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Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity
In a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explores how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. Subramaniam reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into interdisciplinary areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
15 people are currently reading
482 people want to read
About the author
Banu Subramaniam
11 books8 followersBanu Subramaniam is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Originally trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science as they relate to experimental biology.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 2, 2020
I couldn't really get into the majority of this book, but I really did appreciate the introduction and the first chapter. The synthesis of feminist critiques of evolutionary biology and the ongoing predominance of the eugenic script in contemporary biological science was really helpful (so many good citations).
February 2, 2016
Ghost Stories for Darwin can be (very simply) summarized as a criticism of the separation of humanities and science in both the "real" and academic worlds. Subramaniam's main thesis is that science and the humanities are inextricable, and need to be approached as such. The term she coins is "natureculture" – basically meaning that nature/science are connected because they have been deeply influenced throughout history by culture/humans. The ideas of science that we hold as canon today, have been influenced by a dark history of eugenics and the oppression/exploitation of marginalized groups; additionally almost all of the major ideas of science have been created primarily by white males. She argues that this should make us question how science is practiced, how knowledge is constructed, and that this history of science has influenced scientific discovery/ideas since then.
Her book is divided into three main parts. In the first she uses her graduate experiments on morning glory flowers as a metaphor for how "variation in evolutionary biology has been intricately linked throughout history with ideas of human diversity and difference." (p 30). She goes on to talk about how the beginnings of evolutionary theory were shaped by a white male's perspective, in a time when the "ideal" human was a white, upper-class male. Subramaniam notes that Darwin himself essentially said that eliminating the "weaker" or "less valuable" members of humanity would ensure our species' survival:
Darwin's thoughts on eliminating human "impurities" to ensure the survival of a "fitter" human race, went on to influence the father of eugenics, Francis Galton. Connecting these ideas during a time when the white male was the ideal human gave scientific justification to ideas of racism, sexism, ableism, etc; allowing them to run rampant during the 19th century. Subramaniam suggests that this is why these issues are still so prevalent today, and also why women and people of color are so largely underrepresented in scientific fields. The ideas of eugenics furthered the idea that less variation leads to more purity, while in actuality, variation is necessary for species to evolve and stay strong. Subramaniam says the same of the field of science: that diversity in science leads to better ideas.
In the second part, she talks extensively about her “natureculture” term through the ideas of invasion biology. She states that invasion biology, a very recent discipline, is stuck in the binary of “alien vs. native.” The main focus of invasion biology is how “alien” invasive plants are from another location, and therefore largely a threat to “native” flora and fauna. They do not focus enough on the actual environmental impacts they have (good or bad), but merely the fact that they need to be gotten rid of. Subramaniam also questions what exactly makes a plant native: is it how long it’s been in its geographical location, or is it “native” because of the nostalgic sense it gives people? She also points out the disturbing connections between vilification of invasive plants and that of illegal immigrants. Much of the fear-mongering of invasive plants/animals we are familiar with today, emerged during the post-9/11-world – a time when people were basically being told they should be afraid of anyone who looked even vaguely Middle Eastern. She makes these connections to point out that not only is the “science” of invasive plants is important, but the history surrounding what makes it invasive is also important. Like the connection of eugenics to the founding of modern scientific theory is heavily placed in the culture/era of its time.
In the last part of her book, she talks mainly about how merely adding more women in science will not change the way women in science are treated. The way science is done must be changed in order to make science a more fair playing field for the underrepresented. Because modern scientific practices were originated in a white-male-dominated world, the white male is still the unconscious image most people have of a scientist. She states numerous ways that women are either excluded from science, or thought of as not being as “able” to practice science as men are. While there are many programs to include more women (and people of color) in science, many women will still leave scientific fields at some point in their life because of all the obstacles and exclusionary practices/mindsets that exist. In order for science to become a more diverse field, the way that knowledge is constructed and practiced needs to be challenged and changed. She ties this up saying that understanding the history and origins of science and knowledge construction will open up pathways for things to change.
Overall, this is a very dense but well-written book. Subramaniam has many ideas that at first don’t seem like they can be connected at all, but she connects them very precisely. It also really opened my eyes to the way that science is practiced. At times, I really wanted to throw the book, not because I didn’t like it, but because of all the things she pointed out that honestly made me disgusted/gave me the creeps.
If I had one criticism about the book, it would be that she really repeats things… a LOT. In the opening paragraph of each chapter, she seemed to want to remind the reader of the thesis. Sometimes the exact same sentence one paragraph after it was first stated. I know that she wants to reiterate her ideas, and keep you concentrated on the main thesis of the book, but it really got tedious at some points. I would be curious to see maybe what a second edition of this book would be like. Despite that one issue, the book is extremely good. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in feminism, and especially to those who are gender studies or women’s studies students. But I think the number-one type of person who should read this are science students. It opens your eyes to a lot of dark and dirty things concerning certain scientific ideas/practices that are otherwise never criticized. It also makes you aware of the importance about interdisciplinary studies – Subramaniam makes clear how being a scientist and studying the humanities could actually lead you to better understanding science.
Her book is divided into three main parts. In the first she uses her graduate experiments on morning glory flowers as a metaphor for how "variation in evolutionary biology has been intricately linked throughout history with ideas of human diversity and difference." (p 30). She goes on to talk about how the beginnings of evolutionary theory were shaped by a white male's perspective, in a time when the "ideal" human was a white, upper-class male. Subramaniam notes that Darwin himself essentially said that eliminating the "weaker" or "less valuable" members of humanity would ensure our species' survival:
"... 'we Civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute the poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment... Thus the weak members of civilized societies societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.'" (p 50).
Darwin's thoughts on eliminating human "impurities" to ensure the survival of a "fitter" human race, went on to influence the father of eugenics, Francis Galton. Connecting these ideas during a time when the white male was the ideal human gave scientific justification to ideas of racism, sexism, ableism, etc; allowing them to run rampant during the 19th century. Subramaniam suggests that this is why these issues are still so prevalent today, and also why women and people of color are so largely underrepresented in scientific fields. The ideas of eugenics furthered the idea that less variation leads to more purity, while in actuality, variation is necessary for species to evolve and stay strong. Subramaniam says the same of the field of science: that diversity in science leads to better ideas.
In the second part, she talks extensively about her “natureculture” term through the ideas of invasion biology. She states that invasion biology, a very recent discipline, is stuck in the binary of “alien vs. native.” The main focus of invasion biology is how “alien” invasive plants are from another location, and therefore largely a threat to “native” flora and fauna. They do not focus enough on the actual environmental impacts they have (good or bad), but merely the fact that they need to be gotten rid of. Subramaniam also questions what exactly makes a plant native: is it how long it’s been in its geographical location, or is it “native” because of the nostalgic sense it gives people? She also points out the disturbing connections between vilification of invasive plants and that of illegal immigrants. Much of the fear-mongering of invasive plants/animals we are familiar with today, emerged during the post-9/11-world – a time when people were basically being told they should be afraid of anyone who looked even vaguely Middle Eastern. She makes these connections to point out that not only is the “science” of invasive plants is important, but the history surrounding what makes it invasive is also important. Like the connection of eugenics to the founding of modern scientific theory is heavily placed in the culture/era of its time.
In the last part of her book, she talks mainly about how merely adding more women in science will not change the way women in science are treated. The way science is done must be changed in order to make science a more fair playing field for the underrepresented. Because modern scientific practices were originated in a white-male-dominated world, the white male is still the unconscious image most people have of a scientist. She states numerous ways that women are either excluded from science, or thought of as not being as “able” to practice science as men are. While there are many programs to include more women (and people of color) in science, many women will still leave scientific fields at some point in their life because of all the obstacles and exclusionary practices/mindsets that exist. In order for science to become a more diverse field, the way that knowledge is constructed and practiced needs to be challenged and changed. She ties this up saying that understanding the history and origins of science and knowledge construction will open up pathways for things to change.
Overall, this is a very dense but well-written book. Subramaniam has many ideas that at first don’t seem like they can be connected at all, but she connects them very precisely. It also really opened my eyes to the way that science is practiced. At times, I really wanted to throw the book, not because I didn’t like it, but because of all the things she pointed out that honestly made me disgusted/gave me the creeps.
If I had one criticism about the book, it would be that she really repeats things… a LOT. In the opening paragraph of each chapter, she seemed to want to remind the reader of the thesis. Sometimes the exact same sentence one paragraph after it was first stated. I know that she wants to reiterate her ideas, and keep you concentrated on the main thesis of the book, but it really got tedious at some points. I would be curious to see maybe what a second edition of this book would be like. Despite that one issue, the book is extremely good. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in feminism, and especially to those who are gender studies or women’s studies students. But I think the number-one type of person who should read this are science students. It opens your eyes to a lot of dark and dirty things concerning certain scientific ideas/practices that are otherwise never criticized. It also makes you aware of the importance about interdisciplinary studies – Subramaniam makes clear how being a scientist and studying the humanities could actually lead you to better understanding science.
May 3, 2019
Subramaniam's core argument seems to be that evolutionary biologist historically did not study the eugenic roots of their field at the cost of the eugenic policies it enabled and that feminists historically did not study the biological theories that ground the history of eugenics and educational policies about women. She believes evolutionary biologists would benefit from realizing questions about diversity are not just political questions, they are at the core of biology and that the humanities would benefit from realizing questions of variation are not just biological questions, they are at the core of our humanity.
She presents this argument in three parts. In the first she points out how evolutionary biology studies plants removed from their biological, historical, and cultural context and how the study of variation is tied to debates about eugenics and whether a homogenous population of selected bright individuals or a heterogeneous population is better. She presents very elegantly the history of eugenics in the United States and how the eugenic concerns of scientists shaped their scientific views. At the end of the first part, she writes a fictional story that frankly is one of the clearest pieces of writing I have seen regarding the valuable contribution of fiction for the sciences. She really beautifully presents a realistic story of scientists of various disciplines trying to study a plant as a thought experiment and the problems that disciplinarity brings. She then present how studying local literature, traditional customs and records, and working with indigenous communities makes possible a story about these plants with non-Darwinian evolution, non-Mendelian inheritance, challenging the ‘sex’ and the ‘individual’ as categories all at once. It is a strong example of how one might imagine feminist science to be practiced.
In the second part, she discussed the politics of invasion biology and its ties to immigration policies. Specifically, she expresses concern about environmentalists, which tend to be pro-immigration, engaging in xenophobic rhetoric regarding invasive plants and animals, which ends up reinforcing anti-immigration policies. Historically concerns about invading germs, plants, and animals have coincided with periods of heavy immigration to the US and fears of racial impurity or suspicions about immigrant hygiene practices. She presents alternative frameworks for which to understand local ecologies outside of the alien/native binary, and points out how this binary undermines its own goals of protecting our environment. She suggests rather than categorize species as native or exotic, which themselves are heterogeneous categories fraught with complication, a better model would be a more complex scheme that attends to the varied life histories of plants and animals. Three criteria she proposes are 1) dispersal distance 2) uniqueness to region and 3) impact on new environment.
Lastly, in part III she turns to the question of women in sciences and programs meant to push women in STEM fields and help the succeed. I wish this section was slightly more connected to her thoughts on evolutionary biology, but it seemed to be largely a critique of these programs based on the insights she gained from debates about variation in evolutionary biology. If you want a really strong critique of how programs and initiatives pushing women into STEM just reinforce the same problematic structures of science that benefit white men, then this section is for you. She argues without an addressing of the problem of science itself, these programs will be reifying the same problems they are trying to address.
Overall, its a very clearly written and great book that is easy to understand and engaging on multiple levels, including her own personal experience, which I appreciate. She is an excellent example of how to weave together the value of fiction, personal experience, science, history, feminism, and politics all into one.
She presents this argument in three parts. In the first she points out how evolutionary biology studies plants removed from their biological, historical, and cultural context and how the study of variation is tied to debates about eugenics and whether a homogenous population of selected bright individuals or a heterogeneous population is better. She presents very elegantly the history of eugenics in the United States and how the eugenic concerns of scientists shaped their scientific views. At the end of the first part, she writes a fictional story that frankly is one of the clearest pieces of writing I have seen regarding the valuable contribution of fiction for the sciences. She really beautifully presents a realistic story of scientists of various disciplines trying to study a plant as a thought experiment and the problems that disciplinarity brings. She then present how studying local literature, traditional customs and records, and working with indigenous communities makes possible a story about these plants with non-Darwinian evolution, non-Mendelian inheritance, challenging the ‘sex’ and the ‘individual’ as categories all at once. It is a strong example of how one might imagine feminist science to be practiced.
In the second part, she discussed the politics of invasion biology and its ties to immigration policies. Specifically, she expresses concern about environmentalists, which tend to be pro-immigration, engaging in xenophobic rhetoric regarding invasive plants and animals, which ends up reinforcing anti-immigration policies. Historically concerns about invading germs, plants, and animals have coincided with periods of heavy immigration to the US and fears of racial impurity or suspicions about immigrant hygiene practices. She presents alternative frameworks for which to understand local ecologies outside of the alien/native binary, and points out how this binary undermines its own goals of protecting our environment. She suggests rather than categorize species as native or exotic, which themselves are heterogeneous categories fraught with complication, a better model would be a more complex scheme that attends to the varied life histories of plants and animals. Three criteria she proposes are 1) dispersal distance 2) uniqueness to region and 3) impact on new environment.
Lastly, in part III she turns to the question of women in sciences and programs meant to push women in STEM fields and help the succeed. I wish this section was slightly more connected to her thoughts on evolutionary biology, but it seemed to be largely a critique of these programs based on the insights she gained from debates about variation in evolutionary biology. If you want a really strong critique of how programs and initiatives pushing women into STEM just reinforce the same problematic structures of science that benefit white men, then this section is for you. She argues without an addressing of the problem of science itself, these programs will be reifying the same problems they are trying to address.
Overall, its a very clearly written and great book that is easy to understand and engaging on multiple levels, including her own personal experience, which I appreciate. She is an excellent example of how to weave together the value of fiction, personal experience, science, history, feminism, and politics all into one.
December 31, 2019
I read Ghost Stories for Darwin for a "Decolonizing Science" book club with a few other graduate students, inspired by Dr. Prescod-Weinstein's suggested reading list
Overall I enjoyed and deeply appreciated this book. I think part 1 should be required reading for anyone studying or working in genetics. I will qualify my review by saying that, as a STEM grad student, I am probably missing a lot of foundational theory in feminist studies (and the humanities more generally), but I still feel I got a lot out of this book.
Part 1: The Case of Morning Glory Flowers
Before reading this book, I had known that eugenics had historically been mainstream in the U.S. and other Western countries even until relatively recently. What I didn't know before this book was how deeply entrenched eugenics ideas and values are in the evolutionary and population genetics theory that forms the basis of modern biology (including my thesis work). This section should be required reading for genetics grad students as we're taught the "right" questions to ask without knowing the full history behind the criteria that determines which questions are the "right" ones.
Part 2: The Case of Invasion Biology
This is the only section I took any issue with. She's clearly writing this section from the perspective of an immigrant to the U.S. combatting xenophobic arguments against "invasive" species, however she almost comes across as sarcastically dismissive of the problems native people/species face. I don't believe she intends to dismiss the harm colonialism has caused indigenous people in the Americas, as she does (towards the end of the section) point out the irony of colonizers labeling anyone as "invasive". However I felt like she did her argument a great disservice by framing it largely as a defense of "invasive" species at the expense of indigenous people/species and their concerns about conservation.
Part 3: The Case of Women in the Sciences
I really really valued Dr. Subramaniam sharing some journal excerpts from her grad school days in this section, as I am currently doing my PhD in the same department where she completed hers - the Biology department at Duke University. It was comforting to read how her experience was similar to mine, though also discouraging to see how little has changed since her time.
In my book club, we discussed how student-led efforts to question and improve things in our department only seem to persist as long as the student(s) are still active students here. Once they graduate, efforts are frequently dropped, and future students have to create and build new efforts again and again. This reinforced my position that any diversity and inclusion efforts really need to be spearheaded and maintained at the administration/faculty level if any meaningful change is going to happen. Grad students don’t have the power or longevity within an institution to do anything other than voice our ideas and complaints, which admin and faculty can choose whether to listen to or not as it pleases them (yes I'll admit I'm jaded).
I was fascinated by her study on faculty and grad student perceptions of mentor-mentee relationships in academia. I have a lot on thoughts on this section, but none of them very coherent (maybe they in fact are mostly strong feelings…). The study design (a mediator talked with faculty and grad students individually, and the two groups only communicated through the mediator) was fantastic - I've often thought about how a neutral third party is necessary for resolving student/PI conflicts, as the power imbalance makes it impossible for students to speak honestly and really advocate for themselves.
Concluding thoughts: This book should be required reading (have I said that enough?), as genetics grad students don't get nearly enough context about the history behind our field, and interdisciplinary work could really enrich and strengthen our scientific work and our experiences as grad students.
Overall I enjoyed and deeply appreciated this book. I think part 1 should be required reading for anyone studying or working in genetics. I will qualify my review by saying that, as a STEM grad student, I am probably missing a lot of foundational theory in feminist studies (and the humanities more generally), but I still feel I got a lot out of this book.
Part 1: The Case of Morning Glory Flowers
Before reading this book, I had known that eugenics had historically been mainstream in the U.S. and other Western countries even until relatively recently. What I didn't know before this book was how deeply entrenched eugenics ideas and values are in the evolutionary and population genetics theory that forms the basis of modern biology (including my thesis work). This section should be required reading for genetics grad students as we're taught the "right" questions to ask without knowing the full history behind the criteria that determines which questions are the "right" ones.
Part 2: The Case of Invasion Biology
This is the only section I took any issue with. She's clearly writing this section from the perspective of an immigrant to the U.S. combatting xenophobic arguments against "invasive" species, however she almost comes across as sarcastically dismissive of the problems native people/species face. I don't believe she intends to dismiss the harm colonialism has caused indigenous people in the Americas, as she does (towards the end of the section) point out the irony of colonizers labeling anyone as "invasive". However I felt like she did her argument a great disservice by framing it largely as a defense of "invasive" species at the expense of indigenous people/species and their concerns about conservation.
Part 3: The Case of Women in the Sciences
I really really valued Dr. Subramaniam sharing some journal excerpts from her grad school days in this section, as I am currently doing my PhD in the same department where she completed hers - the Biology department at Duke University. It was comforting to read how her experience was similar to mine, though also discouraging to see how little has changed since her time.
In my book club, we discussed how student-led efforts to question and improve things in our department only seem to persist as long as the student(s) are still active students here. Once they graduate, efforts are frequently dropped, and future students have to create and build new efforts again and again. This reinforced my position that any diversity and inclusion efforts really need to be spearheaded and maintained at the administration/faculty level if any meaningful change is going to happen. Grad students don’t have the power or longevity within an institution to do anything other than voice our ideas and complaints, which admin and faculty can choose whether to listen to or not as it pleases them (yes I'll admit I'm jaded).
I was fascinated by her study on faculty and grad student perceptions of mentor-mentee relationships in academia. I have a lot on thoughts on this section, but none of them very coherent (maybe they in fact are mostly strong feelings…). The study design (a mediator talked with faculty and grad students individually, and the two groups only communicated through the mediator) was fantastic - I've often thought about how a neutral third party is necessary for resolving student/PI conflicts, as the power imbalance makes it impossible for students to speak honestly and really advocate for themselves.
Concluding thoughts: This book should be required reading (have I said that enough?), as genetics grad students don't get nearly enough context about the history behind our field, and interdisciplinary work could really enrich and strengthen our scientific work and our experiences as grad students.
December 26, 2018
As a part of her argument in support of interdisciplinarity, Subramaniam actively incorporates pieces from different fields to create a truly interdisciplinary piece of literature. In this form, she pushes readers to elevate our own understanding of the world and question why our academic disciplines are so segregated. Her personal and academic background, as an evolutionary scientist and feminist studies scholar, she combines various perspectives to make this book truly unique to herself and her journey. In three sections: Genealogies of Variation, Geographies of Variation, and Biographies of Variation, Subramaniam covers the narratives of morning glories, eugenics, and women in science to support her argument that interdisciplinarity is key to progress in academia.
Ghost Stories for Darwin is a beautifully-written, complex piece of literature in STS, but it is true in its intentions: to bring together various disciplines. Using her background in evolutionary sciences, feminist studies, and even Bollywood, Subramanian convincingly puts together a vision of a world where “we can chart new academic practices in making possible new
genealogies, geographies, and biographies” (227). While some may argue that her book is too abstract or divergent from a typical scholarly monograph, these aspects of Ghost Stories for Darwin enhance the arguments made within the book. I would recommend this to any student in the biological sciences or the humanities, to show how these two scholarly worlds can collaborate in a productive, reflective manner.
Ghost Stories for Darwin is a beautifully-written, complex piece of literature in STS, but it is true in its intentions: to bring together various disciplines. Using her background in evolutionary sciences, feminist studies, and even Bollywood, Subramanian convincingly puts together a vision of a world where “we can chart new academic practices in making possible new
genealogies, geographies, and biographies” (227). While some may argue that her book is too abstract or divergent from a typical scholarly monograph, these aspects of Ghost Stories for Darwin enhance the arguments made within the book. I would recommend this to any student in the biological sciences or the humanities, to show how these two scholarly worlds can collaborate in a productive, reflective manner.
March 23, 2023
Comps reading. Honestly such a fascinating read. I very much enjoyed reading this. It engages with many questions I’ve wondered about — sometimes as I walked to work in an industrial area, staring at morning glories growing along the sidewalk outside of a concrete factory near where I used to work. Subramanium connects these questions in rather unexpected ways to histories of eugenics and racism that are deeply woven into the assumptions and practices of biological sciences. I might disagree with some assertions in this book, but the questions and themes it engages with are just very, very interesting, including the rhetoric and politics of invasive species, which I think any naturalist or trail hiker will enjoy pondering.
The first part discusses her time as a biology student studying colour variation in morning glories for her field work and the relationship these types of questions have to histories of eugenics. As a quick aside, the common morning glory she studied had origins in Mexico which was very interesting to me:
“The annual vine is believed to have its origins in the highlands of Central Mexico (Barkley 1986, Mabberley 1997). Domesticated by pre-Columbian people, possibly in association with maize and bean culture, the remarkably diverse flower is believed to have been selected for its aesthetic appeal. Collected from the Aztecs and sent back to Spain by Hernán Cortés, the vines were planted in monastery gardens (Defelice 2001). Subsequently, sixteenth- century European explorers sent samples from the new world to Europe for classification and study. Ipomoea, the largest genus of family Convolvulaceae, has at least five hundred species. The genus includes Ipomoea batata, the sweet potato, which was to become a famous food plant, as well as Ipomoea purpurea, the tall morning glory that has become a much loved and favored ornamental vine in Southern European gardens and Great Britain. It has since adapted to tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate regions of the world. Growing in the wild, this self-propagating plant is found across the globe in North America, Central America, South America, Australia, India, Africa, and tropical and sub- tropical regions of the world…”
She then moves on in the second part to discuss the politics of invasion biology and invasive species, and its connection to reactionary anti-migrant politics. Finally she discusses women in the sciences and brings in feminist science studies to analyze how questions of difference and variation in biology are intimately connected to the construction of gender differences and patriarchal structures in science. One passage quite early on discusses this by first alluding to Sarah Bartmann (who I first encountered in the Handbook of STS chapter Subramaniam co-authored):
“The extraordinary scrutinizing of Sarah Bartmann that endlessly chronicles the intense racism and sexism that accompanies her life also redeploys racism and sexism in its retelling, cautioning us that revisiting history can never be innocent (Fausto-Sterling 1995). Nancy Stepan (1986) has pointed out that the historical record shows repeated and direct analogies made between identity categories. For example, she demon- strates how the race-gender analogy was used in the nineteenth century to claim women’s smaller brains and protruding jaws as evidence of their evolutionary inferiority to European men. She describes a process where “by analogy with the so-called lower races, women, the sexually deviate, the criminal, the urban poor, and the insane were in one way or another constructed as a biological ‘race apart’ whose differences from the white male, and likeness to each other ‘explained’ their different and lower position in the social hierarchy” (Stepan 1986: 40–41). By the mid-nineteenth century, racial biology became “a science of boundaries between groups and the degenerations that threatened when those boundaries were transgressed” (Stepan 1985: 98). In a similar vein in “Pelvic Politics,” Sally Markowitz argues that the very idea of sex differences emerged from racialized meanings of bodies. She traces how the category and ideology of sex/gender rests “not on a simple binary opposition between male and female but rather on a scale of racially coded degrees of sex/gender differ- ence” (Markowitz 2001: 391). Rather than a universal or species-wide man or woman, evolutionary biology produced the “manly European man” and the “feminine European woman” as evolutionary types that mark the pinnacle of a hierarchical project of race (Markowitz 2001: 391). The very categories of identity emerge as co-constituted and co-dependent intersectional categories. Thus, characteristics like femininity are racialized themselves in the historical record; “femininity” could not be assumed to be a characteristic of all females (Schiebinger 1993). The distinct categories of sex and race cannot be presumed to be historically evident.”
And a related excerpt shortly following this:
“The power of the logic of difference underlying scientific claims of the varying capacities of human bodies lies in the politics of biological determinism. Scientific claims of biological differences were not understood to be mutable but rather fixed and determined by biology. The foundational work in FSTS has documented how scientists “produced” biological differences of gender, race, class, and nation—claims of anatomical difference, physiological differences, as well as differences in behavior, temperament, and intellect.”
I found it fascinating that Subramaniam grouped the communist biologist J.B.S. Haldane into her genealogy of eugenics, especially because Haldane had explicitly denounced eugenics as formulated by his colleague and friend Julian Huxley, but the questions that Subramaniam raises makes her framing of Haldane a lot more comprehensible to me:
“The eugenic motivations of the key scientists seem so apparent and indeed so instrumental to their scientific views and lives that it is hard to write off their views of politics and science as a benign dalliance or side project. It is indeed interesting that internalist histories of evolutionary biology largely sideline a discussion of eugenics or present a benign picture of the major figures. Instead, most were eugenic enthusiasts (Paul 2001). Some like Dobzhansky and Haldane came from the political left and saw the utopian potential of a new experimental biology that could predict and manipulate biology to enhance human futures. For Haldane and other scientists who bought into these promises, the first decades of the twentieth century were exciting, promising human improvement on many fronts. Therefore, “it was still possible to be a scientist, a socialist, a meritocrat and a eugenicist” (Tredoux 2001). As Mendelian inheritance laws helped develop novel techniques in plant breeding and revolutionized agricultural breeds and yields, so biologists saw the potential for human improvement (Mark Adams 2000). This new future-oriented biology would replace the old religions.”
I read Samanth Subramanian's biography of Haldane over a year ago, and I can understand how Haldane would have fit into this as a techno-optimist communist and to be honest I wonder how I fit into this very broad conception of eugenics also. Eugenics in its most literal terms derives from the Greek word for ‘good birth’ and so using biological technology to avoid the sort of genetic variation associated with particular diseases fits right into this system of logic. Designer babies is eugenics, obviously, but so is any form of genetic screening that would involve circumventing any type of genetic predisposition to disease. Critical disability studies have flagged this sort of stuff for a while actually. On a slightly different but related note, maybe most ‘amusing’/interesting/weird was the fact that some biologists on the left were into eugenics as a way of producing more Marxs and Lenins in the world, which I personally just find hilarious:
“Herman J. Muller and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Both of them were committed social activists and scientists and devoted to using scientific knowledge to better human societies. “Although a biologist may do his research on mice, Drosophila flies, plants or bacteria,” Dobzhansky argued, “the ultimate aim should be to contribute toward the understanding of man and his place in the universe” (qtd. in Paul 1987: 334). Muller similarly wanted to use science, believing that “men should eventually be able to control the process, even in themselves, so as to greatly improve upon their own natures” (qtd. in Paul 1987: 321). Despite their shared passion for social betterment, they fundamentally disagreed on what kind of ideal society to develop, reflecting the complex history of eugenics. Eugenics was a broad philosophy about human betterment and was embraced by a wide range of political ideologies, including the political left and the right. Muller wanted a world that would be filled with brilliant men such as Newton, Lenin, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat-sen, and Marx (Muller 1984). His many proposals for improving society included starting an organization that collected sperm of great men and made them available to women (Paul 1987). A homogeneous world of brilliance was the pinnacle of a great society for Muller. In contrast, Dobzhansky held that diversity was the “supreme value”; he favored a world replete with social, political, and genetic variation. “Do we really want to live in a world with millions of Einteins, Pas- teurs and Lenins?” he asked and answered with a “No!” (Dobzhansky 1962: 330). To him genetic diversity and cultural diversity were related—just as he wanted a world that was culturally diverse, he believed that it was good for individuals to be genetically diverse, or heterozygous, and for populations to be polymorphic (Paul 1987).”
In a related excerpt, Stephen Jay Gould is cited in a useful way, at least for me because Haldane is a bit of a hero in my head, and is honestly a foundational figure in STS to some extent. Helena Sheehan sees him as such. Interestingly people like Fisher felt attacked by scientists of the left like Haldane who were increasingly pushing eugenics scholarship out of journals at the time. Anyway the excerpt on Gould:
“In a wonderful essay on R. A. Fisher, Stephen Jay Gould remarks, “We don’t like to admit flaws in our saints” (Gould 1991). As biologists, we rarely acknowledge them or make note of them; they are largely absent from our internalist histories and at best they are seen as an “unfortunate and discardable appendage,” even if they appear in “our profession’s bible.” We need to understand the eugenic work as central to their science and cannot choose to ignore it as “an embarrassment” (Gould 1991).”
Subramaniam also discusses how eugenics and scientific racism have resurfaced in the form of population genetics:
“Race was not relegated to the “scrap heap” of history with the advent of modern evolutionary biology, but rather redefined (Reardon 2005). Instead, Gannett argues that races were reconceptualized as populations; a populational concept of race replaced a typological one. Indeed, the concept of race has made a resurgence in contemporary biology (Bliss 2012, Reardon 2005, Roberts 2012).”
And furthermore how population genetics continues to function through statistical methods that were constructed within this paradigm of eugenics:
“A critical byproduct of the biometrician/Mendelian controversy was the important statistical and mathematical methods formalized in the early twentieth century that have remained foundational for the field. What emerged was a mathematical population genetics usually associated with Sewall Wright, R. A. Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane. Their work set the foundations of population genetics, which formally reconciled Mendel and Darwin (Provine 1971, Dietrich 2006). The synthesis defined the emerging field of evolutionary biology by explaining and incorporating the many subdisciplines and branches of biology such as genetics, cytology, systematics, botany, zoology, morphology, ecology, and paleontology, as well as mathematics and statistics..."
Backtracking to the invasion biology stuff, Subramaniam also discussed Alfred Cosby’s book, which I am currently reading right now for comps also (though I have some major issues with it):
“We have historically imagined our relationship with the biota of the world in numerous and diverse ways. In his influential book Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Cosby argues that the roots of Europeans’ domination of the western world lie in their creating “New-Europes” wherever they went, especially in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand (Crosby 1986). Rather than thinking of European domination as the result of technology, Crosby argues that we should understand it as simultaneously biological and ecological. Where Europeans went, their agriculture and animals went; they thrived while indigenous ecosystems collapsed. This vast migration of species ushered in a bioinvasion of mass proportions by the conquerors’ animals, plants, weeds, and germs, yielding a “great reshuffling” (Crosby 1986, McNeely 2001, Warren 2007, Weiner 1996). Some plants were now ubiquitous; as Crosby remarks, “the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion” (Crosby 1986: 7). The science of breeding and horticulture led to scientific breeding stations around the globe that turned raw materials from the colonies into plantation crops for the British, French, and other colonies and empires, including the Americas (Brockway 2002). As early as 1776, the United States dealt with its first insect invasion by the Hessian fly. While the Americans and British responded with nationalist and xenophobic fervor, these invasions were seen as isolated events (Pauly 2002).”
This ‘bioinvasion’ however did not really create little European ecosystems globally, because European colonizers were extracting biota from colonies and moving them into other colonies, so many of the crops that Europeans brought with them into colonies were from other colonial possessions. But more importantly, Subramaniam raises issues of how the term ‘native’ species has been very unevenly applied, and had weird affinities with certain ‘green’ settler nativists (eco-fash in some sense is a colonial thing):
“War, industrialization, urbanization, and westward expansion transformed the nation’s landscapes and redefined Americans’ relationship with nature (Rone 2008). This new love of nature was evidenced in the dramatic growth in the number of Americans who considered themselves “nature lovers,” and Americans saw their love of nature as the quality that distinguished the “natives” from the new immigrants. A love for nature translated into a zeal to protect nature, and immigrants came to be seen as not loving nature and as the problem. Nativists increasingly challenged federal government passivity about immigration. The “native” emerges as site of “purity” in our conceptions of humans and plant and animal ecologies. Indeed, as Philip Pauly (1996) notes, the paradigm of the nativist approach was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed at the insistence of California workingmen in 1882, a year after the state’s quarantine law. After World War I, Congress introduced limitations on entries of all European immigrant groups through the Immigration Act of 1924.”
Also I loved some of the chapter titles in this book including “Aliens of the World Unite!” and “Resistance is Futile! You Will Be Assimilated” — a fun little nod to the Borg from Star Trek TNG. Finally, in the feminist science studies section there was this little fascinating tidbit on the history of the cotton gin which I am fascinated by as a reader of Marx and Engels and someone interested in the history of watermills and cotton production (Marx names Eli Whitney, not Catherine Greene, as the inventor of the cotton gin also in Capital, which is and continues to be the canonical line):
“After their deaths, they [women] are forgotten, their contributions lost and invisible in the historical records of science. The effect is named after Matilda Gage, an important American suffragist who argued that the inventor of the cotton gin was a woman (Hess 1997). In contrast to the Matilda effect, we have its converse, the Curie effect, which recognizes the popular conception of Marie Curie as the woman scientist (Des Jardins 2010). The Curie effect points out that in order to be famous, women scientists have to be unusually brilliant like Marie Curie, who won a Nobel Prize in the sciences not once but twice. These two effects represent two phenomena in the history of women in the sciences—invisibility and extraordinariness. Somewhere between the forgotten Matildas and the extraordinary Curies lies the worlds of most women in the sciences.”
Anyway, this was a very interesting and fun read.
The first part discusses her time as a biology student studying colour variation in morning glories for her field work and the relationship these types of questions have to histories of eugenics. As a quick aside, the common morning glory she studied had origins in Mexico which was very interesting to me:
“The annual vine is believed to have its origins in the highlands of Central Mexico (Barkley 1986, Mabberley 1997). Domesticated by pre-Columbian people, possibly in association with maize and bean culture, the remarkably diverse flower is believed to have been selected for its aesthetic appeal. Collected from the Aztecs and sent back to Spain by Hernán Cortés, the vines were planted in monastery gardens (Defelice 2001). Subsequently, sixteenth- century European explorers sent samples from the new world to Europe for classification and study. Ipomoea, the largest genus of family Convolvulaceae, has at least five hundred species. The genus includes Ipomoea batata, the sweet potato, which was to become a famous food plant, as well as Ipomoea purpurea, the tall morning glory that has become a much loved and favored ornamental vine in Southern European gardens and Great Britain. It has since adapted to tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate regions of the world. Growing in the wild, this self-propagating plant is found across the globe in North America, Central America, South America, Australia, India, Africa, and tropical and sub- tropical regions of the world…”
She then moves on in the second part to discuss the politics of invasion biology and invasive species, and its connection to reactionary anti-migrant politics. Finally she discusses women in the sciences and brings in feminist science studies to analyze how questions of difference and variation in biology are intimately connected to the construction of gender differences and patriarchal structures in science. One passage quite early on discusses this by first alluding to Sarah Bartmann (who I first encountered in the Handbook of STS chapter Subramaniam co-authored):
“The extraordinary scrutinizing of Sarah Bartmann that endlessly chronicles the intense racism and sexism that accompanies her life also redeploys racism and sexism in its retelling, cautioning us that revisiting history can never be innocent (Fausto-Sterling 1995). Nancy Stepan (1986) has pointed out that the historical record shows repeated and direct analogies made between identity categories. For example, she demon- strates how the race-gender analogy was used in the nineteenth century to claim women’s smaller brains and protruding jaws as evidence of their evolutionary inferiority to European men. She describes a process where “by analogy with the so-called lower races, women, the sexually deviate, the criminal, the urban poor, and the insane were in one way or another constructed as a biological ‘race apart’ whose differences from the white male, and likeness to each other ‘explained’ their different and lower position in the social hierarchy” (Stepan 1986: 40–41). By the mid-nineteenth century, racial biology became “a science of boundaries between groups and the degenerations that threatened when those boundaries were transgressed” (Stepan 1985: 98). In a similar vein in “Pelvic Politics,” Sally Markowitz argues that the very idea of sex differences emerged from racialized meanings of bodies. She traces how the category and ideology of sex/gender rests “not on a simple binary opposition between male and female but rather on a scale of racially coded degrees of sex/gender differ- ence” (Markowitz 2001: 391). Rather than a universal or species-wide man or woman, evolutionary biology produced the “manly European man” and the “feminine European woman” as evolutionary types that mark the pinnacle of a hierarchical project of race (Markowitz 2001: 391). The very categories of identity emerge as co-constituted and co-dependent intersectional categories. Thus, characteristics like femininity are racialized themselves in the historical record; “femininity” could not be assumed to be a characteristic of all females (Schiebinger 1993). The distinct categories of sex and race cannot be presumed to be historically evident.”
And a related excerpt shortly following this:
“The power of the logic of difference underlying scientific claims of the varying capacities of human bodies lies in the politics of biological determinism. Scientific claims of biological differences were not understood to be mutable but rather fixed and determined by biology. The foundational work in FSTS has documented how scientists “produced” biological differences of gender, race, class, and nation—claims of anatomical difference, physiological differences, as well as differences in behavior, temperament, and intellect.”
I found it fascinating that Subramaniam grouped the communist biologist J.B.S. Haldane into her genealogy of eugenics, especially because Haldane had explicitly denounced eugenics as formulated by his colleague and friend Julian Huxley, but the questions that Subramaniam raises makes her framing of Haldane a lot more comprehensible to me:
“The eugenic motivations of the key scientists seem so apparent and indeed so instrumental to their scientific views and lives that it is hard to write off their views of politics and science as a benign dalliance or side project. It is indeed interesting that internalist histories of evolutionary biology largely sideline a discussion of eugenics or present a benign picture of the major figures. Instead, most were eugenic enthusiasts (Paul 2001). Some like Dobzhansky and Haldane came from the political left and saw the utopian potential of a new experimental biology that could predict and manipulate biology to enhance human futures. For Haldane and other scientists who bought into these promises, the first decades of the twentieth century were exciting, promising human improvement on many fronts. Therefore, “it was still possible to be a scientist, a socialist, a meritocrat and a eugenicist” (Tredoux 2001). As Mendelian inheritance laws helped develop novel techniques in plant breeding and revolutionized agricultural breeds and yields, so biologists saw the potential for human improvement (Mark Adams 2000). This new future-oriented biology would replace the old religions.”
I read Samanth Subramanian's biography of Haldane over a year ago, and I can understand how Haldane would have fit into this as a techno-optimist communist and to be honest I wonder how I fit into this very broad conception of eugenics also. Eugenics in its most literal terms derives from the Greek word for ‘good birth’ and so using biological technology to avoid the sort of genetic variation associated with particular diseases fits right into this system of logic. Designer babies is eugenics, obviously, but so is any form of genetic screening that would involve circumventing any type of genetic predisposition to disease. Critical disability studies have flagged this sort of stuff for a while actually. On a slightly different but related note, maybe most ‘amusing’/interesting/weird was the fact that some biologists on the left were into eugenics as a way of producing more Marxs and Lenins in the world, which I personally just find hilarious:
“Herman J. Muller and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Both of them were committed social activists and scientists and devoted to using scientific knowledge to better human societies. “Although a biologist may do his research on mice, Drosophila flies, plants or bacteria,” Dobzhansky argued, “the ultimate aim should be to contribute toward the understanding of man and his place in the universe” (qtd. in Paul 1987: 334). Muller similarly wanted to use science, believing that “men should eventually be able to control the process, even in themselves, so as to greatly improve upon their own natures” (qtd. in Paul 1987: 321). Despite their shared passion for social betterment, they fundamentally disagreed on what kind of ideal society to develop, reflecting the complex history of eugenics. Eugenics was a broad philosophy about human betterment and was embraced by a wide range of political ideologies, including the political left and the right. Muller wanted a world that would be filled with brilliant men such as Newton, Lenin, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat-sen, and Marx (Muller 1984). His many proposals for improving society included starting an organization that collected sperm of great men and made them available to women (Paul 1987). A homogeneous world of brilliance was the pinnacle of a great society for Muller. In contrast, Dobzhansky held that diversity was the “supreme value”; he favored a world replete with social, political, and genetic variation. “Do we really want to live in a world with millions of Einteins, Pas- teurs and Lenins?” he asked and answered with a “No!” (Dobzhansky 1962: 330). To him genetic diversity and cultural diversity were related—just as he wanted a world that was culturally diverse, he believed that it was good for individuals to be genetically diverse, or heterozygous, and for populations to be polymorphic (Paul 1987).”
In a related excerpt, Stephen Jay Gould is cited in a useful way, at least for me because Haldane is a bit of a hero in my head, and is honestly a foundational figure in STS to some extent. Helena Sheehan sees him as such. Interestingly people like Fisher felt attacked by scientists of the left like Haldane who were increasingly pushing eugenics scholarship out of journals at the time. Anyway the excerpt on Gould:
“In a wonderful essay on R. A. Fisher, Stephen Jay Gould remarks, “We don’t like to admit flaws in our saints” (Gould 1991). As biologists, we rarely acknowledge them or make note of them; they are largely absent from our internalist histories and at best they are seen as an “unfortunate and discardable appendage,” even if they appear in “our profession’s bible.” We need to understand the eugenic work as central to their science and cannot choose to ignore it as “an embarrassment” (Gould 1991).”
Subramaniam also discusses how eugenics and scientific racism have resurfaced in the form of population genetics:
“Race was not relegated to the “scrap heap” of history with the advent of modern evolutionary biology, but rather redefined (Reardon 2005). Instead, Gannett argues that races were reconceptualized as populations; a populational concept of race replaced a typological one. Indeed, the concept of race has made a resurgence in contemporary biology (Bliss 2012, Reardon 2005, Roberts 2012).”
And furthermore how population genetics continues to function through statistical methods that were constructed within this paradigm of eugenics:
“A critical byproduct of the biometrician/Mendelian controversy was the important statistical and mathematical methods formalized in the early twentieth century that have remained foundational for the field. What emerged was a mathematical population genetics usually associated with Sewall Wright, R. A. Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane. Their work set the foundations of population genetics, which formally reconciled Mendel and Darwin (Provine 1971, Dietrich 2006). The synthesis defined the emerging field of evolutionary biology by explaining and incorporating the many subdisciplines and branches of biology such as genetics, cytology, systematics, botany, zoology, morphology, ecology, and paleontology, as well as mathematics and statistics..."
Backtracking to the invasion biology stuff, Subramaniam also discussed Alfred Cosby’s book, which I am currently reading right now for comps also (though I have some major issues with it):
“We have historically imagined our relationship with the biota of the world in numerous and diverse ways. In his influential book Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Cosby argues that the roots of Europeans’ domination of the western world lie in their creating “New-Europes” wherever they went, especially in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand (Crosby 1986). Rather than thinking of European domination as the result of technology, Crosby argues that we should understand it as simultaneously biological and ecological. Where Europeans went, their agriculture and animals went; they thrived while indigenous ecosystems collapsed. This vast migration of species ushered in a bioinvasion of mass proportions by the conquerors’ animals, plants, weeds, and germs, yielding a “great reshuffling” (Crosby 1986, McNeely 2001, Warren 2007, Weiner 1996). Some plants were now ubiquitous; as Crosby remarks, “the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion” (Crosby 1986: 7). The science of breeding and horticulture led to scientific breeding stations around the globe that turned raw materials from the colonies into plantation crops for the British, French, and other colonies and empires, including the Americas (Brockway 2002). As early as 1776, the United States dealt with its first insect invasion by the Hessian fly. While the Americans and British responded with nationalist and xenophobic fervor, these invasions were seen as isolated events (Pauly 2002).”
This ‘bioinvasion’ however did not really create little European ecosystems globally, because European colonizers were extracting biota from colonies and moving them into other colonies, so many of the crops that Europeans brought with them into colonies were from other colonial possessions. But more importantly, Subramaniam raises issues of how the term ‘native’ species has been very unevenly applied, and had weird affinities with certain ‘green’ settler nativists (eco-fash in some sense is a colonial thing):
“War, industrialization, urbanization, and westward expansion transformed the nation’s landscapes and redefined Americans’ relationship with nature (Rone 2008). This new love of nature was evidenced in the dramatic growth in the number of Americans who considered themselves “nature lovers,” and Americans saw their love of nature as the quality that distinguished the “natives” from the new immigrants. A love for nature translated into a zeal to protect nature, and immigrants came to be seen as not loving nature and as the problem. Nativists increasingly challenged federal government passivity about immigration. The “native” emerges as site of “purity” in our conceptions of humans and plant and animal ecologies. Indeed, as Philip Pauly (1996) notes, the paradigm of the nativist approach was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed at the insistence of California workingmen in 1882, a year after the state’s quarantine law. After World War I, Congress introduced limitations on entries of all European immigrant groups through the Immigration Act of 1924.”
Also I loved some of the chapter titles in this book including “Aliens of the World Unite!” and “Resistance is Futile! You Will Be Assimilated” — a fun little nod to the Borg from Star Trek TNG. Finally, in the feminist science studies section there was this little fascinating tidbit on the history of the cotton gin which I am fascinated by as a reader of Marx and Engels and someone interested in the history of watermills and cotton production (Marx names Eli Whitney, not Catherine Greene, as the inventor of the cotton gin also in Capital, which is and continues to be the canonical line):
“After their deaths, they [women] are forgotten, their contributions lost and invisible in the historical records of science. The effect is named after Matilda Gage, an important American suffragist who argued that the inventor of the cotton gin was a woman (Hess 1997). In contrast to the Matilda effect, we have its converse, the Curie effect, which recognizes the popular conception of Marie Curie as the woman scientist (Des Jardins 2010). The Curie effect points out that in order to be famous, women scientists have to be unusually brilliant like Marie Curie, who won a Nobel Prize in the sciences not once but twice. These two effects represent two phenomena in the history of women in the sciences—invisibility and extraordinariness. Somewhere between the forgotten Matildas and the extraordinary Curies lies the worlds of most women in the sciences.”
Anyway, this was a very interesting and fun read.
April 8, 2023
I really wanted to love this book. It makes really excellent points. The book is largely divided into three parts. The first asks why we ask the questions we ask in biology and how the eugenic past of biology has largely guided this process. The second connects the xenophobic rhetoric around immigrants to the inflammatory rhetoric around "invasive species", showing how both miss the larger truths. The third criticizes the structure of graduate school in the sciences and shows how that restrictive structure and culture should be addressed to improve the experience and outcomes of women and other marginalized groups in science. Those are all fascinating topics! And the arguments are well-researched and, largely, new to me. I love that the author used her interdisciplinary training and unique background to shine a light on some real issues. I just thought the delivery of the material itself wasn't great. It also lacked possible solutions to the problems presented. While it is useful to point to the actual problem rather than the symptoms that others have focused on, it would have been nice to feel like there was at least a direction to travel toward positive change.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when authors write about what they are going to show in their writing. Usually it is confined to the introduction so I can skim it. In this book the introduction was really long and had a lot of that so I ended up just skipping forward. Unfortunately, the author continues to do this throughout the book. Stop telling me what you are going to do and just do it. Even more frustrating was the instance where I actually wanted commentary on the writing and I didn't get it: the author writes a fictional story to imagine an alternative way of doing science. As a story, it isn't great but the ideas it presents are exciting. So many cool possibilities are opened up and I wanted to know if anything like this existed, were there real examples of the kind of research and community being presented. Also, how could we encourage this kind of science? But instead of discussing the story at all, the author instantly moved on to the next section of the book.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when authors write about what they are going to show in their writing. Usually it is confined to the introduction so I can skim it. In this book the introduction was really long and had a lot of that so I ended up just skipping forward. Unfortunately, the author continues to do this throughout the book. Stop telling me what you are going to do and just do it. Even more frustrating was the instance where I actually wanted commentary on the writing and I didn't get it: the author writes a fictional story to imagine an alternative way of doing science. As a story, it isn't great but the ideas it presents are exciting. So many cool possibilities are opened up and I wanted to know if anything like this existed, were there real examples of the kind of research and community being presented. Also, how could we encourage this kind of science? But instead of discussing the story at all, the author instantly moved on to the next section of the book.
November 27, 2025
Subramanium’s hot takes on the history and practice of evolutionary biology changed my whole perspective on the field…that being said, she repeats herself a lot and the book had a lot of typos, which pulled me out of the text a bit. Could’ve used a good editor! I also liked the stuff about grad school/women in science fields at the end, but I almost wish she’d just made that into a second book instead of tacking it on to the end of this one. That being said, I think I’ll be referencing this book for as long as I work in the botany field — genuinely a game changer.
January 11, 2022
I read this to help inform my master's project. I am VERY inspired and rethinking how to formulate research questions.
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