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.

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, same-sex couples had become visible as partners and parents, as well as integral members of straight families. This chapter demonstrates how these previous victories on behalf of the queer family made marriage equality possible. When the movement for marriage equality began, advocates emphasized that allowing same-sex couples to marry was a matter of ensuring justice and equality. However, that argument failed to persuade decisionmakers, who instituted same-sex marriage bans around the country. Advocates were only able to gain legal ground when they began emphasizing how discrimination harmed longstanding, devoted same-sex couples, the children they raised, and the straight parents who loved them. They were able to stake these claims because gay- and lesbian-headed households already existed, thanks to years of family-centered strategies. Although marriage equality is the queer rights movement’s best-known success, it came as a postscript to decades of family-centered strategies.

In this chapter, the remit of theoretical linguistics is located within the background of a set of theoretical questions. These questions pertain to issues of ontology, methodology, acquisition, communication, and evolution. The overarching field is distinguished from other pursuits within applied linguistics that have a more practical focus but are argued to subsume certain experimental approaches. The first part of the chapter discusses the role of grammaticality and formal grammars in linguistic theory. Here, the issue of whether the rules of language have normative force is introduced as well as whether the target of scientific linguistics is individual languages or some universal core of human language generally. The question of what a grammar is, a theory, model, or some other device, is presented based on a brief literature review on the topic with a nudge towards a certain scientific instrumentalism about these matters. Next, the chapter asks whether linguistics is best viewed as an empirical social or cognitive science. Arguments are presented on both sides. Naturalism and normativity figure prominently in this debate. Finally, an outline of each chapter of the book is provided with an aim to either precisify or reflect on the philosophical issues presented in this opening chapter.

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.

Realist evaluators argue that evaluations need to ask not just what works but also what works for whom under what conditions. They argue interventions need to be evaluated in terms of the mechanisms they trigger and how these interact with context to generate different outcomes in different settings or populations. Hypotheses should be worded as context–mechanism–outcome configurations (CMOCs). Many realist evaluators argue that randomised trials are not a proper scientific design, do not encompass sufficient variation in contexts to test CMOCs and are inappropriately positivist in orientation. They argue that it is better to test CMOCs using observational designs which do not use randomisation. We welcome the focus on CMOCs but disagree with the view that trials cannot be used for realist evaluation. Trials are an appropriate scientific design when it is impossible for experimenters to control all the factors which have an influence on the result of an experiment. Trials can include sufficient variety of contexts to test CMOCs. Trials need not embody a positivist approach to the science of complex health interventions if they are oriented towards testing hypotheses, draw on theory which engages with deeper mechanisms of causation and use distinctly social science approaches such as qualitative research.

This chapter chronologically follows the development of the American science essay from the eighteenth century, through the foundation of government, corporate, and university research institutes, and ending with contemporary criticism of research practices. Throughout history, science essayists have brought knowledge of new discoveries to the general public by writing in accessible, unexpected, and lyrical prose. They fill a gap between the specialist’s research and the public’s hunger for science news. Beyond communicating research to a mass audience, the science essay offers a space for moral reflection and debate about the implications of scientific knowledge and technological advancements. Science essayists share the common goal of situating research within both a personal perspective and a broad worldview. The science essay acknowledges humanity’s place within nature, embracing scientific insight while questioning the instrumentalism from which it springs.

This chapter discusses connections between the Sophists and their wider intellectual context. It argues for the value of the term “enlightenment” as a characterization of the period in two respects: as pointing to a widespread self-consciousness of intellectual change, and as encompassing a range of discourses and thinkers beyond the philosophical. Using Aristophanes’ Clouds as a guide, the chapter discusses three modes of thinking that are characteristic of the sophistic period as an enlightenment, understood in these senses: an interest in empirical research and collection, particularly in the human social realm; a concentration on methods of argument and widespread employment of antilogistic forms; and a skepticism toward causal reasoning concerning divinity and the unseen generally. These three modes of thinking are found importantly among the Sophists, but are manifest widely beyond their thought, and are best understood as characteristic practices and attitudes of a fifth-century enlightenment.

The penal colonies were modern experiments that attempted to resolve surplus British populations, achieve strategic and naval ambitions, and form new imperial markets. Metropolitan reformers were keenly interested in prison systems, writing speculative accounts and plans in response to early evidence from New South Wales. This chapter analyses major theories about the penal colonies and ‘systematic colonization’ by Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, examining how evidence was drawn from colonial texts and repurposed for metropolitan interests. Alternative forms of information from the colonies were fed into metropolitan inquiries by the Quaker travellers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker. Quasi-official colonial experiments with convicts and prison reform trialled through the first half of the nineteenth century in many cases anticipated the prison reform underway in Britain. This chapter analyses the network of texts that brought metropolitan attention to bear on controversial aspects of convict transportation and colonial reform that reshaped ideas about society, crime, and punishment, with distinctive religious overtones, and how new models for reform emerged from colonial experiments.