New Books in the History of Science

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if just with that one word.) It’s not just because its a beautifully crafted work of prose. And it’s not just because its quite literally a page-turner. The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016) is also a masterful biography of an idea: the life story of the Hamitic hypothesis and its relationship to to the histories of exploration, science, ideas of human origins, and much much more. Robinson’s book opens with an account of reporter David Ker going to the London mansion of Henry Morton Stanley in 1885 to interview the man who was at that point the world’s most famous explorer. (As Robinson puts it, Stanley resided in London, but in truth he lived nowhere.) As the story unfolds we learn about Stanley’s encounter with the white race of Gambaragara and its imbrication with a set of larger questions (Where did the human species originate? Why had it split into separate races? And how had these races come to settle the different regions of the planet?) as we meet some fascinating and compelling figures. The Lost White Tribe also has mummies, ruins, skulls, adventure fiction, and Freud. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While unique in scope, Kaplan’s project can be characterized as the culmination of efforts to apply techniques of personality capture–projective testing, dream analysis, and life history–in cross-cultural research on indigenous peoples, an effort to account for the full spectrum of human life amidst the encroachment of modernity upon cultures based, for example, in oral traditions.Richly documenting the entanglements of Kaplan and others in their attempts to render subjects as data, Lemov throws the transactional nature of anthropology into relief. A data point for an ethnographer can be many things for a research subject: cash for buying American niceties, a beer, a dream lost in the act of recounting, even a permanent mark of distrust. The book is also a history of a technology which never came to fruition: the futuristic reader for Kaplan’s Microcards was never realized, and the boxes of cards became dispersed and lost their value as a total archive of human personality. Lemov argues that we would do well to regard the fate of Kaplan’s database as a parable for our age by calling attention to the information loss upon which the technologies of documentation that saturate our present rely. What, then, will become of our compressed audio files, forgotten social media accounts, and backup hard drives stashed in the back corners of drawers? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it from 1862-1941. The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces the heated and multi-disciplinary debates over the existence of a Pleistocene human antiquity in North America. Meltzer’s book is a thick history that introduces readers not only to the major conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues at stake in the controversy, but also to the figures who debated the nature and scope of human antiquity in America. Anyone with an interest in the history of archaeology or the study of human origins should check it out! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) reframes how we understand the relationships between science and politics in history by looking closely at the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) argues that “in order to understand the forces that shaped thinking about racial difference in early modern philosophy, we must look to the philosophers’ own interest in a scientific classification and physical anthropology, with an eye to the way these projects were influenced by early modern globalization and by the associated projects of global commerce, collection, and systematization of the order of nature.” The resulting book is a thoughtful contribution to both the history of philosophy and science in early modernity, and to the modern history of concepts of race and identity, and is highly recommended to readers and teachers in both fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philosopher. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks closely at the involvement of Bell and others in a project of conservative reform in nineteenth century British medical education. We follow Berkowitz not only into the pages of the works that made Bell famous, but also into the classrooms in which Bell advocated a pedagogy that trained hand and eye together and developed his interest in systems of all sorts, including the nerves, education, and display. Readers will learn about the growth of a new genre of medical weeklies that changed the public face of medicine, the founding of new institutions that changed the teaching of medicine, and the controversy over motor and sensory nerves that accompanied major transformations in the medical science of Bell’s lifetime. It is a fascinating story that honors the importance of the history of education in shaping the histories of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire.Linstrum explores the careers of scientists sent to the South Pacific, India, and Africa to verify and define characteristics of white racial superiority. Far from confirming the inferiority of the colonized, psychologists exposed flaws in Britain’s civilizing mission, often doubting or subverting its underlying assumptions. Linstrum exposes a fundamental tension between the authoritarian goals of state and the role of science, showing how expert knowledge could be adapted as a tool of colonization just as it could be undermined by scientific discovery.Despite its critics, Linstrum shows how psychology mobilized to take part in Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya. Colonial administrators borrowed tools from psychology to conduct interrogations and suppress dissent. The colonial state attempted to cast doubt on the psychological maturity of the colonized, articulating Third World nationalism itself as a kind of pathology. Britain’s representatives aimed to actively reshape thoughts and feelings in their quest to win “hearts and minds.”Linstrum’s book challenges rigid definitions of scientists in the service of empire, complicating earlier narratives which portrayed psychologists as powerful supporters of colonial discourse. Psychology’s intended role was to aid the technocratic administration of a waning empire. While attempting to make the colonized knowable and predictable, British psychologists unintentionally exposed the dysfunctions inherent in European society, challenging the notion of an irrational, inferior “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Janet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood is Reader in History of Science at Cambridge University, and creator on the online exhibition “Making Visible Embryos,” which display some of the images from the book.Hopwood’s ambitious book retraces the social life of drawings of embryos first produced in 1868 by the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel. The book follows the turbulent travels of the images across 150 years and three countries. Some of the perennial controversy surrounding the images centered on debates about Darwinism, for in them Haeckel drew the development of human embryos alongside that of other animals and, in retrospect, seemed to illustrate his famous claim that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” But Hopwood argues that, while Haeckel’s reputation has continued to suffer from repeated allegations of fraud, his images have actually thrived on controversy, appearing in 2010, for example, on the cover of Nature magazine. Hopwood’s far-reaching and intricate analysis explains how one of the most controversial images in the history of science–namely, Haeckel’s embryo grid–has also been one of its most successful. The book is an essential study in the history of images and is itself a masterpiece of visual argument. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jorg Matthias Determann‘s new book looks at the history of modern biology in the Arab Gulf monarchies, focusing on the treatment of evolution and related concepts in the publications of biologists who worked in the Gulf states. Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2015) begins by describing a fatwa against Pokemon and opens out into an introduction of the sensitive nature of discussions related to evolution and creation in the Gulf. The ensuing chapters approach and answer a major question: given this sensitivity, what enabled scientists to nevertheless employ evolution in the political, religious, social, and natural environments of the Gulf? At least part of the answer lies in the importance of networks between scientists, plants, princes, local tribes, European businesses, animals, and other historical actors. The history of those networks – and the botanical, zoological, ornithological, and paleontological research they enabled – is a transnational and transregional one, and looks carefully at concerns with conservation, climate change, and economies at multiple levels. Determann’s book avoids telling this story in terms of the common tropes of decline and stagnation, and seeks instead to “go beyond the wholesale and often negative views of scientific production in the contemporary Arab world.” Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices