This work is a history of ideas, not a history of science. It uses the past to answer the questions of whether the Darwinian Revolution comes from ideas already prevalent in Victoria society – or is it a work of rebellion? – and whether the Darwinian Revolution was truly revolutionary – or is this a mistaken judgment made by historians and others?

A brief introduction to the life of Charles Darwin and his discovery of the causal role of natural selection in explaining evolutionary change. The effect of the publication of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the long delay and the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Suppose you are running a company that provides proofreading services to publishers. You employ people who sit in front of screens, correcting written text. Spelling errors are the most frequent problem, so you are motivated to hire proofreaders who are excellent spellers. Therefore, you decide to give your job applicants a spelling test. It isn’t hard: throw together 25 words, and score everyone on a scale of 0–25. You are now a social scientist, a specialist called a psychometrician, measuring “spelling ability.”

The reader should be officially informed that in this chapter I take leave of the widely accepted consensus about nature–nurture. This is not a textbook, and everything that I have said up to now has been very much my own take on things, but for the most part I have not strayed far from what most scientists would say about the intellectual history of nature and nurture. Not everyone perhaps, but most people agree that Galton was a racist, eugenics a moral and scientific failure, heritability of behavioral differences nearly universal, heritability a less than useful explanatory concept, twin studies an interesting but ultimately limited research paradigm, and linkage and candidate gene analysis of human behavior decisive failures.

Has it always been the case that living people must struggle with the moral failings of their dead ancestors, or is that a special burden that has been placed on the shoulders of citizens and scientists living in contemporary Europe and North America? Recently, the culture feels as though it is being torn apart by this question. I was taught in grade school that the United States is the greatest country in the world, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where anyone could be a millionaire or president if they put in the effort. It is hardly radical to recognize that this is less than true today and isn’t even close to true historically, especially if one is not white, Christian, and male.

Notwithstanding Galton’s admonition to count everything, counting is just a tool; it is no more science than hammering is architecture. One hundred years after Galton, Robert Hutchins remarked, contemptuously, that a social scientist is a person who counts telephone poles. The obvious way to turn counting into science is by conducting experiments, that is by manipulating nature and observing what the consequences are for whatever one is counting. Gregor Mendel, for example, was certainly a counter – he counted the mixtures of smooth and wrinkled peas in the progeny of the pea plants he intentionally crossed. What made Mendel’s work science was the intentional crossing of the plants, not the counting itself. It would have been much more difficult – perhaps impossible – to observe the segregation and independent assortment of traits by counting smooth and wrinkled peas in the wild.

Why is divorce heritable? It’s clear that it is heritable, in the rMZ > rDZ sense. I hope I have convinced you that the heritability of divorce doesn’t mean that there are “divorce genes,” or that divorce is passed down genetically from parents to children, but seriously: how does something like that happen? I am aware that my constant minimizing of the implications of heritability can seem as though I am keeping my finger in the dike against an inevitable onslaught of scientifically based genetic determinism, the final Plominesque realization that our genes make us who we are, the apotheosis of Galton’s proclamation in 1869: “I propose to show … that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world” (Hereditary Genius, p. 1).

Robert Plomin, whose name has come up a few times already, is unquestionably the most important psychological geneticist of our time. Trained in social and personality psychology at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s (my graduate alma mater, though we didn’t overlap), he went on to faculty positions at the University of Colorado and the Pennsylvania State University (both major American centers for behavior genetics) before moving to London to take a position at the Institute of Psychiatry. Plomin’s career has embodied the integration of behavioral genetics into mainstream social science and psychology. Everywhere Plomin has been, he has initiated twin and adoption studies, many of which continue to make contributions today. Although genetics has always played a central role in Plomin’s research, you would never mistake his work for that of a biologist or quantitative geneticist: he (like me) has always been first and foremost a psychologist.

The Second World War marked a turning point for what was considered acceptable in genetics and its implications for eugenic and racially motivated social policies. To be sure, the change in attitude was not quick or decisive. Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized involuntarily after the war. Anti-black racism, antisemitism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, needless to say, persisted for a long while and have not yet been eliminated; interracial marriage was still illegal in much of the country during my lifetime. But – and despite the foot-dragging, I think this needs to be recognized as an advance – it slowly became less and less acceptable to adopt openly eugenic or racist opinions in public or to justify them based on science. Retrograde attitudes about such things persist to this day, but they have mostly been relegated to the fringes of scientific discourse.

Many people outside of psychology and biology come to the subject of nature–nurture because of an interest in race. That is unfortunate, but I get it. People, especially in the United States, are obsessed with race, for obvious reasons: American history is indelibly steeped in racial categories. The two foundational failures of the American experience – genocide of Indigenous Americans and enslavement of Africans – happened because of race and racism. Even today in the United States, people of all persuasions think about race all the time, whether as hereditarian racists convinced that there are essential biological differences among ancestral groups, progressives fascinated by personal identity and the degradations that non-white people still experience, or the dozens of racial and ethnic categories obsessively collected by the U.S. census.

Let’s summarize where the nature–nurture debate stood as the twentieth century drew to a close. When the century began, thinkers were faced for the first time with the hard evolutionary fact that human beings were not fundamentally different biologically than other evolved organisms. Galton and his eugenic followers concluded that even those parts of human experience that seemed to be unique – social, class, and cultural differences; abilities, attitudes, and personal struggles – were likewise subsumed by evolution and the mammalian biology it produced. People and societies could therefore be treated like herds of animals, rated on their superior and inferior qualities, bred to maintain them, treated to fix them, and culled as necessary for the good of the herd. Not every mid-century moral disaster that followed resulted from their misinterpretation of human evolution, but it played a role. Society has been trying to recover from biologically justified racism, eugenics, and genocide ever since.

The theory of evolution, as espoused by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species in 1859, was difficult to accept for religious believers whose assumptions about the world were shattered by it, but Darwin’s The Descent of Man, published 12 years later, posed even greater challenges to people who did accept it, and those challenges continue today. It has often been noted that a disorienting consequence of the Enlightenment was to force people to recognize that humans were not created at the center of the universe in the image of God, but instead on a remote dust-speck of a planet, in the image of mold, rats, dogs, and chimps. For the entirety of recorded history, moral beliefs about humans had been based on the idea that people were in some fundamental sense apart from the rest of nature. Darwin disabused us of that notion once and for all. The scientific and social upheaval that has occurred since Darwin has been an extended process of coming to terms with a unification of humans and the rest of the natural world.

In this essay I consider what myths are, and provide a very short sketch of Darwin’s life and work. I also suggest some possible reasons about the mythology around him, paving the way for the chapters to follow.

This chapter will address contrasting ways in which Argentine literature has reflected on, and borrowed from, scientific theories and practices. Many nineteenth-century writers (such as José Mármol, Eugenio Cambaceres, and Lucio V. Mansilla) drew on (pseudo-)scientific discourses to lend legitimacy to their arguments, while others developed a critical approach to the legacies of positivism in Argentina. Dystopian visions of the imbrication of science, technology, and the politics of authoritarianism dominate the twentieth century, in texts that explore the experience of mass society or dictatorship. However, this chapter will also highlight cases of much greater ambivalence, such as that of Roberto Arlt, in whose work the pursuit of science and technology becomes both an instrument of violence and a fount of beauty and liberation. Furthermore, it will construct an important genealogy of authors – from Eduardo Holmberg in the final decades of the nineteenth century through to the contemporary writer Marcelo Cohen – who have conducted innovative metafictional explorations into the relationship between literature and science, and who have understood the porous boundary between them to be a source of great creativity.

Darwin’s theory, in its uniformitarianism, its materialism, and its elimination of all metaphysical explanations and any element of intelligent agency from the world’s biological phenomena has been taken as an important influence in the growth of the idea that all living creatures are automata – more or less “conscious machines.” Darwin himself, in a least four different aspects of his writing, belies this inference from his theories: the metaphorical work done by his dominant idea – natural selection; his anthropomorphism; his views on instinct; and his theory of sexual selection.

This chapter defines a genre of lyric whose speaker is a personification of an entire species. Lyrics of this kind appear in poetic field guides in the 1830s, and in poetry for children throughout the century. The chapter closes with readings of lyrics by Swinburne and Hardy in which the conditions under which a species can become a speaking subject are opened to critique

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.