This chapter focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to expand a debate on this complex topic. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss to what extent historians should engage the concept of the classic, as has been done for literary and artworks. I will argue that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in historical writing. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts such as durability, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but try to achieve some realities external to the text, they also have to attain some specific features according to this referential content, such as the surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity, and a certain appropriation of ‘literariness’.

Theories have been viewed as mirrors of nature and fictions tainted by human subjectivity. This chapter contends that theories are tools that enable humans to act and coordinate. It argues that theories are like maps that can get us from A to B and like models that allow us to simulate interventions in the world. It illustrates how these different conceptions of theory have implications for research in the domain of creativity research. Overall, this chapter shows how a pragmatist approach to methodology sensitizes researchers to anomalies, and data can be used to drive theory toward increasingly useful forms.

Aristotle here considers the effect of diction, or word choice, on rhetorical argument. Metaphors, epithets, special dialects, the use of the voice to convey passion or emotion, and the necessary parts of any speech are all considered here.

This chapter examines the idea of ’dialogue’ as a way of conceptualising the relationship between the courts and the legislature in a system of ’weak-form review’. Tracking the trajectory of dialogue theory in Canada and in the UK, this chapter outlines the promise and perils of dialogue. By highlighting the iterative and interactive dynamic between courts and legislatures when seeking to uphold rights, the metaphor of dialogue held out the promise that it could transcend the Manichean narrative. However, the chapter argues that the idea of dialogue overpromised and underdelivered. It failed to take us beyond the Manichean narrative and ultimately provided a misleading and distorted understanding of the constitutional relationships between the branches of government in a constitutional democracy.

An influential approach to public communication focuses on changing the preexisting frames of understanding the public brings to issues or introducing new frames to strengthen message acceptance. This chapter explores this approach to communicating developmental science in the work of the FrameWorks Institute together with the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. The application of “strategic frame analysis” is described to show how an influential messaging strategy was developed by FrameWorks, and the example of framing child mental health illustrates this process. Questions are raised about this approach, including how to define the target audience(s) and the media that influence them, balancing scientific accuracy and policy advocacy in the communication goal(s), and whether there are long-term effects of FrameWorks messaging. The work of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child is profiled as an implementation of strategic frame analysis to communicating developmental science. The development of the core story of early childhood development and the use of metaphors such as toxic stress, serve and return, and brain architecture are discussed. The chapter concludes with questions and cautions about the framing of developmental science and the influence of values in science communication.

Chapter 6 illustrates why abstract concepts can be physical tools that modify our perception and interaction with the environment. It focuses on the relationship between abstract concepts and perception, both of the external world and the body. In section 6.1, I describe studies showing the importance of interoception, the ability to detect inner bodily signals for abstract concepts, particularly emotional ones, and contend that they might enhance this capability. The second section illustrates research showing how abstract concepts rely on sensorimotor experience through a metaphorical mapping mechanism. Although metaphorical mapping is powerful, other mechanisms beyond it, and primarily linguistic and social experience, might contribute to explaining abstractness. Finally, I describe how languages and cultures differently influence abstract concepts. A variety of examples, spanning from the concrete concept of container to the abstract concept of time, suggest that abstract concepts are more flexible and variable across languages than concrete concepts.

War features prominently in the broader formation of thought commonly referred to as French Theory. Particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s war attracted the attention of a number of the leading thinkers in France. In 1976 Michel Foucault offered his lecture course at the Collège de France, Il faut défendre la société; in the same year Raymond Aron published his large tome Penser la guerre: Clausewitz; in 1980 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed their theory of nomadology and the war machine in Milles plateaux; and in 1987 Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho published their wargame Le Jeu de la guerre, originally invented in 1965. This chapter examines the key role that war comes to play in French Theory from the 1970s onward. It traces the flux of historical concepts from early-nineteenth-century Prussian military thought into high theory in France and their transformation from military concepts into metaphors and figures of thought. It thereby offers an overview of the of the productive impact of war on French Theory, but also critically stakes out the limits of the militarization of thinking.

The difference between literary language and flowery prose. Checking adjectives and adverbs are really doing a job. Detail implies significance: description needs a reason. Description should produce an effect rather than draw attention to itself as an effect. Why clichés endure – and why we should beware them. Metaphors and similes – keeping them real. The debate over modifiers. Muscular verbs. All description comes from a particular standpoint. Describing place. When detail is relevant and how much is too much. Chekhov’s gun. Telling details. Showing instead of telling.

‘We all know, deep in our egotistical little hearts, when we have written something that has no function in the text other than to show off what good writers we think we are. We have at this point stopped communicating with the reader and are being self-indulgent: we have stopped doing our job and are doing something else.’

To understand what genes “do,” we have to consider what happens during development. The first and most striking evidence that the local environment matters for the outcome of development was provided by the experiments of embryologists Wilhelm Roux and Hans Driesch in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roux had hypothesized that during the cell divisions of the embryo, hereditary particles were unevenly distributed in its cells, thus driving their differentiation. This view entailed that even the first blastomeres (the cells emerging from the first few divisions of the zygote – that is, the fertilized ovum) would each have different hereditary material and that the embryo would thus become a kind of mosaic. Roux decided to test this hypothesis. He assumed that if it were true, destroying a blastomere in the two-cell or the four-cell stage would produce a partially deformed embryo. If it were not true, then the destruction of a blastomere would have no effect. With a hot sterilized needle, Roux punctured one of the blastomeres in a two-cell frog embryo that was thus killed. The other blastomere was left to develop. The outcome was a half-developed embryo; the part occupied by the punctured blastomere was highly disorganized and undifferentiated, whereas those cells resulting from the other blastomere were well-developed and partially differentiated. This result stood as confirmation for Roux’s hypothesis.

During the 1970s, more puzzling observations were made. The first was that the genome of animals contained large amounts of DNA with unique sequences that should correspond to a larger number of genes than anticipated. It was also observed that the RNA molecules in the nuclei of cells were much longer than those found outside the nucleus, in the cytoplasm. These observations started making sense in 1977, when sequences of mRNA were compared to the corresponding DNA sequences. It was shown that certain sequences that existed in the DNA did not exist in the mRNA, and that therefore they must have been somehow removed. It was thus concluded that the genes encoding various proteins in eukaryotes included both coding sequences and ones that were not included in the mRNA that would reach the ribosomes for translation. These “removed” sequences were called introns, to contrast them with the ones that were expressed in translation, which were called exons. The procedure that removed the intron sequences from the initial mRNA and that left only the exon sequences in the mature mRNA was named “RNA splicing.”

One important, and for some the most surprising, conclusion of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has been that in most cases numerous single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) in several genes were found to be associated with the development of a characteristic or the risk of developing a disease. As already mentioned, the main conclusion has been that the relationship between genes and characteristics or diseases is usually a many-to-many one, as many genes may be implicated in the same condition, and the same gene may be implicated in several different conditions. In fact, the same allele may be protective for one disease but increase the risk for another. For example, a variation in the PTPN22 (protein tyrosine phosphatase, nonreceptor type 22) gene on chromosome 1 seems to protect against Crohn’s disease but to predispose to autoimmune diseases. In other cases, certain variants are associated with more than one disease, such as the JAZF1 (JAZF1 zinc finger 1) gene on chromosome 7 that is implicated in prostate cancer and in type 2 diabetes. Therefore, we should forget the simple scheme of gene 1 → condition 1/gene 2 → condition 2, and adopt a richer – and certainly more complicated – representation of the relationship between genes and disease. Additional GWAS on more variants in larger populations might provide a better picture in the future. But insofar as we do not understand all biological processes in detail, all we are left with are probabilistic associations between genes and characteristics (or diseases). The “associated gene” may be informative, but its explanatory potential and clinical value are limited – at least for now.

This chapter is about the public image of genes. But what exactly do we mean by “public”? Here, I use the word as a noun or an adjective vaguely, in order to refer to all ordinary people who are not experts in genetics. I thus contrast them with scientists who are experts in genetics – that is, who have mastered genetics-related knowledge and skills, who practice these as their main occupation, and who have valid genetics-related credentials, confirmed experience, and affirmation by their peers. I must note that both “experts” and “the public” are complex categories that depend on the context and that change over time. There is no single group of nonexperts that we can define as “the” public, as people around the world differ in their perceptions of science, depending on their cultural contexts. We had therefore better refer to “publics.” The differences among experts nowadays might be less significant than those among nonexperts, given today’s global scientific communities, but they do exist. Finally, both the categories of experts and publics have changed across time, depending, on the one hand, on the level of experts’ knowledge and understanding of the natural world, and, on the other hand, on publics’ attitudes toward that knowledge and understanding.

If you were taught Mendelian genetics at school (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2) you should be aware that it is an oversimplified model that does not work for most cases of inherited characteristics. Human eye color is a textbook example of a monogenic characteristic. It refers to the color of the iris – the colored circle in the middle of the eye. The iris comprises two tissue layers, an inner one called the iris pigment epithelium and an outer one called the anterior iridial stroma. It is the density and cellular composition of the latter that mostly affects the color of the iris. The melanocyte cells of the anterior iridial stroma store melanin in organelles called melanosomes. White light entering the iris can absorb or reflect a spectrum of wavelengths, giving rise to the three common iris colors (blue, green–hazel, and brown) and their variations. Blue eyes contain minimal pigment levels and melanosome numbers; green–hazel eyes have moderate pigment levels and melanosome numbers; and brown eyes are the result of high melanin levels and melanosome numbers. Textbook accounts often explain that a dominant allele B is responsible for brown color, whereas a recessive allele b is responsible for blue color (Figure 4.1). According to such accounts, parents with brown eyes can have children with blue eyes, but it is not possible for parents with blue eyes to have children with brown eyes. This pattern of inheritance was first described at the beginning of the twentieth century and it is still taught in schools, although it became almost immediately evident that there were exceptions, such as that two parents with blue eyes could have offspring with brown or dark hazel eyes.

Central to this book is a trio of chapters (4, 5 and 6) on Darwin’s Origin of Species in its first edition of 1859. Darwin called his book 'one long argument'. These three chapters clarify how this long argument is conducted; how Darwin’s analogical reasonings about natural and artificial selection support the argument; and how his various metaphors are grounded in those reasonings. The conclusions from these chapters support the claims in our chapters 1 to 3 about the decisive antecedents, from ancient times on, for Darwin’s conception of analogical reasoning and what it can do for his one long argument. Equally these conclusions support the claims made in our chapters 7and 8 as to how that reasoning should be analysed and evaluated by philosophers, biologists and historians today. Our writing combines throughout narratives that are often not overtly normative with judgements that often are so.

Perhaps you were taught at school that genetics began with Gregor Mendel. Because of his experiments with peas, Mendel is considered to be a pioneer of genetics and the person who discovered the laws of heredity. According to the model of “Mendelian inheritance,” things are rather simple and straightforward with inherited characteristics. Some alleles are dominant – that is, they impose their effects on other alleles that are recessive. An individual who carries two recessive alleles exhibits the respective “recessive” characteristic, whereas a single dominant allele is sufficient for the “dominant” version of the characteristic to appear. In this sense, particular genes determine particular characteristics (e.g., seed color in peas), and particular alleles of those genes determine particular versions of the respective characteristics. Mendel, the story goes, discovered that characteristics are controlled by hereditary factors, the inheritance of which follows two laws: the law of segregation and the law of independent assortment.