New Books in Biology and Evolution

Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? Physicists, chemists, and biologists as well as philosophers have long argued on both sides of this debate between the idea of reduction and that of emergence. At this point, argues Carl Gillett, the sides have reached a stalemate, where it is difficult to know in what ways the sides fundamentally disagree about the nature of the relation between a composite whole and its parts. In Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Gillett aims to break the stalemate by providing needed clarification about what divides contemporary reductionists from contemporary emergentists, and lays out the strongest positions on each side. Gillett, who is professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University, uses his framework to provide a platform for future philosophical and scientific inquiry, helping reorient the debate towards fruitful empirical tests that might provide evidence for one view over the other, and point the way towards new issues regarding the nature of collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how complex is revealed in Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care? (Oxford University Press, 2016), Kenneth Schaffner’s assessment of the impact of recent biological research on the genetic contribution to behavior. Among the developments he considers are the sequencing of the human genome and the development of a model organism, the nematode C. Elegans, for exploring the relationship between genes, neural function, and development. Schaffner, who is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses the methodologies for determining genetic influence and the challenges by developmentalists and others of gene-focused research. He also defends a “creeping” form of reduction in which multilevel mechanistic explanations are possible in local, specific areas of biology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past quarter-century, scientists have been mapping and exploring the human genome to locate the genetic basis of disease and track the histories of populations across time and space. As part of this work, geneticists have formulated markers to calculate percentages of European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry in populations presumed to originate or inhabit particular geographic regions. The work done by geneticists in recent years has been received with a mixture of excitement and concern. Genomics is simultaneously viewed as the key to diagnosing and curing inherited disease, while also posing a threat to individual privacy and raising concerns over the reappearance of racialized thinking in scientific research.In Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2014), editors Peter Wade, Carlos Lopez Beltran, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos ask how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into the work of genetic scientists? Conducting ethnographic research in genetics laboratories located in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the authors question the perceived divide between the scientific community and society at large in the production of knowledge. This important work illuminates how the concepts of race, nation, and gender are continually reproduced, challenged, and reformulated in both scientific and public discourse.David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJs dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

April R. Haynes is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Haynes shows how the campaign against masturbation redefined women’s sexuality and reformulated the battle for political rights. Beginning with Sylvester Graham’s “Lecture to Mothers” to reform-minded women to the black abolitionists Sarah Mapps Douglas’s sex education lectures to African American women, masturbation became a topic with both gender and racial import. After a long history of neglect, it became tied to issues of purity, virtue and self-government. Through women reformers the proscriptions against masturbation were popularized and institutionalized. Haynes sheds light on the continued attention given to masturbation in American culture and the women’s movement, demonstrating its political significance.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth A. Wilson‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of science studies and feminist theory. In its introduction, Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2015) lays out two major ambitions: it seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to how biological data can be used to think about minded and bodily states,” and seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to thinking about the hostility intrinsic to our politics.” The book shows that the gut is an organ of the mind via an exploration of melancholia, depression, some fascinating psychoanalytic literature, and contemporary conversations and debates about psychopharmaceuticals. Wilson’s book unflattens biology, offering an incredibly helpful way to think about anatomy as an ever-changing site of entanglement that enacts “malleability, heterogeneity, friction, and unpredictability.” Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book, Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), biologist Ronald Chase explores the frequently misunderstood condition through an engaging combination of scientific exploration and personal memoir. In recounting the life of his older brother, Jim, who was a bright young graduate student at UCLA when his episodes began to intensify, Chase tells the story of how the treatment of schizophrenia has changed since the 1950s, connecting events in his own life to research on the causation and treatment of schizophrenia. He grapples with difficult questions about why the condition persists from an evolutionary perspective, and the stigma associated with it.Chase takes a hard line on the physical nature of schizophrenia; only by accepting it as a disorder of the biological brain, rather than the moral mind, can we begin to find the right, albeit complex answers and accommodate those who suffer from the condition. Though individuals with schizophrenia can live long lives, Chase’s meetings with Jim call upon the reader to ask themselves how we, as a society, can help make these lives more meaningful. This book is essential reading for those interested in the stories behind brain disorders, and those who want to learn more about how mental illness has changed over the last 50 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (Norton, 2014), the psychoanalyst and innovative historian, George Makari speaks to us about the dramatic history of the invention of the concept of the mind. Beginning at the origins of modernity, Makari takes the reader on a wild ride across the European continent in a search for answers about the nature of human inner life.Hardly a sedate academic debate, the history of the mind is a history soaked in blood. Heretical ideas challenged religious and political authority, toppled governments and fomented revolution. In the shift from an ethereal, God-given soul to a material, thinking mind, humanity found itself freed from the authoritarian rule of the church and the need for a monarch; however, with this newfound freedom to reason and self-govern, man needed to contend with the limits of reason, with unbridled passions, and with madness.Makari has written a history of ideas with powerful implications for the field of psychoanalysis. First, there was the secularization of the soul. Now we are witnessing the supplanting of the mind by neuroscience, biology, and brain. This raises questions about the role psychoanalysis can play in keeping a focus on the mind. 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

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!”The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A “midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s” who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it’s hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this modern scientist, from his early relationships with Freud and dialectical materialism, to his work on the orgasm as a kind of “electrophysiological discharge,” to his research into potential treatments for cancer. The book concludes by considering why understanding Reich’s scientific work matters for us today, including a brief introduction to some recent experimental work related to Reich’s research. It is an absorbing story that’s also a pleasure to read, and pays careful attention to Reich’s scientific work while still translating it in clear terms for non-specialist readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices