New Books in Biology and Evolution

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), include reflections on Darwin’s theories of natural selection and divergence, Ernst Haeckel’s life and work, the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer, the linguistic theories of August Schleicher, and the historical tendency to relate Hitler’s Nazism to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Individually, the essays are models of close and careful reading of the documentary traces of the life and work of Darwin, Haeckel, and others, and include some exceptionally affecting and tragic moments. Many of them touch on evolutionary theory’s moral character, its roots in Romanticism, and its conception of mankind. In addition to offering a fascinating set of case studies in the history of biology, the essays and appendices also collectively raise some important questions about how historians understand the past and bring it into narrative existence. What kind of thing is the past? What sets the history of science apart from other historical disciplines? Is it reasonable to use contemporary science to help construe the past? What is a scientific theory and where is it located? What does it mean to ask (and what might it look like to carefully answer) a question like, Was Hitler a Darwinian? The essays in Richards’ collection are wonderfully reflective considerations that reward the time and attention of both specialists in the history of biology and thoughtful general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines” — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T]he process of becoming accustomed to, and accepting as normal, worsening conditions.” Every generation regards its own environment as natural and healthy, failing to recognize that the status quo is but a pale imitation of what previous generations enjoyed. The term was coined by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist, and it’s most often applied to the collapse of global fisheries. Our oceans are plundered, but our lack of historical context prevents us from noticing.John Waldman is determined to wake us up to what we’ve lost. Waldman, a professor of biology at Queens College, is the author of Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations (Lyons Press, 2013), a book that not only elucidates the predicament of plummeting fisheries, but also provides a roadmap for escaping it. Waldman’s focus is diadromous fish — the migratory species, like salmon, sturgeon, eels, and shad, that once ran in great pulses up and down every East Coast river, providing sustenance for ecosystems and human communities. Centuries of dam construction, overfishing, and other deleterious forces have reduced these once-spectacular migrations to just a fraction of their historic abundance; yet thanks to our shifting baselines, we seem scarcely to have noticed, which only makes the problem worse. Waldman calls this phenomenon — in which species disappear from people’s awareness and so lose their advocates — “eco-social anomie.”Fortunately, the news for migratory fish is not all catastrophic. Waldman documents a number of heartening restoration efforts, especially dam removals, that are helping some species rebound, and proving that diadromous fish still have constituents. While the Atlantic Coast’s fish runs may never return to their former glory, there’s still time to restore their relevance to ecosystems and human lives. “Poor shad!” wrote Henry David Thoreau, to whom Waldman’s book is dedicated. “Where is thy redress?” Running Silver certainly isn’t complete redress for our troubled rivers, but it offers a guide to making amends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the twentieth century, most answers to this question were rather unsatisfying, unless of course you like your answers religio-mythical or pseudo-scientific. Then scientists discovered a genetic difference that seemed to correspond to sexual dimorphism: the 23rd pair of chromosomes was XX in (almost all) human females and XY in (almost all) human males. Thus was a research program born, one prefect for the age of molecular genetics: the search for “sex itself.”In her fascinating book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Sarah S. Richardson explores the ways in which molecular geneticists pursued this program and, just as importantly, the ways in which their “findings” were molded by contemporary attitudes toward sex and gender. The science we see in Sex Itself is not just about “the facts”; it’s about facts embedded in culture. She shows how the two–sexual science and culture–did a sort of dance, each leading the other about the floor of public discourse. Sometimes the dance is beautiful; other times the dancers stumble all over each other. Listen in to our lively discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.”All of this rests upon some uninterrogated (and potentially destructive) assumptions about race and human “origins,” however. In Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kim TallBear asks what’s at stake for Indigenous communities and First Nations when the premises of this ascendant science are put into practice.TallBear, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin and enrolled Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, conducted years of research on the politics of “human genome diversity,” decoding the rhetoric of scientists, for-profit companies, and public consumers. The result is a vital and provocative work, tracing lineages between racial science and genetic testing, “blood talk” and “DNA talk,” and the undemocratic culture of a field which claims it can deliver us from racism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America  (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Marga Vicedo explores the emergence of the science of children’s emotional needs in the twentieth century. Masterfully bringing together approaches from the history and philosophy of the biological sciences, Vicedo’s book focuses on British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907-1990), whose ethological work became one of the most influential and controversial psychological theories of the 20th century. Vicedo uses the story of Bowlby’s science to explore a broader modern history of work on animal and human behavior that includes Konrad Lorenz, Anna Freud, Benjamin Spock, and Niko Tinbergen, among others. Along the way, The Nature & Nurture of Love chronicles the emergence of a kind of anthropomorphic material culture of the human sciences, inhabiting its story with a fascinating cast of robots, dolls, geese, monkeys, and stuffed animals, as well as humans. It is a fascinating and gripping trans-disciplinary story and an absolute pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you think about it, pretty much everything has a history insofar as everything exists in time. Historians, however, usually limit themselves to the history of humans and the things humans make. Occasionally, of course, they make forays into the history of animals, the environment and even the universe (see “Big History”), but these excursions are exceptions to the all-human rule.In Virus Hunt: The Search for the Origin of HIV (Oxford UP, 2013), Dorothy H. Crawford–a biologist–breaks new historiographical ground by tracing the history of a virus, namely HIV. She is, naturally, interested in the tragic human story of HIV and AIDS. But her focus is on the virus itself. Where and when, she asks, was HIV born? In what populations did it live before it jumped to humans? And, most importantly, where and when did it jump to humans? Using an array of sophisticated tools, a group of biologists-cum-detectives were able to give credible answers to these historical questions. Crawford tells their story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America.In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both. The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the day you were born, you arrived with your own unique biology and into your own unique social and cultural context. It would have been impossible to predict on that day how your life would unfold, or exactly the person you would become in the future. Why? Because there are so many complex and interrelated factors in the development of each and every human being. In his new book, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013) world-renowned psychology professor Jerome Kagan tackles some of the most fascinating and important questions about what makes a human a human, and how we become who we are over the course of our lives. He draws from his decades of experience in developmental psychology, as well biology, neuroscience, and even literature and biographies, to inform his nuanced and big-picture view. And never one to shy away from critical thinking, Kagan also provides thoughtful remarks on the limitations of psychology as a field of research. If you want to listen to a person with an amazing mind and decades of experience talk about psychology, this is the interview for you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Humans are quite a bit like chimpanzees, genetically speaking. Of course humans are quite a bit like fruit flies, genetically speaking. But when it comes to behavior, humans are much more like chimpanzees than fruit flies. And so the question arrises: what can we learn about ourselves from chimpanzees? According to the veteran ethologist Frans De Waal, the answer is this: we are not the only species that lives in a moral universe. De Waal should know, because he’s been studying humans and chimpanzees for decades. In his new book The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among Primates (Norton, 2013), De Waal points out that chimpanzees (and bonobos) show nearly the full range of “human” attachments, affects, and emotions. They love, feel loss, sulk, get angry, have fights, and make up. Just as important, they abide by conventional rules that give their groups order and assist cooperation. To De Waal, there is no doubt that all of these primate behavioral traits were evolved. Just so, he says, were they evolved in humans. In the interview we discuss the implications of this viewpoint for human life, and religious faith in particular. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press, 2012) reframes the histories of early and contemporary human genetics. Rather than treating eugenics as “a contaminant of good, honest biomedicine,” the book shows that early human genetics had many of the same basic goals – human improvement and the relief of suffering – as genetic medicine today. At the same time, contemporary genetic medicine emerges as much less benign than it has often been depicted.All of this is accomplished through a sensitive historical tracing of two major approaches to understanding human heredity through the twentieth century: a Galtonian approach characterized by a concern with quantification, public health, and populations; and a Garrodian approach characterized by an interest in conceptualizing the human as individual, and in synthesizing heredity with other forms of knowledge. As we follow these threads along with Comfort, he introduces us to a bookful of colorful, vibrant characters from the history of medical genetics: the idealistic inventor of a “Gumption Reviver,” the sanitarium-operator who was fond of prescribing yogurt-enemas, and the medical geneticist with a talent for boogie-woogie piano, among others. These figures are embedded in an exceptionally carefully-wrought narrative of the spaces, practices, and events by which medicine became genetic, genetics became molecular, and molecules made the engineering of humanity possible in a new way.In the course of our discussion, we talked about the importance, for Comfort, of paying careful attention to elements of the writer’s craft when composing a historical work. The John McPhee essay on narrative structure that was mentioned in that part of the interview can be found here (A subscription to the New Yorker is required to read the full piece.)The Oral History of Human Genetics Project can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices