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Chapter 2 examines how female physical educators (primarily white teachers) conceptualized active womanhood: How did female bodies resemble and/or differ from male anatomy, physiology, and physical aptitude? Were women’s and men’s psychosocial traits similar and/or divergent? What did sex differences imply for female exercise, recreation, and sports? Answering these questions proved difficult as American notions of fitness and femininity changed, scientific debates over human differences intensified, and professional physical educators sought social legitimacy between the 1890s and 1940s. White gym teachers fashioned complicated views that sustained the value of their profession, affirmed bourgeois whiteness and heterosexual femininity, justified both sex segregation and gender equity in the gym, and left room for new ideas about active womanhood.

This chapter summarizes the main idea in Steven Pinker’s 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, together with the author’s response to some of the major criticism leveled at it. It takes aim at an attitude he calls holistic interactionism: that nature and nurture are so intextricably intertwined with each other that it is vulgar and unseemly to try to disentangle them—in particular, to specify the innate motives and learning mechanisms which do the interacting with the environment. Though many commentators tout holistic interactionism as a sophisticated and nuanced way to understand the nature-nurture debate, the author here argues that it is merely a way to evade fundamental scientific problems because of their moral, emotional, and political baggage.

One of the most contentious debates in psychology, education, biology, and other related disciplines centres on the source of exceptional ability. This chapter addresses fundamental issues surrounding the nature/nurture debate in music and, in doing so, scrutinises much of the folklore that typically accompanies remarkable musical abilities. Specifically, it outlines a broad framework that distinguishes between ‘giftedness’ and ‘talent’ and discusses, in turn, six core components of this framework: giftedness, the developmental process, intrapersonal factors, environmental catalysts, chance, and talent. It then explores the scope and potential for identifying musically gifted children. Throughout, it draws on the early experiences of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, commonly evoked as the paradigmatic example of childhood accomplishment, to elucidate these components.

This chapter narrates Bateson's cultivation of Konrad Lorenz as a friend and colleague in the spring of 1966. The Austrian Lorenz was a famed expert on animal behavior and one of the fathers of ethology. Lorenz and Bateson shared a foundation in natural history and a dislike of behaviorism. These matters featured a debate among scientists over the usefulness of the term "instinct" and were specialized versions of a broader nature-nurture debate. Lorenz sent Bateson his newly-published masterpiece of popular ethology, On Aggression. Lorenz's argument in the book is summarized with examples from the behavior of cichlids, geese, and rats. The chapter touches on suspicions of Lorenz's early work as sympathetic to Nazi ideology and, in turn, suspicions of holist approaches to biology in general as politically reactionary. Bateson's engagement with On Aggression was contemporaneous with a reading of T. H. White's The Sword and the Stone, and the chapter explores the resonance between the two books. Both reflect a postwar rehabilitation of the animal as a symbol of brutality and amorality. They spoke to Cold War anxieties concerning whether aggression in humans was instinctive.

This chapter examines the extent to which visual representations can begin to emerge prenatally. This is a fascinating question because while the unborn child exists in a relatively rich auditory environment, its visual environment is very limited, consisting essentially of very coarse variation in luminosity levels. However, there is evidence of substantial spontaneous intrinsically generated neural activity in the visual cortex and elsewhere in the brain both pre- and postnatally. The chapter describes a neural network model that can explain the very rapid emergence of orientation feature detectors and face sensitive detectors after only very limited direct visual experience as a result of the intrinsic activity ‘setting the stage’ for the kinds of neural representations that are allowable and direct visual experience.

This penultimate chapter shows that the perspective developed in the book has a number of practical applications. For example, it can clarify what kinds of expectations comparative psychologists should have about the mental mechanisms of different species, and provides advice for neuroscientists about how to identify the remnants of the major transitions in brain tissue. We also argue that having a rigorous vocabulary for talking about how behavior is produced can assist everyday communications, between academics in different disciplines, as well as in the media. This could have a general salutary effect on public discourse about our own behavior and its causes (e.g., the interminable nature-nurture debate).

While the personalist anthropology emerged as the attempt to overcome a putative physicalism in the natural-law tradition (asserting that the human being is not reducible to nature but rather is a person with spiritual and moral values), personalism itself tends toward a certain dualism between body and mind, nature and spirit. In contrast, theological ethicist Johan De Tavernier claims, evolutionary biology challenges this view. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin already focused on the evolutionary roots of human beings and their morality, claiming that the distinction between human and animal behavior is, in some cases, not so sharp. For example, animals have a capacity for sympathy, empathy, and group loyalty, to name just a few of their characteristically “human” traits. Morality does not start in culture; its roots are in dispositions that are programmed into our nature by evolution. Hence, De Tavernier proposes a renewed integration of natural scientific insights into the personalist tradition.

The theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation was defended in How the Mind Works. Jerry Fodor claims that ‘the mind doesn’t work that way’ because (1) Turing Machines cannot duplicate humans’ ability to perform abduction; (2) though a massively modular system could succeed at abduction, such a system is implausible on other grounds; and (3) evolution adds nothing to our understanding of the mind. This chapter shows that these arguments are flawed. The claim that the mind is a computational system is different from the claim Fodor attacks. Fodor identifies abduction with the cumulative accomplishments of the scientific community over millennia. This is very different from the accomplishments of human common sense, so the supposed gap between human cognition and computational models may be illusory. And, the claim about biological specialization, as seen in organ systems, is distinct from Fodor’s own notion of encapsulated modules.