New Books in Science

Erik Linstrum View on AmazonIn 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."

Natasha MyersView on AmazonAfter reading Natasha Myers's new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnography of protein crystallographers that is based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2003-2008 at a research university on the East Coast of the US. "Protein modelers are the scientists to watch in order to see what forms of life and what materialities are coming to matter in the twenty-first-century life sciences," according to Myers, and the book bears out this statement. Those forms of life and materialities emerge from kinesthetic and affective entanglements created and navigated by the scientists in the course of their modeling work. Understanding that work – in part thanks to a thoughtful exploration of the notion of "rendering" that unfolds over the course of the book – helps us understand the ways that scientific knowledge is fundamentally embodied and gestural, and refigures scientific cultures as performance cultures. This is an exciting, inspiring book that is simultaneously a careful study of a particular local scientific culture, and a model for how to re-enchant our knowledge of the living world.

Brian P. CopenhaverView on AmazonBelief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher's stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke.

Brian CleggView on AmazonBrian Clegg, who is arguably the most prolific science writer since Isaac Asimov, and almost certainly the most prolific British one, has written a delightfully tantalizing book entitled How Many Moons Does the Earth Have? The Ultimate Science Quiz Book (Icon Books, 2015). It's a delectable collection of science quiz questions – and although it includes classics such as "Why Is the Sky Blue?", many will seriously challenge even the most knowledgeable.  You may finish the quiz a lot more humble about your scientific knowledge (as did your humbled correspondent), but that is more than compensated by how much you'll learn about some of the more intriguing and sometimes lesser-known aspects of science — and how much you'll enjoy it.  And isn't that why you want to read about science in the first place?

Nick HopwoodView on AmazonNick 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.

View on AmazonBy now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed individuals to access masses of information faster than ever before. What, then, has been the effect of digital tools on research practices? In their new book Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2015), Eric T. Meyer, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Ralph Schroeder, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, explore how digital tools have transformed research. To do this, Meyer and Schroeder use case studies to examine how new technology has, and continues to, change research in various fields, and what this means for the future of e-research.

John Allen PaulosView on AmazonJohn Allen Paulos, who has accomplished the unheard-of double of writing best-sellers about mathematics and inserting a word ('innumeracy') into the language, has attempted  another ambitious feat – bringing mathematics to bear on one of the few subjects it has yet to examine: biography and autobiography.  A Numerate Life (Prometheus Books, 2015) is simultaneously a charming memoir and a highly entertaining venture into mathematics, literature, and philosophy.  This is one of those rare books that, when you have finished a section, you are torn between going on to the next section and re-reading the last section to make sure that you got everything out of it.  The subtitle of the book is "A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours".  You'll be a little skeptical about that subtitle before you read the book, but when you finish it, you'll realize the subtitle nails it — he's talking, not just about himself, but about you.  A fascinating read.

Anita GuerriniView on AmazonAnita Guerrini's wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead body to sites of dissection across the city, after which we are introduced to four anatomists – charter members of the Paris Academy of Sciences – who will act as focal points for the rest of the story.The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015) opens up Parisian bodies – human and animal, dead and alive – to argue that dissection played a major role in the development of experimental methods in seventeenth century science. In Guerrini's hands, the history of science and medicine in early modern Paris was simultaneously a history of fairy tales and opera, dogs and chameleons, artists and knife-makers, labyrinth-making and oratory. It is a fascinating book that is a must-read for historians of anatomy and of early modern science and medicine, and will be accessible and gripping for readers well beyond those fields.

Somatosphere is "a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics." Founded in July 2008, Somatosphere has evolved into an innovative platform for collaborative experiments, interdisciplinary exchange, and intellectual community. As such, it reveals how websites–and the communities of discourse that create and read them–have become important sites of intellectual production, authorship, and exchange. In editorial departments such as "In the Journals" and "Web Roundup," authors distill recent scholarly contributions across disciplines and spaces. More recently, the editors have incubated creative digital endeavors such as Commonplaces, a "collaborative cabinet" that itemizes the technological present, with entries devoted to topics such as the petri dish, the brain, and the waiting room. Book Forum invites commentary from a range of authors, representing not only different scholarly disciplines but offering intriguing, timely, and often original angles on recent important texts. Thanks to its editorial vision and the palpable energy of its contributors, Somatosphere has become informative, creative, and essential reading.

View on AmazonValuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms of emerging fora for academic publications. In Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2015), Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee bring together a range of authors to outline a new research programme. Alongside individual essays that range from the allocation of transplant organs, questions of plagiarism in science, the ownership of generically modified organisms though to desire and neuroscience, the book points to a new way to think through questions of valuation. As a result its importance moves beyond an STS audience to establish value practices as a vital framework for understanding contemporary life.

Sandra HardingView on AmazonSandra Harding's new book Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (University of Chicago Press, 2015) raises new questions about two central concepts in STS – objectivity and diversity – and in doing so it allows us to animate them in new kinds of relationships and shows that objectivity and certain forms of diversity can be mutually supportive. Harding does this in two major ways: by considering specific cases where science has been shaped by social values and interests and drawing conclusions about the "logical positivist legacy" from them; and by locating these issues within particular historical contexts. Though the "social" tends to be treated as an impediment to scientific research rather than a source of new resources and pathways, social and political movements have deeply shaped the practices and philosophy of science. Ch. 1 offers a historical context in which to understand the approaches that dominate today's analytic philosophy of science, describing and analyzing the ways in which the social conditions for scientific research and its philosophy were created in two eras of significant institutional change: the postwar era of the 1940s-1950s, and the 1960s-1970s. Three science studies research fields that have emerged since the 1960s – science studies, postcolonial STS, and feminist STS – show that sciences and their societies co-produce and co-constitute each other and they deeply influence the project of the book and its remaining chapters. Ch. 2 – 7 explore six major arguments for the claim that the "social norm of diversity and the epistemic norm of objectivity can provide mutual support for each other" and they introduce helpful case studies that both illustrate Harding's arguments and model a methodology for bringing about the kind of integration of philosophy and socially-aware STS that the book advocates. It's a wonderful, clear read and is highly assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses devoted to science, policy, philosophy, and/or STS!

Thom van DoorenView on AmazonThom van Dooren's new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a "…for anyone who…" and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book's five "extinction stories" each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. "What is lost," van Dooren asks, "when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?" How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren's book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields.

A. Mark SmithView on AmazonA. Mark Smith's new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) suggests that the transition from ancient toward modern optics was accompanied by a turn in optical studies from a concern with explaining sight to a focus on light by optical scholars. The book argues that Kepler's theory of retinal imaging was instrumental in this turn. In the course of an amazingly comprehensive narrative of optical studies from Aristotle through the seventeenth century, From Sight to Light offers clear and persuasive discussions of the historical understanding of color and of visual illusions, the use of mirrors as optical devices, the relationships between physical and psychological theories of visual perception, and the study of reflection and refraction. Smith pays special attention to explaining the mathematical bases of optical theories, and he highlights the formative role that Arabic scientists and translation played in the history of optics. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sight, vision, light, and the study thereof

Nick WildingView on AmazonNick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian's role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family's mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a "rich, old, slightly batty widow" in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of "intermediaries and go-betweens" in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits. There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.)

Nicolas RasmussenView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] 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.