and draws on Raphael Samuel’s description of history as an ‘organic form of knowledge’ that ideally draws on multiple sources of information, and on accounts of lived experience and emotions too. In this last respect, literature clearly acts as a great resource.

The concept of environmental rule of law plays a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness of environmental governance by integrating principles of the rule of law into environmental legislation with a nuanced application. Emerging from the recognition of the distinctiveness of environmental law and the stark implementation gap, it seeks to move environmental laws beyond mere legislation to their effective implementation, compliance, and enforcement. Formally acknowledged within the UN system in 2013, the roots of the principles of the rule of law, albeit sporadic, trace back to the 1970s within the realm of environmental law. Gradually, the concept has significantly evolved, gaining global prominence, institutionalization, and ultimately becoming a fundamental guiding pillar in the 2019 Fifth Montevideo Programme for the Development and Periodic Review of Environmental Law. This chapter chronicles the evolution of the concept, delineating its journey from scattered elements to a robust holistic framework. Cognizant that the concept continues to evolve, the chapter underscores critical issues that demand further research to maximize the benefits of the environmental rule of law.

The three editors provide an overview of the book where they describe key issues, summarize progress since Sotaro Kita’s (2004) edited volume on pointing, and situating each contributor(s)’ chapter within the context of the book.

In war we see xenophobic hate, resentment, and violence-triggering anger, coupled with in-group solidarity, love, and altruistic sacrifice. This combination is mirrored in the opponent society. This structure recurs so often that there is an unfortunate tendency to naturalize it as adaptations produced by an ancestral environment characterized by widespread, intense, and frequent war. From this point of view, we are bellicose because our most successful ancestors were; our emotional structure comes from the fact that we are descendants of victors in battle. I don’t agree with this interpretation, which I will call the bellicose adaptationist story. I will sketch an alternative evolutionary story from ongoing anthropological controversies. I don’t deny that humans are violent, but I will try to show that a coherent story can be told in which war qua anonymous inter-group violence was not universal in human history and so could not serve as the selection pressure for altruism. After clearing the ground in this manner, to account for a non-war-based altruism I describe the hypotheses of collective breeding and collaborative foraging put forth by Sarah Hrdy and by Michael Tomasello.

How did language emerge? It has been suggested that language developed through mimicry of the sounds of nature and animals. Some propose that speech arose from grunts and groans, gestures, dance, or music. Others believe that language has more divine origins. A number of scientists speculate that language appeared spontaneously in our species, while opposing theories say that language evolved over a very long period of time. And which was the original language anyway? It makes sense that the question of how language emerged has been called “the hardest problem in science.” All of that being said, researchers don’t always agree as to what constitutes language. It’s generally accepted that communication differs from language in that the latter involves the use of symbols and syntax. For this reason, some argue that language is uniquely human. Others think our hominin relatives may have had speech as well. Animals have their own versions of communication too, while there are always quirky news stories about talking birds, signing chimpanzees, and even monkeys that use grammar. What are we to make of these claims? Let’s look at who has language and how it emerged.

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.

Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.

Since the discovery of the first Neandertal fossils, the neurocranium has been of particular interest to specialists and the general public, particularly in relation to the question of what cognitive abilities can be inferred from the braincase. Here we present a detailed description and analysis of the neurocranial morphology of Neandertals and compare it with that of living humans and the fossil hominins that likely represent our last common ancestor. Our analyses show that the Neandertal neurocranium provides relatively few clues about the structural and functional characteristics of the brain it once contained. The unique morphology of the Neandertal braincase is best understood as a compromise between the spatial demands of a large brain and the biomechanical demands of a large and evolutionarily derived face.

I begin with the bodily good of health, which perfects our organic functioning beyond the rudimentary level required for life. I detail how such functioning operates at different bodily levels, e.g., within cells, tissues, vessels, glands etc. I then move on to bodily abilities, which (not being autonomic functions) reflect the exercise of agency or voluntary control. Such abilities can be divided into active and passive powers, these affording a wider relation to the world in virtue of their intentionality. The third topic is bodily beauty. I argue that this is not a bodily perfection, since it is beholden less to our bodily powers or their configuration than to judgements of character and the social context in which our bodies operate. Finally, I explore body alteration. This constitutes a spectrum, from (perfective) medical intervention to (imperfective) mutilation, with what I call mere body ‘modification’ in the middle. I conclude with two cases that are difficult to place on this spectrum: namely male circumcision and cosmetic ‘surgery’. I argue that the former is likely a bodily imperfection or bad and the latter likely bound up with further imperfections.

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.

I begin by explaining why ‘goodness as natural perfection’ is a metaphysical rather than linguistic or conceptual thesis (even J. J. Thomson’s sophisticated version of the latter). I then unpack what I call the ‘Aristotelian functionalist schema’, which informs my view of how human faculties or powers are teleologically ordered to various natural perfections or ultimate intrinsic goods. This schema embodies a ‘bottom-up’ movement, which culminates in our governing, rational, function; and also a ‘top-down’ movement, which reveals how rationality conditions our subordinate (vegetative, perceptual, productive, locomotive) functions. I then go on to look at two post-Darwinian analyses of function, that of Cummins and that sponsored by the ‘standard evolutionary conception’. I argue that the first is relativistic and the second hyper-reductive – so neither gives us reason to abandon the Aristotelian functionalist schema. Finally, I explore the theory of ‘natural goodness’ elaborated by Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson. I maintain that it improperly reduces natural goodness to moral goodness, and, moreover, ends up being more Kantian than Aristotelian – rendering its form of ‘naturalism’ highly etiolated.

Chapter 7 begins with Kornblith’s attempt to resurrect a teleology of the mind or intellect. I countenance his semantic, desire and pragmatic arguments, maintaining that none of them shows truth or true belief to be an objective good. By contrast, Aristotle’s idea that the intellect is constitutively directed at truth does show this (in virtue of the Aristotelian functionalist schema: i.e. all functions are correlated with perfections or goods). And Aristotle’s idea is corroborated not only by ‘folk’ and theoretical psychology, but also by cognitive science. For the latter is wedded to the notion that the brain is a cognitive system, functionally directed at cognition (viz. true belief). I go on to address three critiques of this intellectual teleology – those put forward by William James, evolutionary biology and global scepticism respectively – and argue that none of them is cogent. Next, I unpack two alternative accounts of the relation between truth and goodness – those of Ayer and Davidson – and maintain that they, too, fall short. Last, I tackle intellectual goods beyond true belief – such as knowledge and understanding – asking whether they or their objects form discernible hierarchies.

Spoken language is a complex signal that evolves over time and conveys rhythm across multiple timescales. Beyond the signal level, there is rhythm in social aspects of speech communication such as joint attention, gestures, or turn-taking. Neural oscillations have in many cases been shown to directly reflect the rhythmic features of speech. However, the knowledge about origins, specific functions, and potential interactions of different rhythms and their neural signatures is far from complete. An integrative perspective that builds on phylogenetic and ontogenetic developments can provide some of the missing components. Here we propose that speech production and perception engage evolutionary ancient temporal processing mechanisms that guide sensorimotor sequencing and the allocation of cognitive resources in time. Slow-wave (delta-to-theta band) oscillations are the designated common denominator of these mechanisms, which interact in a speech-specific variant of the perception–action cycle with the goal to achieve optimal temporal coordination and predictive adaptation in speech communication.

Sex is the most dramatic normal human polymorphism. A single gene triggers remarkable physical differences in gonads and gametes, in anatomy and behaviour of men and women via a network of genes that induce a ridge of cells to become either a testis or an ovary. These very different gonads make hormones that activate other whole networks of genes in far-flung tissues and organs. Here I explore the role of sex differences in health, longevity, reproduction and evolution, societal roles and discrimination. Sex is genetically complex, and wide variation results from variation in genes of the sex pathway, in hormone-producing genes, and in downstream genes that receive these messages in other tissues. This throws up ethical dilemmas of whether, or how, to treat, babies with atypical sexual development. And how to create a ‘level playing field’ for sport. Some variants may influence gender identity, and mate choice so that transgender and homosexual, may both be seen as simply the edges of normal curves of male and female sexual development. I conclude with the hope that we are heading for a more enlightened world in which variation in sexual development and behaviour, and sexual identity is accepted and celebrated.

In quantum physics, the coupling between two oscillators or two quantum wells allows us to interpret molecular vibrations and to understand the covalent bonds between atoms. It explains the stability of the H2+ ion, the ’inversion’ of ammonia or the ’resonance’ of benzene. To simplify the analysis we consider one-dimensional systems consisting of two identical subsystems. Before highlighting the results in quantum physics, we recall the study of the motion of two coupled oscillators in classical mechanics. Beyond certain similarities, such as the breaking of the degeneracy of two initial states into a symmetric and an antisymmetric state or the possibility of generating beats, the quantum interpretation brings to light new concepts such as energy stabilisation, via the delocalisation of an object, or the interaction between two systems via the exchange of an object. Throughout this chapter we use Schrödinger’s wave formulation. However, this also provides an opportunity to introduce matrix notation for solving dynamical equations and a pedagogical introduction to the more general formalism of the Dirac notation that is used in later chapters.