New Books in Biology and Evolution

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...

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...

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 i...

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 arg...

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...

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...

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...

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 ar...

Astrobiology: An Evolutionary Approach (CRC Press, 2014) is a new volume edited by Dr. Vera Kolb that brings together 37 authors from a variety of different research backgrounds to introduce this rapidly developing interdisciplinary field. Anyone coming to the book with questions about the origin or possible manifestations of life... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel‘s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting of an electric world through the span of human history and beyond. Embracing a “big history” approach to the archive, Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Sc...

David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history that stretches far beyond the strictly defined genetic disorder that is its namesake. Wright shows us how the condition that came to be known as Down’s syndrome has as much to do with the social history of what was called ‘idiocy’ in Early Modern times and reform movements to integ...

The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A beach stores sand in dunes behind i...

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautiful...

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chic...

Philosophy of science has come a very long way from its historically rooted focus on theories, explanations, and evidential relations in physics elaborated in terms of a rather mythical “theory T”. But even in philosophy of biology, attention has largely been on the concepts and abstract mathematics of evolutionary biology, not the in-the-trenches work of cell biology. Melinda B. Fagan, associate...

For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” reflects a wandering, impulsive mind distinguished by a remarkable disconnection from reality. There are obvious themes: strident German nationalism, radical racialism, vicious anti-semitism, and militarism....

Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Duke University Press, 2013) treats IVF as a looking-glass in which can see not only ourselves, but also transformations in modern notions of biology, technolog...

John Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routledge, 2013). Hibbing is professor of political science and psychology at the University of Nebraska, Smith is professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, and Alford is associate professor of political science at Rice University. Predis...

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, dreams about policemen and peccaries, dreams prophetic and dreams instrumental. In this brilliant new ethnography of a village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, those dreams are woven into the lives and deaths of a...

Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences. Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (University of Chicago Press, 2013) follows the data through the physical and virtual spaces from which the “new epistemic...

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, Er...

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...

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 th...

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 Belongi...

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 sci...