New Books in Biology and Evolution

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

In their book, Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (University of Chicago Press, 2015) UCLA sociologist and current department chair Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder, assistant professor of social medicine and anthropology at the University of North Carolina address tough questions about the efficacy of genetic testing through a longitudinal study of a genetics clinic.Screening for common genetic disorders is a high opportunity area for the application of biomedical knowledge to the clinic. However, this population health measure can quickly precipitate personal crises and emotional upheaval in the process of confirming results that often turn out to be false positives. For many families, this taxing diagnostic ordeal profoundly shapes the experience of starting or growing their family, and for some it is only the beginning of a greater therapeutic odyssey. Newborn genetic screening undoubtedly saves lives, but its social repercussions require greater scrutiny.This is precisely the task to which Saving Babies? sets itself: an ethnographically-informed assessment of the intended and unintended consequences of genetic screening as they impact families in the clinic and beyond. While newborn screening is meant to provide actionable certainty, its reality is far less clear-cut. Uncertainty is not simply lack of knowledge that the application of technology can eradicate, but rather an intrinsic characteristic of the clinical situation that more information, even more precise information, can often exacerbate. Moreover, longstanding inequalities in the U.S. healthcare system often prevent conditions that can be easily diagnosed from being treated.Saving Babies? is a serious exercise in the sociology of knowledge driven by engaging personal narratives that get at the urgency of newborn screening as a felt phenomenon, as much as an important public health program. As such, it is great reading for sociologists, anthropologists, and clinicians interested in the broader social dimensions of medical practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Due in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of the human genome project, human genes tend to be thought of in light of the present–genetic components of human disease and differential risks associated with genetic individuals–before the future, what gets passed on to later generations. However, public understanding of genetics did not merely radiate from laboratories, as Alexandra Minna Stern‘s book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University, 2012) shows. Before the age of genetic sequencing and mass-produced tests, physicians from various specialties provided genetic counseling on an ad-hoc basis, most of which took the form of reproductive advice. Medical genetics had only been established in the 1960s, with the shadow of eugenics still looming large over a field that was now more inclined toward description of heritable conditions than prescription of reproductive sanctions and sterilization. The founding of the first master’s program in genetic counseling in 1969 established the institutional and intellectual basis for a new kind of health care professional, one that would further the reorientation of medical genetics toward patient-centered care.Stern’s book connects this emergent professional identity to the broader history of genetic and eugenic programs in the United States. So, while this is a history focused on how the distinct profession of genetic counseling emerged as an alternative to traditional medical authority, it is firmly situated within the conflicts that have persistently plagued the development and application of human genetic knowledge. This orientation toward fundamental tensions is reflected by the book’s structure. While she begins with a historical overview of genetic counseling as a profession, the rest of the book is organized around issues; genetic risk and the questionable efficacy of disease apprehension; the politics of race inherent in population knowledge; the fundamental role played by disability in the understanding of inherited disorders; the gender politics of genetic counseling as a challenge to the medical establishment; therapeutic ethics; and the emergence of prenatal testing.This highly readable whirlwind tour through the complex ethical and historical landscape of genetic counseling rewards those new to the history of genetics by virtue of its accessibility, along with those more familiar through the vast amounts of new source material it blends in seamlessly with broader frames. If you enjoy this book, look out for a new edition of Eugenic Nation, Stern’s first book on the politics of eugenics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this oversight, turning our attention to the importance of biological field stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in generating new scientific practices, theories, and networks. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the German- and French-speaking scientific community in Europe, looking at a number of influential case studies that collectively embody what de Bont calls a “station movement” in this period. Exploring the relationship between these field stations and a notion of “experimentalism” embraced therein, de Bont usefully undermines a tendency to focus on laboratories as sites of experimentation in the history of science. The stations ranged in kind from very technologically sophisticated marine labs to cabins in the woods, from urban Naples to the isolated beaches of France to the birdlands of East Prussia. Some of the practices cultivated at these sites spread into a wider political and intellectual economy, transforming disciplines and spaces of inquiry and education in the process. It’s a fascinating study that offers readers a more robust and complex understanding of the spaces of modern science and their entangled histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economics, and other sciences, although amid great controversy. The messy reality of biological creatures and their social relations cannot be captured in mathematical models or computer simulations, it is argued. But what is the relation between mathematics and physical reality? Do highly abstract mathematical formalisms and computer simulations yield empirical knowledge? If so, when, and how? In Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics and Simulations (Oxford University Press, 2015), Margaret Morrison, Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, considers the epistemological status of the results of modeling and simulation as compared, and typically contrasted with, the results of experiment. She argues that no sharp distinction between simulating the world and measuring the world can be drawn in modern science, and that there is no justification for epistemically privileging the results of experiments over the new knowledge we derive from idealizations, abstractions, and fictional models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the potential for innovation and research on treatments of disease related to those genes? In his new book, The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race (MIT Press, 2015), Myles W. Jackson (NYU) considers this question by examining the history of the sequencing and patenting of the CCR5 gene, which was found to have an important role in HIV/AIDS viral infection. In doing so, Jackson chronicles the challenges to the granting of property rights over materials that occur naturally, and the legal and policy arguments both for and against allowing patents on these materials.But the book is more than just an examination of the instability of patent law. On the contrary, Jackson provides an interdisciplinary examination of the history of CCR5, which analyzes the role of race, culture, medicine and other fields, to examine of the wider impact of science and science policy on society. Just listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Yet despite its central place in the life sciences, relatively few geographers employ evolutionary theory in their work. In his new book Evolutionary History:Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Edmund Russell makes a compelling case for why evolution matters for human history. Russell argues that evolution is both important and common. Through a number of case studies, he shows how poaching in Africa led to the evolution of tuskless elephants and intensive fishing fostered the development of smaller salmon and cod. But perhaps more importantly, he shows how anthropogenic, or human shaped, evolution played a pivotal role in two of the fundamental developments of human history: the agricultural and industrial revolutions. His book is a challenge to historians, geographers, and other scholars and the social sciences to recognize the pivotal role evolution has played in human history and to see cultural, political, and economic factors as forces in evolution.Professor Russell is Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of U.S. History at the University of Kansas, and is a leading scholar in the fields of environmental history and the history of technology. His previous book, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, examined the complicated and fraught relationship between chemical weapons production and insecticide development and the consequences of their use for both humans and nature as a whole. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) takes readers into the fascinating world of entrepreneur-biologists as they developed five of the first products of genetic engineering. Based on a documentary archive that includes oral history interviews and corporate documents resulting from patent litigation, Rasmussen’s book emphasizes the agency of the biologists in in driving the development of first-generation recombinant DNA drugs like insulin, human growth hormone, and interferon. After an introduction to the development of basic molecular biology in a Cold War context – and paying special attention to the ways that Kuhn’s notion of “normal science” helped shape the discipline – the ensuing chapters each present a case study that illustrates an important aspect of the history of biotech’s rise as manifest in laboratories, courtrooms, universities, freezers, markets, and the public arena. Gene Jockeys closes with a chapter that considers the policy lessons that can be taken from this story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices