This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

The study of nature as an object of scientific interest matured through the investigations of Presocratic philosophers on the observable world. Herodotus is in dialogue with those expanding its domain into the spheres of natural science and the human. Physis embraces the interior and exterior regularities of subjects as diverse as landmasses, rivers, seas, elements, animals, and men. Unique to Herodotus, however, is the use of nature as a category of historical explanation; it is a standard of measurement that permits historical inference.

By highlighting the importance of venues and meetings for the work of the IPCC, this chapter offers a novel angle from which to study the institution. Thinking of the IPCC as a ’travelling village’ and a ’system of meetings’, we discuss the various functions of venues and meetings in organising and maintaining the IPCC’s assessment process. We argue that because of the global and networked nature of its activities and institutional arrangements, participating in the IPCC means making the world one’s workplace. The chapter also shows how established IPCC meeting practices have been tested by the COVID-19 pandemic and we shed light on some of the implications of the shift from in-person to virtual meetings.

At least until Hubbell’s neutral theory emerged, no concept was thought more important to ecological theorizing than the niche. Without it – and its highly abstract definition by Hutchinson in particular – technically sophisticated and well-regarded theories of character displacement, community assembly, limiting similarity, and many others would seemingly never have been developed. To cite just one example among many, grasslands in the central plains of North America and Africa share a similar structure and exhibit similar dynamics because they are claimed to instantiate roughly the same system of niches, albeit with different species. The niche concept is also the centerpiece of perhaps the best candidate for a distinctively ecological law, the competitive exclusion principle. But the incongruous array of proposed definitions of the concept squares poorly with its apparent scientific centrality. I argue this definitional diversity reflects a problematic conceptual imprecision that challenges its putative indispensability in ecological theory. Recent attempts to integrate these disparate definitions into a unified characterization fail to resolve the imprecision. The niche is not the conceptual cornerstone of ecological science.