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Behavior genetics is a controversial science. For decades, scholars have sought to understand the role of heredity in human behavior and life-course outcomes. Recently, technological advances and the rapid expansion of genomic databases have facilitated the discovery of genes associated with human phenotypes such as educational attainment and substance use disorders. To maximize the potential of this flourishing science, and to minimize potential harms, careful analysis of what it would mean for genes to be causes of human behavior is needed. In this paper, we advance a framework for identifying instances of genetic causes, interpreting those causal relationships, and applying them to advance causal knowledge more generally in the social sciences. Central to thinking about genes as causes is counterfactual reasoning, the cornerstone of causal thinking in statistics, medicine, and philosophy. We argue that within-family genetic effects represent the product of a counterfactual comparison in the same way as average treatment effects (ATEs) from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Both ATEs from RCTs and within-family genetic effects are shallow causes: They operate within intricate causal systems (non-unitary), produce heterogeneous effects across individuals (non-uniform), and are not mechanistically informative (non-explanatory). Despite these limitations, shallow causal knowledge can be used to improve understanding of the etiology of human behavior and to explore sources of heterogeneity and fade-out in treatment effects.

Since the 1970s, studies on gender and women in science--typically practised by women--have significantly supported the spread and establishment of <>, and just as typically they have been underrated. Known as STS--originally for Science, Technology and Society, now often for Science and Technology Studiessince the 1930s those studies have developed beyond disciplinary boundaries by proposing integrated approaches for an understanding of science and technology over time. STS deal with interactions among science, culture, and shared social values, including those of sex/gender, as perceived already by Virginia Woolf and other female scholars since the 18th century, such as Clotilde Tambroni. With the aim of reconstructing fragments of a history of women's contribution to an understanding of those hybrid phenomena, the present article turns to the work of a number of female scientists who, in recent decades, practicing liminal approaches have succeeded in bringing into the lab, together with feminist politics, a dialogue between the natural sciences and the social sciences. A dialogue that, since the 1980s, has been crucial for bringing us beyond the false nature vs. culture dilemma. Dagli anni Settanta del Novecento gli studi di genere e sulle donne nella scienza--tipicamente praticati da donne--hanno sostenuto in modo importante -e altrettanto tipicamente sottovalutato--la diffusione e l'affermazione dei <>. Oggi indicati con l'acronimo STS--originariamente per Science, Technology and Society, ora piu spesso Science and Technology Studies--, dagli anni Trenta del Novecento questi studi si sono sviluppati oltre i confini disciplinan proponendo approcci integrati alla comprensione dei fatti scientifici nel tempo. Gli STS si occupano infatti di interazioni tra processi conoscitivi naturalistici e tecnologici, cultura e valori sociali condivisi: compresi quelli di sesso/genere, come percepirono Virginia Woolf e altre studiose prima di lei, per esempio Clotilde Tambroni. Con l'obiettivo di ricostruire frammenti di una storia del contributo delle donne alla comprensione di quei fenomeni ibridi, l'articolo approdera al lavoro di alcune scienziate che negli ultimi decenni, praticando approcci liminali, hanno saputo portare in laboratorio, con le politiche femministe, quel dialogo tra scienze naturali e scienze sociali che fin dagli anni Ottanta aveva consentito di superare il falso dilemma natura-cultura. Keywords: Clotilde Tambroni, Virginia Woolf, soglie, Darwinismo femminista, natura-cultura, studi sulle donne e di genere, Studi della scienza (STS); Clotilde Tambroni, Virginia Woolf, thresholds, Darwinian feminism, nature vs. culture, women's and gender studies, science studies (STS).

Christa Kuljian’s Our Science, Ourselves chronicles the life histories of seven trailblazing women whose work, activism, and ferocity forms an originary node for feminist science studies. These figures formed a powerful network in the Boston area from the 1970s to the 1990s. Inspired by the women’s movement and organizations such as Science for the People and the Combahee River Collective, they led critical analyses of gender and racial biases in science. Their work famously challenged E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers’s comments about women in science in 2005. Drawing on extensive research, Kuljian celebrates how these women profoundly shaped our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world. I met Kuljian after she gave a talk at the STS colloquium series at Brown University in March 2025, and we subsequently connected for this interview.

Evelyn Fox Keller calls the form of organisms a “devious” problem. How and why do such forms arise? Models, Keller argues, are necessary inroads to these questions. The speculative-propositional mode of computational and mathematical models permits scientists to question the physical and mental processes that shape matter into elegant form despite the “void” of certainty opened by the complexity of vitality. This article documents the use of the LOGO programming language in model-mind making as well as in experimental coding pedagogies for special needs students circa 1968. It provides a historical and philosophical background for interpreting clinical observations of two young autistic students, David and Joey. The article demonstrates that the designers of LOGO understood their design choices in terms of philosophical debates about the nature of purposive orientations in organisms. The author argues that cautious engagement with those debates—guided by Keller’s philosophy of models and Catherine Malabou’s understanding of Immanuel Kant’s concept of schema—can open for humanists an interpretive project aimed at elucidating the historical meaning of the graphical user interface. Insights into the aesthetics of resistance from autistic rhetorician Remi Yergeau and philosopher-poet Fred Moten allow neuroqueer ephemera, lingering in the archives of LOGO, to illuminate a politicization of mental variety nascent in digital screens.

Scientists are oft trained to think that “feeling” is not simply irrelevant but antithetical to their methodologies. That scientists are not simply objectively trained minds but also bodies that feel has been an important feminist contribution towards reimagining scientific knowledge—not as the product of self-directed teleological discovery, but as situated in time, place, and transformed through relations that oft exceed the binary logics of scientific representation; those founded upon rationalist distinctions between feeling/knowing, body/mind, object/subject. Through a collaborative methodological lens we (ethnographer + scientist) are calling radicle empiricism, we ask how a scientist comes to make sense of feeling and knowing—and the relations “between”—throughout shifting configurations of a pea plant decision-making apparatus. By focusing this study at the level of the apparatus (Barad, 2007), we provide an empirically based description—not a proposed model or theory—of some of the material-discursive relations through which the concepts of “feeling” and “knowing” are (re)configured through a scientist’s unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or radicles. As such, we offer a perspective that does not assume “feeling” or “knowing” as distinct categories of a scientist’s knowledge making endeavors, nor as categories of experience that function independently of the historical, social, and material conditions through which they are made perceptible. Immanent to this description is an invitation to explore creative and collaborative practices of science-making in which the phenomena we study—whether pea plants or other persons—have the opportunity to reformulate not only our categories of “feeling” and “knowing” but the conditions through which they are made possible.

Evelyn Fox Keller wrote first biography of the Nobel Prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock in which Keller discussed how McClintock felt being rejected by her peers in the 1950s because she questioned the dominant idea of the particulate gene and instead proposed that the genetic material jumped positions on the chromosome which indicated that the gene did not control but was controlled by the cellular environment. Keller's story of McClintock's life is an account of a woman scientist's conception of science and how her unorthodox views isolated her from the main stream science. Keller's biography was read by many in a way that made McClintock a feminist icon by showing how women scientists \"see\" scientific objects differently and how their science is holistic and hence radically different from the reductionism of male-dominated science. The second biographer Nathaniel Comfort calls this story a myth. In his detailed intellectual biography, Comfort embarks on an energetic journey to separate fact from fiction to dismantle what he calls the McClintock myth. The difference between two biographers is not entirely about evidences or about separating fact from fiction but about their adoption of two contrasting paradigms of scientist's subjectivity: Keller foregrounds McClintock's affective self and Comfort her rational. In this commentary I have closely and comparatively read both biographies to revisit Keller's \"myth\" and Comfort's \"truth\" and to provide yet another interpretation of McClintock's life and work from the perspective of object relations theories in psychoanalysis. Instead of figuring out the extent to which the myth bears truth as Comfort does, I have asked questions: How and why this private myth was in the making throughout McClintock's life and work? How this private myth was related to the making of her science? By using developmental psychoanalytical approach, I show that what Comfort calls McClintock's private myth was not something that was partly fictional and hence incorrect or wrong but it emerged from a deeply and compellingly affective place in McClintock's life. This so called myth was integral to and fundamentally formative of who she was, a woman and a scientist, and that this myth formatively shaped McClintock's relationship with science's objects and science's subjects. This commentary aims to show the relevance and usefulness of psychoanalytical theories for understanding scientific subjectivities and provides a revision to the neo-Kantian idea of scientist subject—a unified and wilful, selfdetermined, self-regulated, active, autonomous, and rational subject wilfully driven by social and scientific ethos—generally popular among historians of science.

Complexity has recently risen to prominence in ecology as part of a broader interest that suggests its status is something more than just a scientific theory or property of reality. It may be helpful to consider complexity, and related terms such as “self-organization,” as recent metaphors deployed to advance knowledge on fundamental questions in ecology, including the relationship between parts and wholes, and between order and disorder. Though not commonly viewed as such, metaphors are an indispensable component of science, and should not be appraised as true or false, but rather in terms of how they help or hinder knowledge. By understanding metaphor as a necessary ally and not a threat to ecological knowledge, we may enrich our contextual understanding of complexity while continuing to invoke it in useful ways. The special section introduced by this article features essays by two prominent experts in ecology, complexity, and metaphor: science studies scholar Evelyn Fox Keller and theoretical ecologist Simon Levin.

Molecular geneticists are notoriously indifferent not only to mathematics but even to modelling outside their own conventions (for instance, in their diagrammatic representation of genes). But [Evelyn Fox Keller] notes that a new paradigm, rejecting such genetic preformationism, is beginning to emerge, in the hands of people like Susan Oyama and Stuart Kauffman. The latter, in particular, uses modelling to \"tame\" and thus transcend naive geneticism. But surprisingly, at least to me, Keller sees the greatest hope in the computer games that go by the grandiose title of Artificial Life. These, she believes, will ultimately bring the modellers, experimentalists and theoreticians into harmony. I suspect she is looking in the wrong direction, and the greatest hope lies in the pathways pioneered by Oyama and her developmental systems theory (sometimes known as autopoiesis, or self-creation). But Keller's achievement is to historicise 20th-century biological concepts, so that we can begin to see that they are not inevitable, springing directly from a realisation of \"how nature is\", but rather are culturally located, and shaped by complex social forces.

In the Shadow of the Bombnarrates how two charismatic, exceptionally talented physicists--J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans A. Bethe--came to terms with the nuclear weapons they helped to create. In 1945, the United States dropped the bomb, and physicists were forced to contemplate disquieting questions about their roles and responsibilities. When the Cold War followed, they were confronted with political demands for their loyalty and McCarthyism's threats to academic freedom. By examining how Oppenheimer and Bethe--two men with similar backgrounds but divergent aspirations and characters--struggled with these moral dilemmas, one of our foremost historians of physics tells the story of modern physics, the development of atomic weapons, and the Cold War. Oppenheimer and Bethe led parallel lives. Both received liberal educations that emphasized moral as well as intellectual growth. Both were outstanding theoreticians who worked on the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Both advised the government on nuclear issues, and both resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb. Both were, in their youth, sympathetic to liberal causes, and both were later called to defend the United States against Soviet communism and colleagues against anti-Communist crusaders. Finally, both prized scientific community as a salve to the apparent failure of Enlightenment values. Yet, their responses to the use of the atom bomb, the testing of the hydrogen bomb, and the treachery of domestic politics differed markedly. Bethe, who drew confidence from scientific achievement and integration into the physics community, preserved a deep integrity. By accepting a modest role, he continued to influence policy and contributed to the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. In contrast, Oppenheimer first embodied a new scientific persona--the scientist who creates knowledge and technology affecting all humanity and boldly addresses their impact--and then could not carry its burden. His desire to retain insider status, combined with his isolation from creative work and collegial scientific community, led him to compromise principles and, ironically, to lose prestige and fall victim to other insiders. Schweber draws on his vast knowledge of science and its history--in addition to his unique access to the personalities involved--to tell a tale of two men that will enthrall readers interested in science, history, and the lives and minds of great thinkers.