In this powerful critique, the esteemed historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller addresses the nature-nurture debates, including the persistent disputes regarding the roles played by genes and the environment in determining individual traits and behavior. Keller is interested in both how an oppositional “versus” came to be inserted between nature and nurture, and how the distinction on which that opposition depends, the idea that nature and nurture are separable, came to be taken for granted. How, she asks, did the illusion of a space between nature and nurture become entrenched in our thinking, and why is it so tenacious? Keller reveals that the assumption that the influences of nature and nurture can be separated is neither timeless nor universal, but rather a notion that emerged in Anglo-American culture in the late nineteenth century. She shows that the seemingly clear-cut nature-nurture debate is riddled with incoherence. It encompasses many disparate questions knitted together into an indissoluble tangle, and it is marked by a chronic ambiguity in language. There is little consensus about the meanings of terms such as nature, nurture, gene, and environment. Keller suggests that contemporary genetics can provide a more appropriate, precise, and useful vocabulary, one that might help put an end to the confusion surrounding the nature-nurture controversy.

Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist’s Book is a portrait of the space between things, whether they be neurons, quotations, comic-book frames, or fragments in a collage. This twenty-year project is an artist’s book that juxtaposes quotations and images from hundreds of artists and writers with the author’s own thoughts. Using Adobe InDesign® for composition and layout, the author has structured the book to show analogies among disparate texts and images. There have always been gaps, but a focus on the space between things is virtually synonymous with modernity. Often characterized as a break, modernity is a story of gaps. Around 1900, many independent strands of gap thought and experience interacted and interwove more intricately. Atoms, textiles, theories, women, Jews, collage, poetry, patchwork, and music figure prominently in these strands. The gap is a ubiquitous phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of neuroscience, rabbinic thinking, modern literary criticism, art, popular culture, and the structure of matter. This book explores many subjects, but it is ultimately a work of art.

In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller unearths the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility—the capacity to be transformed by one's environment and experiences—to uncover how biopower developed in the United States. Schuller challenges prevalent interpretations of biopower and literary cultures to reveal how biopower emerged within the discourses and practices of sentimentalism. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry and other literary texts, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. Her historical and theoretical work exposes the overlooked role of sex difference in population management and the optimization of life, illuminating how models of binary sex function as one of the key mechanisms of racializing power. Schuller thereby overturns long-accepted frameworks of the nature of race and sex difference, offers key corrective insights to modern debates surrounding the equation of racism with determinism and the liberatory potential of ideas about the plasticity of the body, and reframes contemporary notions of sentiment, affect, sexuality, evolution, and heredity.

From public health luminary Nancy Krieger comes a revolutionary way of addressing health justice and the embodied truths of lived experience. Since the 1700s, fierce debates in medicine and public health have centered around whether sources of ill health can be attributed to either the individual or the surrounding body politic. But what if instead health researchers measure--and policies address--how people biologically embody their societal and ecological context? Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health represents a daring new foray into analyzing how population patterns of health reveal the intersections of lived experience and biology in historical context. Expanding on Nancy Krieger's original ecosocial theory of disease distribution, this volume lays new theoretical groundwork about embodiment and health justice through concrete and novel examples involving pathways such as workplace discrimination, relationship abuse, Jim Crow, police violence, pesticides, fracking, green space, and climate change. It offers a crucial counterargument to dominant biomedical and public health narratives attributing causality to either innate biology or decontextualized health behaviors and provides a key step forward towards understanding and addressing the structural drivers of health inequities and health justice. Bridging insights from politics, history, sociology, ecology, biology, and public health, Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health presents a bold new framework to transform biomedical and population health thinking, practice, and policies and to advance health equity across a deeply threatened planet.

This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally. Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of 'shadow' ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.

Sociogenomics has rapidly become one of the trendiest sciences of the new millennium. Practitioners view human nature and life outcomes as the result of genetic and social factors. In Social by Nature, Catherine Bliss recognizes the promise of this interdisciplinary young science, but also questions its implications for the future. As she points out, the claim that genetic similarities cause groups of people to behave in similar ways is not new—and a dark history of eugenics warns us of its dangers. Over the last decade, sociogenomics has enjoyed a largely uncritical rise to prominence and acceptance in popular culture. Researchers have published studies showing that things like educational attainment, gang membership, and life satisfaction are encoded in our DNA long before we say our first word. Strangely, unlike the racial debates over IQ scores in the '70s and '90s, sociogenomics has not received any major backlash. By exposing the shocking parallels between sociogenomics and older, long-discredited, sciences, Bliss persuasively argues for a more thoughtful public reception of any study that reduces human nature to a mere sequence of genes. This book is a powerful call for researchers to approach their work in more socially responsible ways, and a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand the scholarship that impacts how we see ourselves and our society.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means to be human.

An accessible but rigorous introduction to genes for non-experts, explaining what genes are and what they can and cannot do.

'A great mind that is constantly exploring, searching, "becoming" . . . an impressive collection' Elif Shafak, Observer 'A phenomenal book' Claire Kohda Hazelton, Guardian 'We are fortunate to have Hustvedt voicing doubt so intelligently' Lara Feigel, Financial Times A TRAIL-BLAZING AND INSPIRING COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON ART, FEMINISM, NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY FEATURING THE DELUSIONS OF CERTAINTY, WINNER OF THE EUROPEAN ESSAY PRIZE 2019. Internationally acclaimed as a novelist, Siri Hustvedt is also highly regarded as a writer of non-fiction whose insights are drawn from her broad knowledge in the arts, humanities, and sciences. In this trilogy of works collected in a single volume, Hustvedt brings a feminist, interdisciplinary perspective to a range of subjects. Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Susan Sontag and Knut Ove Knausgaard are among those who come under her scrutiny. In the book's central essay, she explores the intractable mind-body problem and in the third section she reflects on the mysteries of hysteria, synesthesia, memory, perception, and the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. With clarity, wit, and passion, she exposes gender bias, upends received ideas, and challenges her reader to think again. PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT: 'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie 'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear' Hilary Mantel 'Her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist . . . in this regard I feel that she resembles Virginia Woolf ' Observer 'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post

This popular text/reader for the social psychology courses in sociology departments is distinguished by the author′s engaging framing essays that open each part, and an eclectic set of edited readings that introduce students to major thinkers and perspectives in this field. Through the combination of essays and original works, the book demonstrates how we make and remake our social worlds through our everyday interactions with one another. The Seventh Edition features 10 new readings from the contemporary social psychology literature, a streamlined organization, and the option of either e-book or print versions.