Chapter 11 deals with the timescale of history and human evolution. It offers a complexity approach to the evolution of art that attempts to move beyond simplistic theories of the survival function of art, including the much-debated issue of the function of art in the context of sexual selection. After discussing the basic principles of evolution from a complex systems approach, the chapter outlines different evolutionary scenarios: the survival-enhancing function, on the one hand, and the view of art as an evolutionary by-product, on the other. By showing how both evolution and human activity are entangled, interaction-dominated dynamics, the chapter provides an alternative to simplistic gene-for-art assumptions.

This chapter of the handbook examines the complex relation between empathy and prosociality by drawing on evolutionary theory, neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics. The author begins by distinguishing three components of the broader phenomenon of empathy: emotional contagion, empathic concern, and perspective taking. He reviews evidence suggesting that emotional contagion of a conspecific’s pain often leads to helping behavior, but such contagion is modulated by group membership, levels of intimacy, and attitudes toward the other. Empathic concern, too, is a powerful motivator of prosocial behaviors but is also socially modulated – extended to some people more than others and to individuals more than groups. Effortful perspective taking, finally, can provide a better understanding of other people’s minds but does not always generate prosocial behavior, even when it facilitates empathic concern. In sum, various forms of empathy can motivate prosocial behaviors, but empathy is fragile and often stops short of its potential when people engage with large groups, people outside of their tribe, or anonymous strangers.

This chapter of the handbook proposes a developmental ethics, an organic moral theory grounded in (1) humanity’s deep evolutionary history, (2) the malleability of the child’s neurobiological structures that undergird moral functioning, and (3) the influence of cultural practices on neurobiological development. The chapter addresses the following questions: What kind of creature are we? What qualities do we need to live a full life? What kinds of capacities make each a proper member of the species? What influences our development? Answers center around perhaps the most critical influence on human development, our species’ evolved nest. In humanity’s ancestral context, nestedness is a lifelong experience with particular import in early life. Moral virtue emerges from holistically coordinated physiological, psychological, spiritual systems oriented toward holistic communal harmony, social attunement, receptivity, and interpersonal flexibility. Understanding how the evolved nest scaffolds biopsychosocial and moral development reveals why antisocial behavior is so pervasive in modern Western culture – and it provides a baseline for redesigning society to promote prosociality.

My biographical sketch describes how I became a cultural/cross-cultural developmental scientist as a complete autodidact. During the late 1960s in Germany universities were in a massive process of change which only later resulted in formal institutional structures and curricula. Until then, there was complete freedom for pursuing interests and selecting topics. I was generally interested in other cultures and found opportunities to study children and families abroad. Connecting with evolutionary theory prompted me towards being a universalist. In another direction, meeting great minds in the fields of cultural and cross-cultural psychology helped me find my point of view as a developmental scientist studying children’s developmental pathways in different cultural environments. Together with wonderful colleagues, I studied systematic contextual variations in solving general developmental tasks. My overall conclusion is that culture needs to be consistently introduced into developmental science and all its applications (in policy and practical interventions).

Chapter 6 returns to H. G. Wells to offer a fuller account of this writer’s longstanding fascination with animal experimentation, a practice he supported. Analysis of The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), short stories, and essays reveal this author’s investment in contemporary scientific debates surrounding the thorny issues surrounding non-human pain introduced in Chapter 5. Despite differences in genre and tone, the selected texts each exploit the uneasy relationship between injury, experience, and expression to raise compelling questions about pain’s purpose and limits. The period’s vivisection debates were an important and productive context for Wells who capitalised on the ambivalence they produced, undermined the generic expectations of writings about the subject, and considered whether literary and linguistic methods could uniquely capture – or even solve – the problem of pain.

Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.

Since the Greeks, our world has been understood in terms of one of two root metaphors – the world as an organism (“organicism”) and the world as a machine (“mechanism”). With the coming of evolutionary ideas in the eighteenth century, we see that there are interpretations in terms of both metaphors.

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.