This chapter argues against the narrative that posits a pre-twentieth century past, where the mother and fetus were one, in contrast with the present, where the fetus is visible and autonomous. I complicate this narrative by showing that the maternal–fetal relationship was redrawn and reinterpreted multiple times in the twentieth century. The ‘fetal parasite’ era was informed by the hereditarianism of the early 1900s. The notion of a developing organism sensitive to external influences was replaced by a remarkably sheltered fetus. In contrast, concerns around the physical and psychological trauma following the Second World War supported the notion of ‘critical’ periods, responsive to external influences mediated by the mother. Yet soon thereafter, the language and imagery of an autonomous, self-sufficient fetus became prevalent amidst political battles over abortion. The notion of the autonomous fetus is linked to evolutionary biology’s 1970s concepts of the ‘selfish gene’ – with the ‘selfish’ fetus pitted against the mother in the struggle over scarce resources. By the 1990s, the rise of DOHaD and epigenetics signalled a return of the maternally mediated environment to the science of human development. While some interpreted this as a return to the pre-modern model, there is a significant difference. Here maternal experiences and surroundings have to be rendered accessible to an experimental, molecular approach and to show evidence of a quantifiable change in observed parameters.

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.

Mainstream social science, when it looks for parallels with the natural sciences, tends to look to classical Physics, which stresses laws, causes, and theories. I argue that we should look instead to Biology, which explains principally with processes, mechanisms, and models. Here I look briefly at Evolutionary Biology and Developmental Biology, where reductionist gene-centric explanatory programs have failed – decisively and spectacularly (and relatively recently). Evolution involves not just genes (let alone selfish genes) but multilevel processes of modular tinkering, very much like what I have called continuous (trans)formation, including processes of co-evolution that are strikingly analogous to what we see in the social world. Similarly, gene expression, rather than a largely mechanical DNA-directed bottom-up process, is as much a matter of manipulating and transforming genetic material as it is processing the information that it contains. Gene expression can only be properly performed within multiple, complexly intertwined, self-organizing regulatory networks. More broadly, I argue that Systems Biology, which is on the cutting edge of twenty-first-century Biology, provides an attractive model for relational/systemic social sciences.

Discovering why natural selection has left humans vulnerable to mental disorders will make psychiatry more sensible and effective, but defining the appropriate objects and kinds of explanation remains challenging. Asking how a disorder increases fitness is a mistake; disorders are not adaptations and they do not have evolutionary explanations. The correct objects of explanation are the traits that make all members of a species vulnerable to a disorder. Task 1 is to describe the evolutionary origins and functions of the traits involved. Task 2 is to describe the proximate processes that result in the disorder. Task 3 is to discover why natural selection left the traits vulnerable to malfunction. Five main kinds of explanation need to be considered: stochasticity, path dependence, mismatch, trade-offs that benefit the individual and traits that benefit gene transmission at a cost to the individual. Depression, addiction, eating disorders, autism and schizophrenia are used to illustrate the opportunities and challenges of framing and testing hypotheses about vulnerability. Multiple explanations are often needed for a single disorder, frustrating the wish for simplicity. However, recognising the fundamental differences between organic and designed systems offers opportunities for resolving – or at least understanding – some enduring controversies in psychiatry.

The authors critique trauma and illness models of the effects of adversity, and go on to consider alternative societal and political understandings.They then review biological insights from attachment theory and affective neuroscience. An analogy with grief leads to consideration of post-traumatic growth, and adversity activated development.

A review of symptoms resulting from adversity then leads to consideration of the factors that help people rebuild their lives after major adversity, such as safety and security, interpersonal bonds, and networks.A positive sense of one’s identity and role, and feeling that life is just and meaningful, also helps.Effects of the asylum process often counter these factors.

People’s problems often have to be categorised as ‘health’ issues in order to access care. Positive and negative effects of this are reviewed.

This chapter explores how Charles Darwin’s ideas about structural and functional anomalies in plants, animals and humans inspired the new Gothic monsters to be found in the work of Grant Allen, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen. It traces the ways in which these writers reimagined human genealogies in light of evolutionary biology, materialism and Darwinist criminal anthropology. Sadistic criminals whose degenerate minds and bodies threatened civilised society, and atavistic flesh-eating plants whose natural ‘criminality’ was coaxed out by sadistic experimental scientists, are part of a significant reimagining of both biological and cultural history in the last half of the century. Indeed, through these types of biological monsters, Gothic writers challenged some of the most cherished ideas that Victorians held about their cultural heritage. Knowledge about human descent, the biology of human and animal abnormality, and criminal compulsions that dwelt in the ‘protoplasm’, largely negated the ideals of the age of chivalry – the medieval origins of the higher-order values that supposedly defined the human as exceptional.

Looking to evolutionary biology for lessons applicable to cultural and political evolution, David Sloan Wilson brings the book to a conclusion with his discussion of symbolic systems as the most effective and organic model for societal transformation. Building on the literature of professors of genetics and evolution, and on his own earlier work on evolutionary theory and economics, Wilson demonstrates that many of the assumptions undergirding the national security state are due for reform as a matter of future existence, beginning with ideas about theories of governance.