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Reading the Book of Nature By John Hedley Brooke Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp.xi + 313. A$105 HB. T THE heart of Peter Harrison's searching study is a contrast between two ways of reading the Bible--both of which, he persuasively argues, had serious implications for how God's other book, the book of nature, should be read. The older of the two conventions, which he illustrates from patristic and medieval theology, was characterised by a quest for multiple and symbolic meanings of biblical texts, producing a rich tapestry of spiritual allegory. According to the ninth-century commentator Rabanus Morus, references to Jerusalem could be understood in four different ways: ~historically as the city of the Jews, allegorically as the Church of Christ, anagogically as the heavenly city...and tropologically as the soul of each individual". The correlate of this style of exegesis was the ascription of symbolic meanings to objects in the natural world on the understanding that the two books illumined each other. By contrast, the newer convention, which Harrison sees as a product of the Protestant Reformation, was characterised by the quest for literal, univocal interpretations of the sacred text. This shift in religious and literary sensibility was profoundly important for the rise of science in Europe because it stripped natural objects of their emblematic accretions. In order to fill the ensuing vacuum, a new language was required for the analysis of nature's objects--one that permitted students of the second book to converge on similarly univocal interpretations. Many readers of Metascience will be familiar with Newton's insistence that one meaning, and one alone, should be allowed of biblical texts and how this same mentality found expression in an equally vehement insistence that controversy in the sciences was to be deplored because unique solutions to scientific problems could be found. Harrison's admirably lucid text is welcome because it helps us to appreciate what

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REVIEWS was novel in Newton and many of his contemporaries in their approach to the two books. But more than that, it contains an arresting and provocative thesis--that the shift to literalism in the reading of Scripture, far from being obstructive to scientific inquiry (as popular sentiment might suggest) was the very move that made m o d e m science possible. Once nature ceased to be read as a vast repository of emblems and symbols, the space was created for a science in which "objects were related mathematically, mechanically, causally, or ordered and classified according to categories other than those of resemblance." Attempts to correlate the scientific movements of the West with the Protestant Reformation have a long and controversial history. There have been many derivatives of Max Weber's thesis in which both capitalism and science have been seen as nurtured by Calvinist theology. For the Dutch historian of science Reijer Hooykaas, the Calvinist emphasis on the sovereignty of God facilitated what he called the "de-deification of nature ~. A nature denuded of divine intelligences, spiritual forms and essences became a mechanical nature open to scientific inquiry. The Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers has been construed as an anti-authoritarian formula, propitious for the freedom of scientific inquiry. In the celebrated thesis of Robert Merton, puritan values were a positive stimulus to the expansion of science in seventeenth century England where a godly involvement in altruistic enterprise could lead to a higher value placed on the applied sciences. Protestant miUenarianism, according to Charles Webster, provided a distinctive stimulus because the cultivation of those same applied sciences could be seen as a religious duty in preparation for Christ's second coming. As Francis Bacon saw it, some of the effects of the original Fall could be reversed through experimental philosophy. Harrison is aware that these well-known theses, especiaUy that of Merton, have been subject to damaging criticism. In a particularly telling critique, to which he does not refer, William Ashworth has argued that it is impossible to identify archetypal Catholic and Protestant mentalities in those thinkers of the seventeenth century who sought to reintegrate their natural philosophy with their faith. How then does Harrison differentiate his thesis on the relevance of Protestantism to science from these older, partially vulnerable models? The answer--and it is an interesting one in the light of current trends in the historiography of science---is that one should focus neither on doctrines nor values, but on Protestant practices, both in the reading of Scripture and in worship where iconoclastic attitudes towards religious symbolism were expressed. As he puts it himself, "iconoclasm with respect to images directly parallels literalism with respect to texts." This is because "denial of any level of meaning 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS except the literal has the implication that objects do not refer." That being so ~their use as aids in worship is at best pointless, at worst idolatrous". Thus Protestant practices, often unwittingly, had the effect of narrowing down the range of possible meanings of both biblical texts and natural objects. T h e effect on scientific practices was indirect but nevertheless profound. As a hieroglyphic conception of nature was displaced, as God's creatures ceased to be natural signs, as they lost their multiple meanings, they nevertheless resurfaced replete with purpose. And purpose now meant beneficial uses for humanity, which empirical enquiry alone could discover. In short, the vacuum was filled with a pervasive physico-theology sanctioned by literal readings of Scripture in which the Fall had become a literal, historical event, the effects of which were discernible in nature and to be reversed as far as possible. But without the shift in exegetical practice, the themes of human mastery and dominion over nature could not have become so pervasive. F o r Harrison, "the quest for the divinely instituted purpose of nature is diverted solely into the search for its practical utilities." One might cavil here at the ~solely", given the many claims that natural philosophy was morally and spiritually upliRing; but Harrison's key point is that a scientifically grounded natural theology such as that of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, or John Ray, was only possible because Protestant exegetes had already cleared away so much elaborate symbolism. He chooses Ray to introduce and epitomise his thesis. In a Preface to The Ornithology of Francis IVillughby (1678), Ray resolutely announced that he and WiUughby had ~wholly omitted what we find in other Authors concerning Homonymous and Synonymous words, or the divers names of Birds, Hieroglyphics, Emblems, Morals, Fables, Presages or ought else appertaining to Divinity, Ethics, Grammar, or any sort of Humane Learning." Instead, the reader is presented ~only with what properly relates to their Natural History ~. The physical environment, the physical context of the creature has displaced its literary context. In Ray's list of omissions there is an explicit challenge to the older conventions. Harrison is impressive when drawing out the implications of his analysis. What mattered to many Protestant exegetes in the seventeenth century was not the plethora of spiritual allegories that might be spun from the Genesis text, but what Moses had actually meant. This enables him to argue that the historical origins of two of the hallmarks of modernity--the identification of the meaning of a text with its author's intention and the privileged status of scientific discourse---were closely intertwined. Whereas Robert Markley has argued that seventeenth-century religious and political controversies and the development of experimental science led to breakdowns of traditional systems of representation, an implication 446

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REVIEWS of Harrison's account is that the converse is true---that the development of experimental science was a response to the breakdown of traditional systems of representation. There is the implication, too, that the controversial thesis of Lynn White Junior--to the effect that HebraicChristian readings of Genesis encouraged an exploitatlve attitude to the earth's resources--must still be taken seriously. White's contention does not hold in any timeless sense; but, on Harrison's reading, it does apply to that crucial period in the seventeenth century when the Genesis imperative to exercise dominion over nature became a literal command. Finally, there is the irony that, through the very processes that Harrison describes, Protestant theology unwittingly engendered its own secularisation by severing the book of God's works from communion with the book of God's words and by permitting (through its own language of mathematics) an autonomy it had not previously enjoyed. Does the analysis hold up? I have some worries concerning the many references to "the Protestants" as if their hermeneutic principles were sufficiently uniform to permit the high levels of generalisation on offer. As Harrison himself concedes, allegorical interpretations of both nature and scripture continued to co-exist with the literal. Luther, who is used to epitomise the shift to univocal, non-allegorical readings of Scripture, would happily preach on the peach stone and see in the power of the young shoot to penetrate the hard shell a parable of the power of God. Luther also expressed a certain liking for alchemy because in the fiery separation of the pure from the impure it offered symbols of eschatological significance. If Robert Boyle is presented as the new type of mechanical philosopher and physico-theologian, there is the embarrassment that he, too, could still write that "the great volume of nature is full of real hieroglyphicks, where.., things stand for words, and their qualities for letters." Harrison sees no problem here; for it boils down in the end to trends and emphases rather than absolute contrasts. Where allegorical readings survive they simply indicate an "unconscious reluctance to admit the failure of the old world picture". Such a move raises deeper problems about the testability of his thesis, some of which arise for the different reason that his argument is conducted entirely through the categories of an history of ideas. How can we decide whether the shift towards biblical literalism that he so skilfully charts was a precondition, a concomitant or even a consequence of a less emblematic understanding of nature? I suspect that from the history of ideas alone we do not have the necessary criteria to decide. These difficulties notwithstanding, Harrison's sophisticated analysis is essential reading for anyone interested in the field of science-and-religion. It will also appeal to historians of science wrestling with the enduring problem of why the sciences took off so spectacularly in Europe precisely 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS when they did. Whether a full allowance is made for the science produced in Catholic cultures is a question the author will have to face. Department of History Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancs., U K

Here Be Dragons By Terry Dartnall Rita Carter,

Mapping the Mind. L o n d o n : W e i d e n f e l d a n d

Nicolson, 1998. Pp. 224. s

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OCTOR: Would you clap both your hands together, please? (Patient lifts fight hand and makes clapping motion in air, then puts it back on bed. Smiles, apparently satisfied.) Doctor: That was just your right hand. Could you raise your left hand and do it again with them both, please? Patient: My left hand? Oh. It is a little stiff today. My arthritis. Doctor: Could you try to lift it though, please? (Pause. The patient does not move.) Doctor (repeats): Could you try to lift your left hand, please? Patient: I did. Didn't you see it? Doctor: I didn't. Do you think you moved it? Patient: Of course I did. You can't have been looking. Doctor: Would you lift it again for me, please? (Patient does not move.) Doctor: Are you moving it now? Patient: Of course I am. Doctor (indicating left hand lying on bed): What is that then? Patient (looking): Oh, that. That is not my hand, It must belong to someone else. This patient was suffering from anosognosia: lack of knowledge of illness. Anosognosia is caused by damage to an area of the brain that is concerned with paying attention to the body. Some sufferers behave as though everything to one side of the body has ceased to exist. They forget 448

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REVIEWS to move the limbs on that side, drag a neglected leg behind them when they walk, comb only one side of their hair, and try to clothe only one side of their body. Sufferers with Anton's delusion, the most extreme form of anosognosia, refuse to acknowledge total blindness and blunder about, apparently in a visual world of their own making. Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind is full of case studies such as this. Inasmuch, it shares common ground with Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wzfefor a Hat (London: 1985), but in other ways it is more ambitious. Sacks' book is a collection of case studies, which he discusses with caring and compassion. Carter's is an introduction to behavioural neuroscience for the non-specialist, which the case studies serve to illustrate. This is a glossy book that could sit on a cane table with a bowl of fruit and a Cezanne copy on the wall. The front cover has a map of the mind laid out like the London Underground. Rita Carter is a journalist. But the book was written in consultation with Christopher Frith, a senior member of the neuroscience community. It contains cameo pieces by experts in their field: Horace Barlow on the reductionist approach to the brain; Steven Mithen on the evolution of the mind; Alan Parkin on 'alien hands' (when your hand behaves as if it has a mind of its own); Simon BronCohen on autism and the male brain; Joseph LeDoux on the emotions; Kay Jamison on mania, depression and creativity; Richard Gregory on vision; Antonio Damasio on memory and mental images; and many more. The book is beautifully presented and for the most part very readable (except for rhetorical flourishes, such as "the ftredance of the neurons" p. 19). It provides an overview of the development and architecture of the brain, and the behavioural consequences that can happen when things go seriously wrong. The development and architecture are illustrated by diagrams and pictures, and the behavioural consequences are illustrated, in another kind of way, by the case studies I have mentioned. There is a wealth of these in the book, so I will mention two more. We tend to think that face recognition is a single, unitary phenomenon. In fact, it is a complex, composite phenomenon involving two neural pathways, one mediating identification and the other mediating familiarity. If the former pathway (the ventral route through the limbic system) is disrupted, Capgras delusion results, in which patients become convinced that their spouse or parent or child, or anyone near and dear to them, has been replaced by an identical-looking imposter. Carter cites the case of someone who was so convinced that his father had been abducted and replaced by a humanoid robot that he slit his throat to find the wires that animated him. With Fregoli's delusion, the opposite occurs and the familiarity pathway is active in the presence of total strangers. Sufferers have such 9 AAI"IPSS$, 1999.

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REVIEWS a profound sense of recognition for these strangers that they find it easier to believe that they are familiar people in disguise, rather than accepting that their sense of recognition is playing them false. Carter relates the case of a 66 year-old woman who became convinced that her ex-lover and his girlfriend were spying on her. She claimed that the couple disguised themselves with wigs, moustaches, dark glasses and hats, and followed her everywhere, on foot, or in dozens of different cars. On the day of her first appointment with a psychiatrist, she was hours late because, she said, she had to do a complicated detour around town to throw them off her trail. ~They keep changing their clothes and their hairststyles but I know it's them," she said. "They should get a medal for acting, they are so good, but I can tell it is them from the way they stand and move about" (p. 122). The pursuers disappeared when she was given a dopamineblocking drug. The downside of this book is that it is seriously philosophically naive. All sorts of philosophical infelicities are forgivable in a popular book such as this, and Carter commits a few of them. What is more worrying is that she sometimes presents theories--and bad theories, at that--as facts. Here are some of the infelicities that I do not think are too serious. She says, time and again, that the brain "constructs" the world in our heads: "there is no definitive picture of 'out there', only a construction in our heads ..." (p. 109), "The brain does not 'see', 'hear' or 'feel' the outside world. It constructs it in response to stimuli" (p. 125). This leads her to say that "Hallucinations, imagination, and 'real' seeing are essentially the same thing as far as the brain is concerned" (p. 125). This statement doesn't seem to bother her at all. Nor does this: "Every brain constructs the world in a slightly different way from any other because every brain is different. The sight of an external object ..." (p. 108). But what external object? What does it mean to talk about external objects, if the world is constructed in our heads? This is a central philosophical issue, but I don't think that Carter's naivety matters much h e r e - - s o long as we get the neurological information. (It worries me rather more that Walter Freeman says the same thing: "the only knowledge that each of us has is what we construct in our own brains . . . . any brain can only know the little it can create within itself" (p. 146). Can't we expect more philosophical sophistication from the Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley?) Now we come to Carter's discussion of Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a nineteenth-century rail-worker who lost a large chunk of forebrain when a steel rod was blown through his skull by a mistimed explosion. He survived, but changed from a purposeful, industrious worker into a

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REVIEWS drunken drifter, completely unable to direct or control himself. Carter says that this is the first well-reported case "to raise the awkward possibility that morality, free will and responsibility for one's actions were rooted literally in flesh and could not be removed without removing the whole person" (p. 201). Elsewhere she says: "If antisocial hehaviour can be linked to malfunctioning brain modules, perhaps we should learn to turn the modules on or off. Current research into rage, psychopathy and the sort of behaviour typified by Phineas Gage suggests that these might be treated ... by stimulating or inhibiting precise areas of the brain . . . . Is an artificially induced change of mind worse than a stretch in prison?" (p. 27). The discussion ends here, with no attempt to explore the issue. In the Introduction, Carter had said, brain mapping is providing the navigational tool required to control brain activity in a precise and radical way...When our brain maps are complete it will be possible to target psychoactive treatments so finely that an individual's state of mind (and thus behaviour) will be almost entirely malleable... damage is found in the frontal lobes of a disproportionate number of murderers on Death Row... One of the purposes of this book is to draw attention to the social implications of what at first sight may seem a purely technological advance (p. 7). I think it is debateable that she does "draw our attention to the social implications". All that she does is to point out technological possibilities. We have had all sorts of technological possibilities available to us for a long time: sterilisation of criminals and castration of sex offenders are two obvious examples. The question isn't whether we can use them, but whether we should use them. It is not helpful to point towards an issue, pump our intuitions with a question ("Is an artificially induced change of mind worse than a stretch in prison?"), and to leave it at that. I think that in this case a little discussion is a dangerous thing. But, we say, this is not an ethical treatise. It is an introduction to behavioural neuroscience, so let it pass. In the context of talking about Gage's lack of self-determination, she describes Christopher Filth's finger-lifting experiment. The outcome of this experiment, she says, "made sure that the bit of brain identified is almost certainly that which, quite specifically, allows people to do things of their own volition" (p.24). But what (the reader wonders) if this was only an activated pathway, and not the source of the activation? How would we rule that out? And at the end of the chapter we find: "It is 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS possible, too, that areas that light up when a certain mental task is performed are not themselves responsible for that task, but are simply passing on a stimulus to the bit that is . . . . Brain mappers are trying hard to avoid falling into that trap but sometimes, inevitably, they do" (p. 31). Well, we think, at least she has mentioned the problem, so let it pass. But then we come to her claims about Face Recognition Units, to which she devotes a special section. "Familiar faces are stored in the brain in neural circuits--memories--known as Face Recognition Units (FRU). When a new image of a person enters consciousness these FRUs are scanned for a match. If one is found the appropriate F R U is activated, retrieved and attached to the new image" (p. 122). So this is how we recognise faces... Except, a few pages later (p. 135) Antonio Damasio explains why this can't be the case. For one thing, we would run out of storage space. For another, mental images are not exact copies of their originals (which vary, anyway, every time we see them, in terms of angle, light conditions, etc), so that there would be all sorts of recognition and retrieval problems. There are other reasons, not mentioned by Damasio, for believing that recognition does not require internal templates. For one thing, if we can only recognise a face by accessing an inner template, then we can only recognise the template by accessing another template, and so on. It might be replied that we know about the template that it is a template of X. Well, in that case we could apply this knowledge directly to X (to the thing perceived), so that the template would be redundant. It is much more likely that, rather than being stored copies of experience, inner images are generated by the same knowledge that we bring to experience and that makes recognition possible. Damasio points in this direction. It is unfortunate that this book presents implausible theory as fact, and lectures us on it. Apart from anything else, it makes us wonder what else in the book we can really believe. On the other hand, maybe life is just like that, and we have to exercise our critical judgement. At the end of her Introduction, Carter says that she has tried to keep the dragons of scientific bluster out of her chart, "but others are bound to spot them, along with misleading signs and dubious landmarks." Nevertheless, she says, "read on and I will show you strange and wonderful things." (p. 8). There are strange and wonderful things in Mapping the Mind. But caveat emptor! Computing and Information Technology Griffith University Nathan, Queensland, Australia

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Early Studies of Early Earth Sciences Re-Viewed By Sally Newcomb Sciences of the Earth: Studies in the History of Mineralogy and Geology. A l d e r s h o t : A s h g a t e / V a r i o r u m ,

David Oldroyd,

1998. Pp. xiv + 340. s

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HE USEFULNESS of collections of papers like this one is well attested to, especially in a field such as the history of science where papers are published in a variety of journals, from the technical through those of the humanities, and across national borders. The journals represented here have been published in four countries. Even major university libraries may not have had subscriptions to all of them, or they may have met the fate of more and more journals in these days of diminishing budgets, that of being put into library storage. Resurrection from this state usually depends on several contacts and several days' lead time. This occurred when I attempted to consult one of these articles, in a journal that has been a fixture on the scene for a long while. Thus, it is gratifying to have the papers available in this form. I, of course, plunged into the middle of the book, in search of information from the article I had not been able to see. There was some sense of unease as it was not obvious whether the articles had been reproduced as they had been originally, or if commentary had been added for this edition. These and other questions of a similar nature were miraculously resolved when, after reading about three articles, I had the wit to look at the author's preface. This provides a brief, graceful, and interesting account of how one eminent historian of science entered our much-loved but somewhat orphan field, comments on the included articles, and acknowledges the co-authors of two of the papers. The book is organised into three sections, and the articles are labelled consecutively with Roman numerals. Original publication dates range from 1972 to 1980. The first section consists of just one paper, "Science in the Silver Age: Aetna, a Classical Theory of Volcanic Activity", published

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REVIEWS in 1979. The paper, with co-author P.B. Paisley, examined what a Latin poem dating from antiquity could reveal about actual knowledge of volcanic action. Date, authorship, and theoretical content and impact were discussed. The second section is a remarkable series of papers that to my knowledge has not been expanded on very much in the nearly twenty years since their publication. These papers are concerned with the intersection of chemistry and geology in the formative years of both, namely the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as several that examine the development of mineralogy in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Various aspects have been amplified by several authors in the last ten to fifteen years, but there is much still to be done. I have argued that the lack of acceptance for the Huttonian model for rock origin was neither his "obscure writing style" nor pure ignorance and lack of vision on the part of Neptunists, or even lack of a heat source that would melt enormous masses of rock, but instead resulted from demonstration of specific rock and mineral properties of fusion and/or solution followed by precipitation under laboratory conditions. The papers here, developed and amplified from Oldroyd's unpublished (in full) dissertation of 1974, examine the history, context, and some content of that effort. A list of titles is perhaps the most efficient means of conveying what is included: "Some Neo-Platonic and Stoic Influences on Mineralogy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries", "Mechanical Mineralogy", "Some Phlogistic Mineralogical Schemes, Illustrative of the Evolution of the Concept of 'Earth' in the 17th and 18th centuries", "An Examination of G.E. Stahl's PhilosophicalPn'nciples of Universal Chemistry", "A Note on the Status of A.F. Cronstedt's Simple Earths and his Analytical Methods", "Mineralogy and the 'Chemical Revolution'", "Some Eighteenth Century Methods for the Chemical Analysis of Minerals', "Edward Daniel Clarke, 1769--1822, and his R61e in the History of the Blowpipe". These papers provide a background to major thoughts on mineral origin, review matter and chemical theory, discuss mineral classification schemes, and describe methods devised to learn more about natural minerals, all introduced well before the relatively recent interest in experiment and instruments. Oldroyd also concluded that a belief in phlogiston did not negate valuable work in mineral identification and classification. The third section consists of a series of papers that explore the history and historiography of science. There is an exploration of the way Robert Hooke conducted his science, as shown in his "Discourse of Earthquakes". Oldroyd argued for the cohesiveness and plausibility of Hooke's geological work. This view has been supported lately by Ellen Drake in her Restless Genius: Robert Hooke and his Earthly Thoughts (Oxford: 1996). In 454

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REVIEWS the next paper, Oldroyd and co-author W.R. Albury ~examine the study of minerals from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century in the light of the work of Michel Foucault on the history of systems of thought ~ extending it to a new area, namely sciences of the earth. The next two articles are titled ~Historicism and the Rise of Historical Geology, Parts I and II ~. The work of major figures (Steno, Werner, yon Humboldt, Smith, LyeU, etc.) is examined with respect to how their own sense of history contributed, as well as to the increasing influence of history in general on geological thought. This is provocative stuff, as is Oldroyd's thoughtful assessment of both the work of Archibald Geikie and his own reaction to it, and his investigation and evaluation of the ~grid/group" method of Mary Douglas, as applied to the history of geology (by Martin Rudwick). Both essays force historians to think about their own objectivity. Of course there must always be a few quibbles. There are none with the content. However, the papers are reproduced in the same format as the original publication. The original pagination is used for each article, so there is no consecutive numbering. In a couple of articles (most particularly the one on Geikie) print size is reduced to fit on the page, making it too small for aging eyes, and the footnotes are minuscule. Some of the print is very light as well. Footnotes or end-notes are also in the original format. I have a distinct preference for 'science' as opposed to 'humanities' style, with an alphabetical list of references and no need to crawl through notes to see if a reference has been used. For purely selfish convenience I would have wished a reference list for the whole volume. None of the latter paragraph negates the fact that this is a fine collection of original and thoughtful articles, not only full of the results of extensive scholarship, but written in a way to inspire reflection on what it means to write history of science. 13120 Two Farm Drive, Silver Spring, Maryland, 20904, USA.

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Scientific Authority: Historical Authority By Celia Roberts Ronald G. Walters (ed.), Scientific Authority and TwentiethCentury America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Pp. vi + 271. US$35 HB. SKING how science came to have the 'disinterested' authority it enjoys today is central to humanities' attempts to engage with science and its influence in everyday life. The role of history in this endeavour is important but remains unclear in many respects. This collection attempts to clarify this situation. Although, as discussed below, many of the essays present interesting historical material, their task of illuminating the role of history in analysing science is hampered by the lack of acknowledgement of work coming from other fields (STS, feminist science studies, contemporary philosophy and anthropology, amongst others), which also deal with questions of scientific authority. Ignoring other relevant disciplines makes it difficult (and arguably even unhelpful) to find out what history's contribution to the understanding of scientific authority might be. This lack of attention is evident in the introduction to the volume by Ronald G. Wahers, which attempts to summarise the net impact of the contributions. The main point of these articles, he states, is to analyse science and its authority in twentieth century America, but without "dismissing it entirely as a source of knowledge and guidance ~ (p. 3). This is not a novel aim for anyone versed in STS or feminist or other critical studies of science. A more specific example comes in the conclusion to this introduction. Although Waiters criticises others for being "blissfully uninfluenced by postmodernism, feminism, and Foucault" (p. 8), his own efforts to describe the complex relation between science and culture seem almost as serene. In the concluding paragraph, he describes the sort of science that the writers in the collection might hope their critiques would help to create: "This would not be a world without values or truths.., but it would be a world that includes humility about our knowledge and an

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REVIEWS awareness that our values and truths have their historic origins and that power lurks beneath claims to expertise and within the language we use to describe the world" (p. 10). The notion of power 'lurking beneath' does not indicate a sophisticated understanding of Foucault, whilst the reduction of history to a question of 'origins' is clearly overly simplistic. Despite this introduction, many of the essays in the collection are very interesting, and provide thought provoking details around the history of science and medicine. JoAnne Brown's essay on the metaphors connecting crime and disease in American public health and advertising discourses, for example, provides rich pickings for an argument about the interwovenness of science, capitalism, and public and private imagination. Similarly, John R. Stilgoe's piece on small scale farming innovation and big-scale farming research shows how companies prepared to cater to the small-scale farmer or 'plugger' were able to acknowledge the 'nonscientific' expertise of these farmers--an expertise which was discounted by governmental agencies who catered only to the large-scale farmer who was able to invest in the latest scientific techniques. Stilgoe's paper concludes that it is the techniques of the plugger--maintained by these companies and ignored by science--which are now regaining favour in moves towards ecologically sustainable farming. A third article which deals with the connection between science and corporate activities is by Roland Marchand and Michael L. Smith. This history of science and technology displays from the late nineteenth century to the present, provides a fascinating window into the relations between science, capital and broader social situations. Following the transformations of these science displays, Marchand and Smith show how the representations of visions of scientific progress in the present and into the future which make up these displays indicate much about contemporary relations between science and cultural power and authority. The decrease in scientific authority over recent decades is clearly visible in the changes in such displays, they argue. T h e essays on social science are more theoretical. James T. Kloppenberg's essay, "Why History Matters to Political Theory", stresses the importance of recognising diversity within traditions of thought, and within American culture more broadly, in order to cultivate a "critical perspective alert to the contested nature of all knowledge but nevertheless aware of the possibility of making judgments on the basis of pragmatic tests and democratic procedures" (p. 203). The two other essays on social science, by Dorothy Ross and David A. Hollinger, also address the question of the dichotomy between objectivism and relativism. Like Kloppenberg, Hollinger calls for an emphasis on diversity--what he calls a postethnic position--which does not devalue scientific achievements, but 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS which attempts to broaden the view of scientific communities through the inclusion of diverse viewpoints. Ross' analysis of American social science also criticises the scientistic approach, advocating as an alternative, a greater emphasis on historical models. One problem with a collection that deals with an area as big as 'scientific authority' is that unless a concerted effort is made, the areas covered give a very patchy view of 'science'. In this volume, this is a significant problem. There are three essays on medicine, two on agriculture, and three on theoretical social science. This is hardly a broad enough view to claim to be coveting scientific authority in general. The question of links between these essays is also a problem--although there are introductions to each section, the reader is left wondering why these essays are together in this volume. The connections are so general and the essays so specific, it is difficult to view the choices of essays as anything but expedient. I think this book suffers both from this lack of cohesion and from a lack of interrelation with other contemporary work in the area of science studies. Some of the essays are valuable in themselves, but together they do not offer significant insight. F o r me, a central question remains: can the authority of science be deconstructed without also challenging the authority of history? Department of Women's Studies, University of Sydney, N S W 2006, Australia.

A Non-Technical Popper By Rafe Champion Geoffrey Stokes, Popper." Philosophy, Politics and Scientific Method. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Pp xiii + 197.

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of Popper's work, though in order to keep the task within reasonable bounds he has not attempted to treat quantum theory or Popper's technical work in logic and probability. The book

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REVIEWS addresses, in turn, Popper's project (problem and method); falsification and its critics; the politics of critical rationalism; the methodology of social science; metaphysics and freedom; evolutionary epistemology; and critical rationalism and critical theory (an engagement with the Frankfurt School). The aim is t . . t o indicate the key intellectual components and priorities in his thought, to show how they form a complex whole, and how they lead to certain problems and inconsistencies" (p. 6). Stokes is especially interested in the relationship between Popper's views on scientific methodology and his politics. This approach has enabled him to locate some important points that are often overlooked, such as Popper's concern about the political consequences of the 'manifest truth' epistemologies of Bacon and Descartes. The consequences that concerned Popper were the fanaticism and intolerance of those who believed that important truths were self-evident to those who adopted the correct approach (the correct authority or the correct methodology), so that any deviation from those truths could be attributed to wickedness or manipulation by the forces of evil. In contrast, Popper has argued that truth is hard to come by, so any claims to possession of it should be tentative and arguments should be regulated by the attitude of critical rationalism: "I may be wrong and you may be right, and by a collaborative effort we may be able to get nearer to the truth". Stokes identified critical rationalism as the thread that runs through all Popper's work, though he is not convinced that it is strong enough to hold the whole lot together. H e noted some problems that have not received adequate attention from Popper's supporters. These include some awkward comments by Popper on the need for a little dogmatism to maintain a theory in its early stages, ambiguity about which proposition or propositions have actually been refuted in the event of experimental falsification (the Dulaem-Quine problem), difficulties with methodological individualism and uncertainty about the precise nature of Popper's social and political liberalism. Such a large number of complex and controversial issues are touched in the book that most readers are likely to feel that their special area of interest has not been given adequate coverage. A major concern in this regard is the lack of development of some of Popper's central ideas. An obvious example is Popper's non-authoritarian stance in epistemology and politics, where it would be helpful to have a more detailed explanation of the logic of Popper's arguments against the demand for decisive justification of theories and the political counterpart of this stance, namely his critique of all doctrines of unlimited political power. In the political domain this led to his suggestion that the fundamental problem in democratic politics is not "who shall rule" but instead "how can we design 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS institutions to ensure that even incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?". The epistemological counterpart of this question is something like "How can we maximise the exposure of our theories to criticism so we can get rid of the ones that do not stand up?" As an aside, one might wonder why the non-authoritarian views of Popper have not been taken up by young radicals in general and the generation of '68 in particular. The explication of Popper's ideas in this book may have been assisted by drawing upon the work of a number of people who have applied and developed Popper's ideas in interesting and important ways. These include Bartley on rationality and the limits of criticism, Jarvie on the application of objective knowledge to the task of explanation in the social sciences (Concepts and Society. London: 1972) and Munz on evolutionary epistemology (Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge: Popper or 9Wittgenstein? London: 1985). Also missing from the bibliography is the special "Popper" edition of ETC.: A Review of General Semantics (1985, 42) with contributions inter alia from Petersen on Popper's psychology and Burgess on some practical aspects of piecemeal social engineering. More attention to Bartley's development of Popper's ideas might show the way to relieve some of the tensions in Popper's epistemology and in the project of critical rationalism generally. Stokes refers to one article by Bartley but not to any of those more ambitious pieces where he attempted to explain Popper's achievement in emancipating rationalism from the dogmatic or authoritarian framework where it was traditionally located. The seminal paper, for Bartley, was Popper's "On the sources of knowledge and ignorance", reprinted in Conjectures and Refutations (London: 1963), which identified the authoritarian structure which was shared by epistemology and political theory. Inspired by this insight, and by Popper's non-authoritarian response to it, Bartley attempted to broaden and generalise Popper's views on rationality and criticism. The most useful references for this aspect of Bartley's work are the appendices to the revised edition of The Retreat to Commitment (LaSalle, Illinois: 1984) and the third in his series of review articles in Philosophia in 1982, "The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Part III: Rationality, Criticism and Logic". On Bartley's account, Popper's broader project was to replace the justificationist or "true belief" mode of discourse with a "critical preference" mode, where positions can be held tentatively and changed in the light of new evidence and arguments. In this expanded field of criticism, the test of evidence was just one of several forms of criticism that could be applied to scientific theories and the falsifiability criterion was not so central to the philosophy of science as previously thought. One of the main conclusion that follows from the non-justificationist stance is the notion that there is no need to rush to judgement on a position, there is no 460

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REVIEWS arbitrary limit to criticism, and no need to take a dogmatic stand at some point to avoid the infinite regress that can ensue if a critic (like a nagging child) insists on justification for every assumption and every argument that is raised to support an assumption. Applying those considerations to some of the tensions in Popper's work that were noted, then on the Popperian justification of dogmatism to sustain an infant theory or research program, there is no need for dogmatism, merely patience to live with uncertainty while more development occurs. Similarly with basic statements, where Popper was forced to resort to some uncomfortable statements about 'decisions' and arbitrary stopping points, Bartley showed that this kind of talk was not required if the pressure of belief and justification are removed. On the Duhem problem, to ascertain whether it is the hypothesis under test or some other theoretical assumption that has been falsified by the evidence, again there is a need for patience while further experimentation and theoretical development proceed. (It may be noted that the Duhem problem brought out the worst in Popper who attempted to depict Duhem as a conventionalist and quite failed to indicate the close affinity of their views concerning both the nature of the problem and its possible solution.) Munz explored the implications of the 'non-justificationist'position in the wider social world. He suggested that this shift in perspective offers the possibility of a cultural advance past the point where social and cultural bonding is based on shared bodies of knowledge and behaviours which are exempt from criticism. He suggested that a threshhold has been crossed, so it is conceivable to establish societies which do not depend entirely on adherence to any particular belief system and its rituals. This might be described as a truly multicultural society where some aspects of its evolution can be regulated by rational/critical discussion in a way that was not possible hitherto. He conceded that progress in this direction is far from inevitable, and it could easily be thwarted by the proliferation of selfcontained and exclusive sub-cultures, a process that may be aided and abetted by the triumph o f ' l a m p ' theories of knowledge, of the Kuhn/Rorty variety, over the 'mirror' theories of positivism. The 'third way' is offfered by the Popperian line of non-justificationist, evolutionary epistemology. This is stirring stuff, and no doubt in need of criticism, but there is no hint of it in this book. In the area of politics and social reform Stokes provides a clear, though brief account of Popper's views on the task of democratic politics, to keep power under control with the aim of helping people in need rather than striving to realise utopian dreams that will make everyone happy and virtuous, It would have been useful to recapitulate Popper's rejoinder to 9 AAHPSSS, 1900.

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REVIEWS the Platonic argument that individualism equals selfishness (Chapter six of The Open Society) and some of Popper's views on leadership and the education system are worthy of note (Chapter seven). Stokes noted the problem that Popper has hardly developed his ideas since they were written during World War Two and there is a need to explore just what a Popperian philosophy of practical politics would look like in detail. It would certainly mean nurturing traditions and institutions that promote tolerance and reasoned debate, it would also involve the Rule of Law and quite likely the "citizens law" or the "people's power of referendum" as practiced in Switzerland and several states of the US. The chapter on the debate between Popperians and the Frankfurt school is interesting in so far as Stokes comments that the critics have not generally noticed that Popper has moved on from the position that they attack (if he ever held that position at all). The critics also appear unwilling to acknowledge areas of agreement which would help outsiders to the debate to locate the real differences between the rival parties. Given the many controversial aspects of Popper's thought, most people will find plenty to disagree with, both in the primary works and in Stokes's interpretation of them. Like many strong-minded teachers, Popper has attracted vitriolic critics and uncritical followers so that exchanges between them generate more heat than illumination. Popper's work needs to be examined in the spirit of critical rationalism to do justice to its strengths and to find whether its weaknesses are fundamental or incidental, thus amenable to correction without loss to the larger structure of his thought. In case some of the critical comments in this review appear too ungenerous I had better close by saying that it is gratifying to note that Stokes has been prepared to put so much time and effort into the work of a thinker who is not widely regarded in philosophical circles as a living influence or a significant force [?? - - ed.]. Those who beg to differ will be pleased that Stokes has kept Popper's ideas 'in play', at least for the time being. Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, The University of Sydney, N S W 2006, Australia.

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Chaos all the way down By Andrew Milne Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen,

Figments of Reality: The

Evolution of the Curious Mind. C a m b r i d g e : C a m b r i d g e University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 325 A$39.95

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IGMENTSof Reality is an ambitious book. Ian Stewart and Jack

Cohen attempt to provide a model for a new kind of science and novel accounts of evolution, intelligence, consciousness, free will, culture and society from within their new paradigm. While a great deal of this book is interesting, stimulating, and even plausible, it falls short of those ambitious goals. T o o often it mischaracterises its opponents, and what the authors take to be novel insights are in fact old news. While I think genuinely new and exciting conceptions and ideas lurk very near what Stewart and Cohen say, the authors just have not done the work of articulating them as genuinely distinct options. One of Stewart's and Cohen's goals is to describe an alternative understanding of the goals of science and an alternative, complementary way of doing science. T h e 'conventional' understanding of science suffers from a number of major problems, according to the authors. First, it misunderstands the goal of science, which is not, they argue, some sort of absolute truth (something they doubt the existence of, anyway), but understanding. Second, it misunderstands the role of theory in science. In their view, theories don't just explain observations, but provide a conceptual framework without which observations might not be intelligible (see p. 35.) Both these claims are defensible. I myself would be most tempted to argue with the first--I think explanation is probably as important as understanding, and even if we grant that understanding is the main goal, that doesn't mean truth isn't central to science--false theories don't provide understanding, merely the illusion of understanding. But the main question, here as elsewhere in Figments, is who exactly is supposed to disagree with these claims? Who holds the 'conventional' views? Working scientists? Philosophers and historians of science? Non-scientists? Take the second claim: the 'theory-ladermess of observation' is as close to 9 L~a-IPSSS,1999.

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REVIEWS dogma as things come in philosophy and history of science, and has been for probably forty years. This is not to imply that everyone in these fields agrees that observation is always theory-laden. Far from it. There are in every generation heretics, and heretics are often fight. But I ' m sure you would have trouble finding someone in the field who wasn't well aware of the view and the reasons for holding it. Since Figments is a work of popular science, perhaps what Stewart and Cohen mean is that these are common views outside of science and science studies. But since we are not told who holds the 'conventional' view, the non-expert could easily (and quite justifiably) come away with the mistaken impression that most scientists and/or most of those who study and think about science, don't understand the role of theory in observation and require Stewart and Cohen to set them straight. The main worry is not an academic concern with the attribution of credit, though that is an issue, it is the implicit mischaracterisation of a field. This pattern is repeated throughout the book. Putting aside this cavil, what is the authors' positive conception of science? Stewart and Cohen set up a contrast between reductionism and what they call 'contextualism'. Reductionism (a familiar enemy) is the view that science should work by taking things apart and seeing how their parts, working together in lawful ways, explain how something does what it does. The authors' objection to reductionism is not that it is wrong, but that it is limited. First, it is limited in the questions it can answer and the understanding it provides. It can, for instance, tell us ~how" something happens but not ~why'. Second, there are going to be large domains for which reductionism is not even going to be able to tell us ~how'. Stewart and Cohen, as anyone familiar with their previous work will know, are very much interested in recent work in complexity and chaos theory. They think that the complexity of many systems dooms reductionist attempts at explanation because, (a) the systems will be computationaUy intractable and (b) even in those cases where we could one day find a tractable reductionist account, it would be so complex and incomprehensible that it would not provide understanding anyway. This is a reasonable view, but it raises a problem for their characterisation of science. If, in fact, it is impossible to provide successful reductionist accounts in psychology, biology, sociology, and so on, then those scientists who think they are doing good science in these domains are either deluded, or not doing reductionist science. Since the first seems rather unlikely, it follows that either Stewart and Cohen's 'reductionism' cannot be an accurate description of what scientists do, or that they are wrong about the failings of reductionism. And again, the authors do not tell us who they think actually holds the views being attacked. 464

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REVIEWS But still, if Stewart's and Cohen's 'contextualism' offer an interesting and worthwhile alternative paradigm, then none of this matters too much. So what is contextualism? It involves "see[ing] how the system is shaped by what lies around it" (p. 9). It "explains why a system functions in terms of the circumstances in which it operates or has come into being" (p. 34). It involves "embedding a system in its surroundings--thereby studying not just what it does, but what it might have done in slightly different circumstances..." (p. 34). While Stewart and Cohen do not claim to have a general theoretical model with which to pursue contextualism, they do have a favoured mechanism that they think lies at the heart of many complex systems--what they call "complicity." Complicity "arises when two or more complex systems interact in a kind of mutual feedback that changes them both, leading to behaviour that is not present in either system on its own" (p. 63). An example, and a central topic of the book, is the evolution of culture and mind. "Extelligence" (their name for various kinds of information in the cultural environment) and intelligence evolved as complicit systems-as our ancestors' brains got more complex, they became able to support a richer and more complex culture. And as culture became richer, there was an incentive for having more powerful brains so as to better exploit that information. This quick gloss does not do justice to the richness of the authors' views on extelligence and intelligence, and complicity. For instance, the authors constantly stress that "[o]ne of the universal features of complicity is the emergence of new patterns, new rules, new structures, new processes that were not present, even in rudimentary form, in the separate components" (p. 245). Thus, in the case above, extelligence and intelligence arise from the interaction of two systems which, at least initially, are not culture and not intelligence. Something genuinely new emerges in the process. However, there seem to be two ways of understanding Stewart's and Cohen's claims. A conservative reading of their account of the evolution of intelligence makes it sound just like the kind of story many contemporary biologists would be happy to tell--a tale of coevolution in a changing environment, where the organisms involved are responsible for many of those changes. More generally, one has the sneaking suspicion that both here and elsewhere in the book "complicity" could be replaced by "interaction" or "coevolution" without loss. It is hard to locate exactly what is radical, new, or iconoclastic. The emergence of novelty, for instance, is not a good candidate---there are many (completely conventional) ways of understanding that without invoking anything from complexity theory. The radical reading is harder to fred. For instance, I see suggestions in their discussion of intelligence of the idea that intelligence 9 AAt-IPSSS,1999.

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REVIEWS is, in some sense, not 'in the head'. The reductionist mistake, one might argue, is to see intelligence as a power of the brain, when it is really a product of the complex, complicit system of brain-and-environment. But if this is their view (and a very interesting view it would be) then it needs a great deal more articulation and explanation. Another central notion in Figments is that of ~privilege'. The authors use privilege in a fascinating attempt to group together an apparently disparate range of phenomena and show how they are linked. Privilege is an evolutionary strategy that has its earliest origins in such things as eggs with yolks, uteruses, and nests. Such things allow parents to give their offspring a 'headstart'. This strategy, of one generation providing (some of) the conditions required for the flourishing of the next, is a major evolutionary development, according to the authors. It is also, they argue, the scaffolding on which later developments like intelligence and extelligence are built. Earlier forms of privilege, such as the nest, provide the setting in which later forms of privilege, like learning behavioral tricks from parents, can evolve. Thus the offspring and the environment created by the parent form complicit systems, whose driving complexity leads at last, through repeated use of the strategy of privilege, to human intelligence and culture. Privilege is also part of Stewart and Cohen's criticism of the conventional neo-Darwinism. The authors seem to identify neo-Darwinism with the gene-based view of evolution found in authors such as Richard Dawkins. This seems to be a mistake--many of Dawkins' strongest critics would still count themselves as neo-Darwinian. While Stewart and Cohen's argument against this view is complex, a central part of it is the claim that neo-Darwinism presumes too simple an understanding of the relationship between genotype and phenotype. In part, this is because they think the usual conception of the relationship between gene and final organism ignores such features as privilege, where the phenotype is created under the influence of an environment created by previous generations. In part, this is because the authors think the neo-Darwinist requires a reductionist account of development, which would be impossible given the complexity of the systems. Thus they claim: One reason why neo-Darwinism is popular is that it directs attention away from one of the biggest gaps in scientific knowledge: the connection between D N A sequences and the organisms that develop "from" them. (We think that gaps like this should be bridged, not ignored.) (p. 91) This is plain insulting to those biologists (including evolutionary biologists) who have dedicated their lives to the study of development. 466

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REVIEWS And it is also insulting to those who favour the gene-centred view, because principled reasons can be offered for treating development as a 'black box', reasons having nothing to do with a commitment to reductionism. These reasons may be mistaken, but it is not just a question of the neoDarwinist running away from hard questions. There is considerable debate among biologists and philosophers of biology about whether the gene-centred view of evolution is right. And there are alternatives--for instance, there are faint glimmers of one of the alternatives (the "developmental systems" account of Susan Oyama and others) in some of what Stewart and Cohen say: In evolutionary terms, what privilege does is to link successive generations together so that to some extent selection can act on both, simultaneously, as a kind of evolutionary unit. Selection acts on the entire cycle, not just on one stage . . . . (pp. 94-95) But Stewart and Cohen do not provide the right kinds of arguments against the gene-centred views because they do not seem to understand the reasons for holding it. And the alternative they seem to be suggesting (if, in fact, it is some version of "developmental systems") is not an original idea and not articulated adequately enough to make it a contribution to the debate. So again, we are given an incredibly suggestive and stimulating idea like privilege, and highly complex questions concerning its role in evolution. This could be part of a genuine alternative to the mainstream view. But it is presented as an alternative to a caricature, it can be understood in a completely conventional way, and the radical alternative is not spelled out. Figments of Reality offers many positive views which merit sympathy and further consideration, but its very ambitious reach has exceeded its grasp. Considered as an academic book, Figments of Reality fails to meet basic standards of correctly characterising the views of others, and of knowing the literature and giving credit where it is due (two of my favourites, just for the philosophers: the later Wittgenstein argued for a private language (p. 196) and ontology is the study of knowledge (p. 259)). Considered as a piece of popular science, it contains too much misinformation to be recommended--while a non-expert reader might come away with a good impression of what Stewart and Cohen think, they could easily come away with a completely mistaken view of the shape of various fields. Considered as a 'think piece', something to stimulate new thoughts, it is harder to judge---who am I to say what someone might be brought to think by this book (or any other)? But I am inclined to say that 9 AAHPSSS, 1990.

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REVIEWS others have done a better iob of articulating the relevant ideas, with more evidence and greater thoroughness. Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand.

Dances with Diversity By Martin Kelly Kazumasa Hoshino (ed.), Japanese and Western Bioethics--Studies in Moral Diversity. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. Pp. xii + 243. US$127 HB. HIS collection represents the proceedings of the United StatesJapan Bioethics Congress held in Tokyo in September 1994. There is considerable diversity among the papers, both in style and subject matter. The volume makes a substantial contribution to the contemporary bioethical literature, although it is not without (minor) problems. In particular, there are occasions when the reader might hope for more sustained discussion of some topics. This is unavoidable given the kind of collection this is, with different authors taking up a range of issues---death and dying, resource allocation, genetics, public policy--and with papers from Japan, North America and Europe side by side. Mercifully, explicit cross-cultural analysis is kept to a minimum, but there are rich examples of cultural difference, and of diversity and moral pluralism within cultures, throughout, and comparisons are implicit in every paper. Let me offer some general comments and then discuss some of the particular contributions. T h e volume is divided into five parts. The central section deals with health care in the face of approaching death, and with the meaning and significance of life, death and well-being. Autonomy, paternalism, allocation of scarce resources and end of life decisions--familiar topics in western bioethical literature---are considered through the prism of cross-cultural differences and similarities between Japanese and Western

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REVIEWS culture and ethical traditions. The middle section is preceded by essays on universalising claims and cultural particularity and a number of essays on ambiguities and questions of authority within traditions--which question the basis, or rather the contexts, of individual decision-making and public policy debates--and is followed by a section on the human genome and genetic ethics, and concludes with two papers on cultural diversity and ethics in post-traditional societies. Not surprisingly, this last section offers questions rather than answers. The question of morally justifiable bases for collaboration and engagement in health care is a theme which runs through the collection. The list of contributors to the volume is also substantial. Japanese professors of ethics, philosophy and cultural anthropology are joined by a cross-section of well known and respected writers in ethics from the European and American philosophical tradition (including Beauchamp, Englehardt and Veatch) and a number of others who deserve to be well known and respected on the basis of their contributions here. While the volume deals with traditional topics in contemporary bioethical literature, this is not a rehashing of familiar aspects of controversial issues. Much of its energy comes from grappling with issues of life and death, living and dying, but its particular approach makes it genuinely interesting. The cross-cultural focus enables old problems to be discussed from other perspectives. Another asset of the collection is the clarity and accessibility of the majority of papers, which are pitched at a level which does not require considerable medical, ethical or cultural studies expertise. This is refreshing in a collection of substance. It is also a collection with something for everyone. Some papers set out carefully argued positions, others give fascinating insights into aspects of Japanese. In this category would be Emiko Namihira's discussion of the Japanese concepts and attitudes to human remains, which begins by describing the unique Japanese style of cremation as a lead-in to a discussion of Japanese attitudes to organ donation. His attention to the concrete particular reveals a world full of meaning, and the traditional Japanese sense of personal and bodily identity, and the changes associated with death, is discussed to good effect. Perhaps a slightly longer consideration of the implications of this for organ donation would have been helpful, but this is a minor criticism of an otherwise excellent paper. A more substantial criticism, perhaps the only one, is that there are instances where a reader might wish for more sustained discussion around contentious issues. But that seems unavoidable in a project as ambitious as this consideration of the engagement between Western and Japanese bioethics. Nevertheless, despite the organising concept of diversity, there seem to be instances where authors seem to take for granted matters which 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS are called into question by the collection which forms the context of their paper. Problems of this kind are, in fact, dealt with in other essays in the collection. There are several instances, for example where "Japanese Culture" or the "North American" tradition are spoken of as if they were homogeneous, a n d their diversity, their moral and cultural pluralism, effaced. The fact that this occurs in a collection of essays whose theme is diversity and difference, and often within essays which themselves urge us to appreciate this diversity is interesting. It suggests a tendency, which at least some of us have, to think in terms of 'unified' groups with typical features, while ignoring the differences that make lives and culture interesting, and worthy of sustained discussion. However, this tendency is offset by the occurrence of the papers in a volume which, in a sense, celebrates diversity and problematises too-general assumptions about cultures and overly-ambitious universalising claims of ethics. The collection also has built-in criticism, in the form of Mark Cherry's concluding essay. In the introduction to his paper, Cherry takes the essays of Brody, Veatch and Beauchamp to task for the assumptions they seem to make about "the character of the moral world and its significance for medicine as if there were an uncontroversial common moral reality to which all could appeal" in their attempt "to heal a fractured moral reality'(p. 201). Bayertz's discussion of "The Normative Status of the H u m a n Genome" is interesting in this context. It demonstrates the ineliminable tension within attempts to unify theory if the theorist takes the empirical facts of their own context seriously. Bayertz's paper seeks to elucidate and to defend a philosophical basis for the attempt to develop a Europe-wide moral consensus on genetic research and genetic engineering, which is in tension with the acknowledgment finding that there is fragmentation of views even within Europe. This diversity is epitomised by the different position that German-speaking Europeans take with regard to genetic engineering, in particular, on the basis, Bayertz thinks, of recent historical experience. Diversity is an organising concept of this volume, but so is a similar, although distinct, concept--ambiguity. The question of the ambiguity inherent in taken for granted terms is considered in a number of papers, and perhaps the best example is that of Kevin Wildes S.J., "Sanctity of Life: A Study of Ambiguity and Confusion". Wildes discusses the way both diversity and ambiguity bedevil ethical debates, even within an (onlyapparently) unified tradition. In Western bioethical literature and public discourse, terms like "sanctity of life" or "respect for life" mean different things within different moral narratives. Within a particular Christian tradition, or within Buddhism, these terms have heterogeneous meanings. Furthermore, when the terms are excised from the (religious) context 470

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REVIEWS where they originally have their meanings, they become so ambiguous that, far from offering definite moral understandings or winning ethical or public policy debates, they mean almost nothing, since different understandings support different moral choices (p. 94). Terms like "sanctity of life" take on so many meanings as to become meaningless. As example, Wildes uses the C r u z a n case to "illustrate how people with very different views of moral controversies in death and dying can reach very different conclusions by appealing to the notion of the 'sanctity of life' ". Mark Cherry's essay, "Moral Strangers: A Humanity that does not Bind," wraps up the collection, and critically reviews and summarises many of the papers. The theoretical treatment of some of the (still contentious) issues is dealt with by considering how the contemporary bioethics community and our ethical understandings have arisen in a cultural and historical setting. Cherry's reflections on Western bioethics are subtitled "Struggling with pluralism", and some ethical theorists' attempts to describe an underlying moral reality are considered in the context of resisting the more 'empty' versions of moral and cultural relativism. There is even consideration of the attempt by European countries to "bridge the gap among moral strangers and diverse communities" by establishing a single "moral culture" by legal decree (p. 212). This nicely sets the scene for discussing the tendency to understand Japanese appeals to moral authority in terms of "the content-full norms of their moral commitments to community and family". Traditional understandings of death and dying are the subjects of several papers. And there are discussions of significant changes, under the influence of ideas from recent Western Medicine, for example, with regard to the question of informing a person about the nature of their terminal illness, and with regard to the familial model of decision-making. But again, the heterogeneity of even traditional culture is not effaced in Cherry's discussion; rather, he argues that the pluralism drawn from Shintoism, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity has been further amplified by recent Western influences. Cherry offers a number of hopeful comments in his conclusion. He notes various ways that Western approaches to bioethics are being recast in order to accommodate moral diversity and moral strangeness, while arguing that moral relativism is not an inevitable outcome of these kinds of changes. And what of the interaction between Japanese medicine and Western bioethics? Cherry is optimistic that "within a strong culture, with consenting others, that it may be possible to forge a medical morality and sustain an ethos for health care that is truly Japanese" (p. 219). Indeed, this collection offers some grounds for his optimism. Let me conclude with my favourite paper. I began reading this collection last year while working as a locum in Central Australia with 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS Nganampa Health Council on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands. Some of the central issues in these essays--respect for autonomy, paternalism and clinical decision-making, allocation issues in a resource-poor environment, and the practice of ethical, culturally-sensitive health care--in another culture were vivid. In the back of my mind was the question "What is there, here, which is practically useful in my situation?" Interestingly, it was only after my return that I read Edward Keyserlingk's paper on "Quality of Life Decisions and the Hopelessly Ill Patient". Here was a philosophy paper that a medical practitioner could warm to. There are no self-conscious statements about the need to take account of cultural difference and moral diversity, rather these are taken for granted in a way that does not render them invisible. After all, these are the kinds of issues that make the practice of medicine both interesting and challenging, whether in Northern America or Japan or indeed Central Australia. Keserlingk raises these issues, not by considering the question of the engagement between Western and Japanese bioethics, but rather by tracing the development of one contemporary approach to the question of quality of life decisions and decision-making towards the end of life, namely the idea of "medical futility", in its historical and cultural context. He shows what different approaches have sought to achieve, and that one of the goals of each has been a pursuit of what Keyserlingk calls a delusion, "namely, complete objectivity and neutrality in medical decision-making" (19. 103). He also calls into question the existence of "a dichotomy between the physician as scientist and the physician as moral agent, and the (assumption) that the proper and exclusive commitment of medicine is to scientific objectivity and certainty" (p. 110). In addition, Keyserlingk gives an excellent account of the role of family members in clinical decisions, which highlights the heterogeneous nature of these groupings and their, at times, conflicting but legitimate interests in medical decisions. Keyserlingk's account of the doctor as moral agent and as 'truth teller' is impressively nuanced, refusing to efface the importance of difference and recognising the diversity between practitioners, including in levels of competence. And those who would argue that his construal of the role of the doctor is problematic would be those who have understood Keyserlingk's point. He has little time for 'one dimensional caricatures' in discussions of clinical reality. School of History, Philosophy and Politics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

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Global Destruction, Local Impoverishment By WendyVamey Lorraine Elliott, The Global Politics of the Environment. South Yarra: Macmillan, 1998. Pp. xvi + 311. A$34.95 PB. WO THINGS are starkly evident from this book: that the full gamut of environmental issues is global and that the existing institutions through which these issues are being addressed are completely inadequate for their solution. Indeed, as Elliott so poignantly points out, they are part of the problem. With its careful attention to environmental problems and their global ramifications, and often global causes, this book will be of great interest to those interested in the environment and in issues of social justice and is particularly worthwhile to those interested to see the connections between these two lots of social issues. It is also valuable to those seeking an understanding of the social implications of technology and technological procedures. Although issues of science and technology are not dealt with explicitly at length, they are important players in the global situation and Elliott brings the threads together well. Starting with the U n i t e d Nations Conference on the H u m a n Environment, the author looks at the direction of international attempts to come to terms with environmental crises and the ongoing problems and compromises that have characterised these attempts. Much of this is ground revisited, relating to the vastly inequitable power relations between North and South--terms which Elliott demonstrates to be euphemisms, hiding the inequalities from colonialism and present-day economic domination behind suggestions of mere geographical difference. But all this is important ground and it is revisited comprehensively and sensitively, perhaps with one worrying exception, the omission of discussion of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). It is testimony to the swiftness with which political issues arrive on the agenda that Elliott's book~ released only in February 1998, does not mention the MAI, which the Australian government is poised to sign. Yet

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REVIEWS the MAI, which has been described as "a bill of rights for corporations" has been subject of negotiations, albeit highly secret, by members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development since 1995. The implications of the touted agreement are so horrendous that they certainly warranted coverage in a book of this nature, especially since signatory nations to the MAI are likely to find that they cannot legislate in favour of national interests as pertaining to, for instance, environmental protection. With environmental confrontation looming, perhaps this would suit the present Australian government and may explain its eagerness to sign. This highlights a paradox. Elliott points to the problem that national sovereignty can stand in the way of environmental protection in many instances. As has been observed, ~the Earth is one but the world is not." This observation is valid, of course, as residents of, say, Sweden, which has elected to phase out nuclear power but which still runs the risks associated with the nuclear power programs of its neighbours, well know. But increasingly there are the threats from international economic agreements which curtail nation states' ability to protect their environment. This is already occurring as a result of the latest round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ( G A T r ) and it is bound to be exacerbated by the MAI. Of more relevance than whether the nation state is an aid or obstacle to environmental protection is the question of the economic framework into which individual nations are locked and here Elliott is superb at identifying the problems. She brings together a wealth of critiques seldom canvassed within one cover. On these grounds alone the book would be a most valuable resource. Elliott identifies sources of elitism within globally-operating groups and the structures within which they work. She deals with a range of groups and institutions from the Untied Nations Environment Program to the worldwide military to grassroots groups such as India's Chipko Movement and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. Her hopes are with these latter groups as they understand and work to change the political practices from which so many detrimental environmental practices spring. She questions the full range of 'solutions' that has been used, including the controversial Debt for Nature Swaps (DFNS) which she points out may undermine indigenous lifestyles and land rights struggles. South American D F N S s , for instance, involved debt that "was not Indian debt while the 'nature' involved was Indian land that the Indians had not agreed to trade for anything" (p. 206). With the best intentions, then, those who seek to 'save nature' through such arrangements may legitimise debt and divert attention from debt relief and the structural problems 474

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REVIEWS underpinning debt. Most mechanisms p u r p o r t e d to be aimed at environmental protection have likewise suffered from this diversion and from thinking about the environment in ways which the present global economic forces prompt us to think about them. It is here that Elliott's book complements a very different, but still useful, book by Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature (Leichhardt: 1990), which deals with philosophical shifts and differences in the ways in which nature is understood and the ethical bases for these value systems. Whereas Nash starts off in the minds of environmentalists, EUiott guides us through the global power structures. But she concludes that a major problem is that, due to the pervasiveness of the dominant economic model, the environment has, like much else, come to be seen as a commodity. This is a crucial point because it drives the belief that the market is the rightful arena for the problem to be solved. It is largely thought that saving the environment all boils down to the most efficient use of resources and that the market merely needs to be let operate at its smoothest and most efficient for this to eventuate. According to this view, it is simply a case of internalising the externalities and freeing up trade. Problems have been defined as deriving from lack of money and technology and an underdeveloped market, thus the South is urged to use the model of the North and, in doing so, falls further into the dependency trap. Strategies for sustainable development have been flawed in the same way, looking to sustain models of development rather than the environment which has already suffered so much by adherence to the faulty model. EUiott complains that the environment is constantly seen as an add-on issue which is to be addressed within the given economic framework. Finally she juxtaposes two approaches, one a problem-solving approach and the second a critical approach. She claims that, while problem-solving seeks to make the institutions work more smoothly and to incorporate mechanisms by which problems might be addressed, the critical approach seeks to change the very structures which, certainly in the case of environmental degradation, have given rise to the problems. This is the more difficult road, of course, but Elliott's book vividly demonstrates that it is the necessary road to take. Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia.

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Judging Daubert By Orin Thomas Kenneth

F o s t e r a n d P e t e r H u b e r , Judging Science: Scientific

Knowledge and the Federal Courts. C a m b r i d g e ,

Mass.: MIT

Press, 1997. Pp. 333. US $40 HB. HIS book examines the US Supreme Court's 1993 decision in the William Daubert et al. K MerrellDow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. case. It focuses on the areas in the judgment that have become guidelines for the admissibility of novel scientific evidence in the United States Federal Court System. Admissibility guidelines dictate which novel scientific evidence can and which cannot be admitted into Federal Courts. Scientific evidence has become increasingly important in trials with one study reporting that 44% of judges encountered scientific evidence in 30% of cases, and another report by the Rand Institute finding that of 529 California jury trials, 86% admitted scientific testimony of some kind. Guidelines of scientific evidence admissibility are not only of interest to those in the legal profession, but to those who study how science and the law interact. Before 1993, mostly in criminal cases, novel scientific evidence had to get past the 1923 Frye general acceptance criterion. Novel scientific evidence in criminal cases, such as lie detector or gunshot residue tests, had to be shown to be 'generally accepted' by the relevant scientific community before being deemed admissible by the court as legitimate evidence. The enactment in 1975 of the Federal Rules of Evidence theoretically superseded prior common law precedents such as Frye. However, use of Frye in Federal Courts increased after the enactment of the Federal Rules. It has been suggested that the reason some Federal circuits used Frye after 1975 was that the Federal Rules by themselves were not strong enough to screen out evidence that may be scientifically problematic. The Daubert case was based on the premise that the morning sickness drug Bendectin caused birth defects. Daubert came to the Supreme Court's attention because the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of Daubert's evidence by a lower court on the basis that it did

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REVIEWS not conform to the Frye general acceptance standard. The Supreme Court was interested because Frye had been superseded by the Federal Rules and hence the Ninth Circuit had not used a valid legal excuse to exclude Daubert's evidence. The Supreme Court noted that the Federal Rules make no mention of general acceptance by the scientific community as a benchmark for determining admissibility. The Federal Rules were also found to be less than explicit on how admissibility of novel scientific evidence should be determined. In the Daubert judgment they provided a clarification to the existing Federal Rules. Even though they provided guidelines, the Supreme Court never intended to provide a definitive checklist of criteria that novel scientific evidence must possess to be deemed admissible. The decision did, however, provide several general concepts by which judges might assess admissibility. These 'general concepts' are explored in separate chapters by Foster and Huber in Judging Science. Chapters are devoted to how a theory fits the relevance of the case, error in science, reliability in science, scientific validity, peer review, and testability or falsification of scientific theories. The concepts in each chapter are explained with reference to works in the philosophy and sociology of science as well as to legal writings on science. Parts of these are reproduced in separate boxes throughout the text. This is a problem inasmuch as one cannot but help think that the book would be an easier read if a few choice sentences were quoted instead of reproducing a page long section of text every time the authors wanted to draw the reader's attention to some important work. The diversity and length of the reproduced selections allows the reader's attention to meander away from Foster and Huber's argument. The concepts articulated by the Supreme Court in Daubert are both complex and diverse. Foster and Huber try to explain each concept in a single chapter whilst aiming their book at a reader new to studies of science. This means that these explanations often lack depth. To cover such issues as "what constitutes scientific validity?" or a discuss ~testability and falsification" as applied to novel scientific evidence would require far more than a chapter. Judging Science's focus on the concepts articulated in Daubert means that it does not address interesting and relevant issues pertaining to the judgment. Why, for example, did the court stay away from providing a 'checklist' for admissibility if the Federal Rules were found lacking? The reader is also given little insight as to how important Daubert is, whether or not the authors think it will be an effective scientific admissibility standard and would it help courts or hinder them? Also the difficulty courts might have in assessing scientific methodology on the basis of general concepts is not deeply canvassed. 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS Judging Science is aimed at introducing the reader to some of the complexities involved with science's interface with the law. It is not a book detailing the different cultures involved in each enterprise nor does it try to analyse the policy issues involved with the question "how should it be decided what courts view as reliable science?" It is aimed at exploring the current situation with regards to the admissibility of scientific evidence in US Federal Courts. Foster and Huber rightly avoid some of the arcane technicalities of scientific evidence admissibility such as those articulated by Imwinkelried in his textbook Methods of Attacking Scientific Evidence (Charlottesville: 1997). By avoiding the problem that novel scientific evidence passing the Daubert standard is not necessarily admissible, Foster and Huber are able to better concentrate on the judgment's substance. Kenneth Foster and Peter Huber are well known advocates of stricter scientific reliability guidelines for the courtroom. Peter Huber comes from a legal background and Kenneth Foster is an engineer. T h e book was written with the support of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research who are known for sponsoring investigations into tort reform. In collaboration with Kenneth Foster, Peter Huber has produced a markedly different book to his earlier book Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (New York: 1991). Galileo's Revenge was not only mentioned in the final Daubert judgment by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after the Supreme Court remanded the case to them, but is also mentioned in legal textbooks on scientific evidence with some frequency. Huber's vehement and often amusing critiques of junk science, and the legal system that encourages it are missed in this recent collaboration. T h e tone in Judging Science is measured, though Huber and Foster do get somewhat more strident when it comes to critiquing Daubert's expert witnesses. This book is of interest primarily to those in legal studies with little background in science. Those that are unaware of the processes of scientific admissibility will also find it a good general introduction to this important case. Those who have studied the area in detail will find little that is innovative about the approach or the analysis. However, given the authors' prominence and the lack of books dealing with the subject Judging Science is highly likely to be cited in Federal Court decisions and hence makes an important addition to the bookshelf of those studying the area.

Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

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Notes of a Clinical Trial Watcher By Craig R. Stillwell Loewy, Between Bench and Bedside: Science, Healing, and lnterleukin-2 in a Cancer Ward. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . :

Ilana

Harvard

U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 9 7 . P p . vi + 3 7 0 . US$39.95

HB.

HIS book is both a useful survey of the rise of clinical trials in cancer research over the past century, and a fascinating 'thick description' of one particular anti-tumor immunotherapy trial that was carried out in a Paris cancer ward in the late 1980s. Loewy, an immunologist turned historian and sociologist of science and medicine, adopts a science studies perspective in order to explore the complex interaction between scientists and physicians as they attempt to transfer a promising therapeutic innovation from the laboratory into the oncology clinic. The innovation here is interleukin-2 (IL-2), a protein secreted by white blood cells and heralded to be a powerful stimulator of immune cells' natural tumor-fighting activity. The strategy of the trial was to remove white blood cells from late stage terminally ill cancer patients, treat these cells in the test tube with IL-2, and then put the treated cells back into the patient's body under the expectation that these 'activated' cells will seek out and destroy tumors. A novel therapy in 1988, when the clinical phase of the trial began, IL-2 therapy was also expensive, labourintensive, and produced severe side effects; as a new 'miracle drug' for cancer, it failed to live up to the hopes of the researchers, physicians, and sadly, the patients. Yet despite the trial's ambiguous results, the collaboration between immunologists and medical oncologists persisted (and even strengthened), and Loewy's aim is to use a variety of science studies methodologies in order to understand how the multi-layered networks of alliances were established, negotiated, and renegotiated throughout the trial.

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REVIEWS Before Loewy describes the clinical trial itself, and the local and contingent events that brought it about and determined its trajectory, she spends three chapters situating it within the larger historical context of cancer research in Europe and America. In the first chapter, she argues that the development of chemotherapy in post-World War II medicine fostered a culture of clinical experimentation in cancer therapy and created medical oncology as a new science-laden subspecialty of healing. Next, she narrows her focus to trace the parallel development of tumor immunology and cancer immunotherapy from 1880 to 1980. Despite a troubled history of tantalising promises and dismal failures, by the 1960s, many experimental oncologists regarded immunotherapy--namely, the use of bacterial toxins and vaccines to stimulate nonspecifically tumorfighting immune mechanisms--as a promising 'fourth' weapon (alongside surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy) with which to combat cancer. Thus, by the 1970s, years of extensive clinical trials had helped to establish important alliances between cellular immunology and clinical oncology. In the third chapter, she examines the clinical use of the latest wave of cancer-fighting agents, namely, interferon and interleukin-2, protein molecules believed to have the power to amplify nonspecific immune mechanisms. The enthusiastic development of this therapeutic approach, primarily in America, continued to forge links between immunologists and oncologists, and now, just as importantly, between experimental oncology and the burgeoning biotechnology industry of the 1980s. The French IL-2 trial was an effort to establish similar connections by bringing this cutting-edge cancer therapy into the clinic of a private, non-proft cancer institute that had hitherto resisted sustained cooperation between immunologists and oncologists. The last half of the book describes and interprets the French IL-2 clinical trial from her perspective as participant-observer. Despite initial suspicion and skepticism over the aim and value of her proposed research project, Loewy successfully negotiated a role for herself as 'house historian'. She studied the trial for four years, sitting in on lab meetings, attending conferences, interviewing members of the group, observing laboratory practices, and even lending a hand with some of the work! Mindful of the limitations of drawing conclusions from one particular French case, she also observed a few comparable American and Israeli IL-2 clinical trials. She narrates these experiences in a personal, engaging manner, interweaving detailed descriptions of the laboratory environment, the physical spaces and experimental practices, with those of the social realm--the revealing characterizations of individuals and their behavior within the group. The clash of personalities, territorial squabbling, and other unpleasant moments during the trial are faithfully reported. Her 480

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REVIEWS assessments of people and their motives seem fair-minded, however, and she is acutely self-reflective about her own role as an observer and her own changing attitude toward the trial over time. Clearly, no one is portrayed as simplistically 'good' or 'bad'; instead, we meet a diverse cast of characters acting out personal agendas, strong emotions, driving ambitions, and professional insecurities. Following the historical narrative of the trial, Loewy devotes a chapter to a deeper sociological analysis of the complex interactions she had observed between participants and institutions. She describes how their searchers and clinicians negotiated control over "space, equipment, biological materials, subordinates (technicians and students), enrollment of patients, and the allocation of representative tasks" (pp. 231-232). Moreover, because these scientists and physicians inhabited different social and conceptual worlds, smooth and stable cooperation was not inevitable, especially when they even perceived the IL-2 treatment differently (was it an 'immunotherapy' or an 'anti-cancer drug'?). In order to facilitate collaboration, Loewy argues, the participants developed a set of semi-routine activities that were relevant to the trial but not solely controlled by either laboratory or clinic. Instead, these activities existed within a ~space for negotiations"--an intermediary zone that bridged the two domains and promoted interaction between their members. Furthermore, Loewy draws upon recent work in science studies to argue that the scientists and physicians successfully interacted across disciplinary boundaries by constructing shared 'boundary objects' that linked the two domains. For example, the IL-2-treated and 'activated' lymphocytes were boundary objects, for their potential existence and potential therapeutic efficacy linked the research laboratory to the oncology clinic by creating an intermediary zone of negotiation. Even so, the failure of the IL-2-treated lymphocytes to perform as expected threatened to dismantle the collaboration between bench and bedside. Loewy therefore illustrates how the scientists and physicians developed several types of alternative strategies to justify and maintain their cooperation: for example, they developed new procedures involving both lab and clinic, they co-wrote grant proposals and articles that summarized and interpreted research results, which fostered a shared vocabulary and criteria of meaning, and they established a formal IL-2 group that met regularly and displayed at least the appearance of successful collaborative activity. Readers interested in science studies methodologies will find this chapter most relevant (along with her Introduction, which discusses contemporary scholarship), whereas historians of biomedicine will profit 9 ~u-IPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS from her contextualised accounts of medical oncology and immunotherapy. The book would also be suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate c o m e s in science studies or the history and sociology of medicine. Overall, this study succeeds in showing us that we can transcend naively simplistic historical frameworks, and through a more complex, multi-layered analysis that employs several methodologies, enrich our understanding of how contemporary medical knowledge is made. Lyman Briggs School, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.

Lyell's Transformation of Geology, 1830-1833 By Leonard G. Wilson C h a r l e s Lye11,

Principles of Geology.

Edited with an

I n t r o d u c t i o n b y J a m e s A. S e c o r d . L o n d o n : P e n g u i n B o o k s , 1997. P p . xlvii + 4 7 2 . A $ 1 4 . 9 5 P B HARLES Lyell's Principles of Geology, first published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833, is an astonishingly modem work. It is primarily a study of geological forces active in the world at present--erosion of the land by water and wind, accumulation of sediments in the sea floor, and land movements caused by earthquakes and volcanoes. It is also a study of the living world---of the dependence of animals and plants on particular environmental conditions, including the presence of other species. Constant change in physical and biological environments may gradually destroy the conditions necessary to the life of a species and bring about its extinction. Lyell described the extinction of species through successive geological periods, noting that, although usually gradual, extinction might occur more rapidly during geological periods marked by large changes in the distribution of land and sea, with resulting changes in both local and world climates.

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REVIEWS In his skilful condensation of the three volumes of the first edition of

the Principles, James Secord has kept intact the chapters or portions of chapters that he has retained, while omitting other chapters in their entirety. He provides summaries of the chapters omitted, where they have been removed. The parts omitted are usually extended descriptions of geological processes, with multiple examples of their effects. He has annotated the text, identifying the sources of all quotations. Lyell quoted frequently from poets, both ancient and m o d e r n - - f r o m Virgil, Horace, and Ovid (usually in translations by the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden), and from Milton, Byron, Shakespeare and Scott. Secord also identifies LyeU's allusions to his scientific opponents and other scientific references, explaining that for many such references he is indebted to Martin Rudwick's "Bibliography of Lyell's Sources", appended to his recent facsimile edition of the Principles (Chicago: 1991, Volune 3, pp. 113-160). In an extended introduction, Secord discusses the historical context in which Lyell published the Principles. He connects Lyell's arguments for the reform of geological theory with the contemporary campaign for parliamentary reform. Although Lyell was never involved directly in politics, during the 1820s he abandoned his father's Toryism to become a Whig, convinced of the need for reform in many aspects of British life. Secord may overstate the role of politics in Lyell's life. On the authority of Adrian Desmond, Secord writes that "in Scotland an angry crowd stoned a carriage carrying his sisters, who were hated as Tory gentry" (p. xiii). Lyell himself is the original source for this incident in October 1831. As the Lyell carriage passed through the village of Kirriemuir, a crowd of about forty hissed. They threw no stones. At the time, the Kirriemuir people were excited about the Reform Bill, which Lyell's father opposed, but they were not given to violence or to hatred. Secord has identified many reviews of the Principles, previously overlooked. He has appended to the book a list of thirty-eight reviews of one or more of the three volumes of the first edition, published in Britain between 1830 and 1835. Frequently, the individual volumes were reviewed separately as they appeared. Taken together, the reviews show that the 1M'nciples exerted a profound and pervasive influence on British opinion. The reviewers saw dearly the fundamental challenge that the book posed to existing views of geology. Even Lyell's scientific opponents praised it. William WheweU suggested that Lyell's "systematic, complete, and conclusive methods" were essential to establish geology as a science. William Daniel Conybeare considered the Pn'nciples so important as "to mark almost a new aera in the progress of geology". The Monthly Magazine thought the book would "form an epoch" in the history of geology (p. xxiii). 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS Secord's brilliant account of the social, literary, and religious influences in Lyell's thought tends to obscure the far more important role of geological observation in his development as a scientist. Lyell's vision of the geological past grew out of his early study of natural history, his observations on the strata of southern England, on the recent marls in Scottish lakes, and most especially on his study of the geology of France, Italy, and Sicily in 1828. Secord quotes Lyell's vivid statement of the effect on his mind of the discovery that the apparently ancient Val di Noto limestone in Sicily was a relatively young Tertiary formation, containing fossils of living species, but treats the passage as a literary device rather than as an account of the radical transformation of Lyelrs view of the geological past that in fact it was (p. xxvi). At times Secord is inexplicably deprecatory of Lyell, writing that "[y]oung Lyell . . . tended to dismiss provincials, colonials, women and working people as mere sources of information" (p. xv). In support of this startling assertion, he cites a passage from Lyell's Second Visit to the United States, published nineteen years after the first volume of the Principles. In that passage Lyell was pleading for an improved educational system in Pennsylvania to enable the public to understand the results of scientific research. It did not have the implied condescension that Secord attaches to it. As contrary evidence, in 1832 Lyell permitted women to attend his lectures at King's College. He actively promoted the career of at least one colonial, John William Dawson of Nova Scotia, and as a young man he befriended the provincial surgeon Gideon Mantell of Lewes in Sussex. Secord discusses the tact with which Lyell wrote the Principles. H e may not appreciate fully the moral courage that Lyell required to publish a book in which he opposed the views of leading geologists, including his teachers and many close friends--men whom he liked and respected, but thought mistaken. Be that as it may, James Secord has produced a most valuable volume. Penguin Books has printed it in rather small type, but with the aid of a good magnifying glass, it may be read quite clearly. Department of History of Medicine, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, M N 55455, USA.

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Forging the Cartesian Mind By PeterAnstey L o u i s d e L a F o r g e , Treatise on the H u m a n Translated Desmond

with an Introduction

Mind (1666).

and Notes by

M. Clarke. Dordrecht:

Kluwer,

Pp.xxv + 237. US$120

HB.

1997.

ESCARTES died in 1650 with a n u m b e r of projects left incomplete or unpublished and some promissory notes left unfulfilled. F o r instance, his Treatise on Man was not published until 1662 and this was only an account of human physiology, focussing especially on the structure and function of the brain. He promised his readers a complementary account of the soul and its interactions with the body, but the work was never even started. It was taken up by one of the most enthusiastic and well qualified young Cartesians of the 1660s, Louis de la Forge (1632-1666) and was published in 1666 as his Traitt~ de l'Esprit de l'Homme. Desmond Clarke has translated this Treatise into English, thus making available for the first time one of the central texts that very important group of neo-Cartesians who preceded Malebranche. T h e Treatise is a work whose content is not particularly well known amongst English speaking philosophers and historians of ideas, or at least amongst those who do not specialise in Cartesianism or occasionalism. It comprises a long Preface followed by 28 chapters which fall roughly into five parts. These parts deal with what the human mind consists of, its functions, the union of the mind and body, the actions which flow from this union and, finally, the way to use the mind properly in order to lead a happy life. Throughout, La Forge sticks very closely to his master's doctrines, often quoting large slabs from Descartes' works and correspondence. The Preface is intriguing in its own right. It is a sustained attempt to demonstrate that Descartes' philosophy of mind is virtually identical with that of St Augustine. Of course, this is entirely understandable when one considers that Descartes' works were put on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1663, just as La Forge was writing the Treatise. La Forge's book was to be published in Paris, so there is little wonder that he attempted to

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REVIEWS give it some theological legitimisation by invoking the name of Augustine. What is less clear is why La Forge also attempts to show that Descartes' views are consistent with those of the neo-Platonist Ficino. With the theological posturing completed, La Forge turns in Chapters 2 to 7 to the nature of the mind. Of particular interest here are Chapters 3 to 5 which are devoted to arguments for the immateriality of the mind. Many philosophers of mind, such as Norman Malcolm, have dredged Descartes' works searching for valid arguments for the claim that the mind is immaterial. It is interesting therefore to find that La Forge is aware of this lacuna in Descartes' writings and, while he cannot bring himself actually to criticise his mentor, he does concede that Descartes 'demonstrations' of the soul's immateriality "did not resolve all the problems which the Schools derive from the subtleties of logic" (p. 38). Chapters 8 through 12 deal with the functions of the mind, spelling out a faculty psychology that is avowedly Cartesian. There is little that is original here, but what is pleasing is the contained and systematic manner in which La Forge deals with topics which in Descartes are scattered and require much mental cutting and pasting by the reader. It is in the chapters on mind/body union (pp. 13-16) that the importance of this book really lies. F o r here La Forge begins to go beyond Descartes and to develop an explicit form of occasionalism. However, the final theory as presented by La Forge is really a mitigated occasionalism. As Daisie Radner and Stephen Nadler have pointed out, La Forge tells us (Chapter 10, p. 92) that the mind actually has causal powers in so far as it is the principal cause of its thoughts. And having admitted some causal efficacy to the mind, this causal power becomes rather hard to contain. Thus, we find it spilling out into La Forge's account of the mindbody relations. In chapter 16 (p. 151) we are told that the soul does not have the power to increase or decrease the motion of animal spirits because that would be a violation of the law of the conservation of motion. However, it does have "the power only to determine them, that is, to turn them in the direction in which they must go in order to execute its will". La Forge here is clearly attributing a greater role to the mind than that of a mere occasional cause. It seems then that in the final analysis, La Forge's occasionalism is restricted to body-body and body-mind relations. As for the edition itself, the translation from the French is very good. The English prose flows well and technical terms are explained in the footnotes. On the whole, the footnotes are a condensed version of those in the definitive French edition of Pierre Claire (1974) which is now out of print. Unfortunately however, the finishing touches were omitted in the final stages of editing. There are numerous typos and just as we are told that the "punctiation" (p. ix) of the French text has been occasionally 486

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REVIEWS amended in the translation, so this reader would have liked some of the spelling and indexing to have been mended. F o r instance, every index reference to the Introduction is wrong and there are a few factual errors in the Introduction, such as the claim that La Forge died at age 32. Oddly enough, while this is no doubt disappointing for Clarke and will be irritating for some readers, I did not find that these errors hampered my reading of the book in any way. It is about time that the works of the first generation neo-Cartesians were available in English, and Clarke has done students and teachers of early m o d e m thought a great favour in translating the Treatise for us. School of Philosophy, Sydney University, N S W 2006, Australia.

The Original was Good; the Sequel is Better By Jay L. Garfield J o h n H a u g e l a n d , ( e d . ) , Mind Design 11: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence. ( R e v i s e d a n d e n l a r g e d edition). Cambridge:

MIT

Press/Bradford

P p . viii + 4 7 6 . U S $ 2 2 . 5 0

Books, 1997.

PB.

OR MANY years, Haugeland's Mind Design was simply the best interdisciplinary anthology on the foundations of artificial intelligence. Indeed, in the early years of cognitive science, it had no serious competitors. But over the past decade it did become a bit dated. True, those classic essays by Turing, Newell and Simon, Minsky, Dreyfus and Searle remained important and essential to have between the same set of covers for teaching foundations of cognitive science courses with substantial AI components. But the connectionist revolution and the advent of chaos theory as well as advances in philosophical debates about mental representation and the physical realisation of mind left Mind Design behind.

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REVIEWS With Mind Design 1I, Haugeland remedies all that. This anthology is now clearly the best available collection of essays on artificial intelligence and its philosophical foundations for philosophers and for students of cognitive science. The old classics from the original Mind Design are retained. But the new volume also contains a balanced collection of influential essays on connectionism comprising essays by Rummelhart, Smolensky, Rosenberg, Churcb_land, Fodor and Pylyshyn, and Ramsey, Stich and Garon. Essays by Clark and Brooks explore the nature and role of symbols in nonclassical computation and their necessity to models of intelligence, and an essay by Van Gelder introduces dynamic modelling of cognitive processes. There is not a bad choice in the volume. All are important contributions to the literature; all are accessible to philosophers, cognitive scientists or to intermediate to advanced students in the field. Together, they represent a balanced coverage of the major theoretical issues in the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence. One of the great strengths of Mind Design was its free introductory essay, ftself an invaluable introduction ~:e the field for the neophyte, and a pedagogical boon to those of us teaching the philosophical foundations of cognitive science to advanced undergraduates or graduate students. Haugeland surpasses that essay with the introduction to Mind Design II. Haugeland sets out with great perspicuity the basic concepts one needs to understand the literature and theoretical debates in the field, the principal theoretical issues at stake, their connection to larger debates in cognitive science and in philosophy, and the state of play as of 1997. He sets the essays collected in the volume into this larger context so that the anthology can function not simply as a collection of readings but as a unitary text. One could, in fact, profitably use it as a core text in an intermediate or advanced undergraduate course on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. This is a very fine volume indeed. I recommend it to philosophers or cognitive scientists interested in the philosophical ramifications of artificial intelligence and to those teaching courses in the foundations of cognitive science or artificial intelligence, as well as to those teaching courses in the philosophy of mind with a focus on the problems raised by and for artificial intelligence. Department of Philosophy, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA.

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Quaternions and Space-Time By Mark Colyvan Noel Curran, The Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Laws: Another Copernican Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Pp. ix + 208. s HB. N THIS book Noel Curran suggests that considerations in the philosophy of mathematics--in particular, the proper interpretation of quaternions--leads to a 'new' philosophy of space and time. According to Curran: space is Euclidean; time is absolute, flows and has a beginning; and G o d created the universe at the beginning of time. Unfortunately, I can find little of merit in this work. The book is riddled with errors and confusions. To give but a few examples: (i) true propositions are continually conflated with axioms, although Curran reserves the word "proposition" for a spoken sentence (for example, pp. 19, 25-26 and 93); (ii) the author seems to confuse paraconsistent logic with bivalent logic (for example, pp. 11, 15, 19 and 171-72); (iii) we are told on page 21 that sets of the same cardinality are equal; (iv) we are also told that the commutivity of multiplication is a ~fundamental axiom of axiomatic set theory" (p. 24); (v) Curran even suggests that the real numbers are countable (p. 37)! I could go on, but I think the picture is clear. Moreover, various conclusions in the book are ill-supported. For instance, we are told that it is "unsatisfactory" to consider points along a line as constituting a set (p. 21), but we are given no indication as to why we ought to accept this odd and extremely controversial conclusion. The book is also rather poorly written--it is both confusing and repetitive. The reader is constantly trying to guess what Curran means, either because what he is apparently saying is clearly false (as with the previously-mentioned claim about the real numbers being countable) or, more commonly, because his confusing expression leaves it entirely unclear what is intended (as with the claim that "there are important branches of mathematics where the equations are not equal" (pp. 14-15)). Curran's tendency to repeat whole sections (most notably the consecutive

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REVIEWS sections on Frege's "On Sense and Reference" pp, 1-15 and pp.16-20) is also very distracting. Finally, the work fails to engage with the relevant contemporary literature. This is not so serious in and of itself, but Curran proceeds to draw lmwarrantedly broad conclusions from his apparently limited research. For example, he suggests that since Frege and Husserl wrote only on the philosophy of arithmetic, there is no philosophy of algebra or geometry (p. 27). All of the above shortcomings I found distracting to the point of making an assessment of the cogency of the main theses of the book extremely difficult and, unfortunately, somewhat irrelevant. In short, I am unable to recommend this book to anyone interested in either the philosophy of mathematics or the philosophy of physics, Department of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Digging the Garden's Secrets By Mark Cortiula Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . : H a r v a r d

J o h n M . Riddle,

U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1997. P p . 341. U S $ 3 9 . 9 5 H B . H

EANTOSis a plant-based medicinal that is regularly prescribed for heroin and morphine addicts in Vietnam. Reliance upon this herbal concoction, as a seemingly effective treatment against addiction, is the product of a traditional approach to herbal medicine in the East that has historically been at odds with the Western pharmacological approach to the treatment of disease. While it has become common for many residents of the contemporary world regularly to ingest pills of all shapes and sizes to achieve a desired therapeutic outcome, the origins of this custom are quite recent. Historically, it was 490

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REVIEWS special preparations of plants and herbs that have acted as nature's medicinal. The traditional reliance upon natural herbal remedies to regulate and restore the body to its natural condition is splendidly demonstrated in Eve's Herbs. In this impressive work, the author demonstrates how women since the ancient period have used the power of plants and herbs to influence their productive cycle and regulate fertility. In a worthy followup to his Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, Riddle builds upon the earlier thesis that ancient women utilised herbs to control their reproduction. Taking the argument into a new and even more fruitful direction, Riddle transcends the earlier discussion on pharmacopoeia, to consider the way in which knowledge about contraceptives and herbal abortifacients was preserved and transmitted throughout the ages. Contrary to the accepted view that women, in the m o d e m period, lost what was once common knowledge on birth control, Riddle advances the hypothesis that while contraceptive information became less accessible in the m o d e m period, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost but actually survived in a more covert form. Riddle's discussion of birth control and abortion is framed within the larger cultural context of each of the main historical periods considered in the book. Beginning with the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and continuing through to the early twentieth century, he exposes the prevailing popular and legal attitudes towards fertility control and more interestingly, the actual practices employed by women to achieve a measure of reproductive control. In the process, he overturns the largely held view that popular knowledge about birth control practices, before the onset of the nineteenth century, was generally to be found only within the boudoirs of the well-educated and the elite. From the discussion, it emerges that knowledge about the power of plants and herbs to control reproduction and limit family was fairly widespread. Women recognised the power of commonly available plants to regulate menstruation. Pomegranates, Queen Anne's Lace, rue, artemisia, and the squirting cucumber, were just some the herbs and plants commonly employed by herbalists, doctors, and of course, women themselves, over the past centuries as a means of gaining a measure of control over their bodies. By examining a wide array of primary source evidence: court documents, church records, pharmacopoeias, medical and botanical texts and oral testimony, he produces strong evidence to suggest that the masses understood the power of plants to regulate family size. The use of eighteenth-century pharmacopoeia documents, however, is at times problematic. While these documents contain lists of plant-drugs 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS common for the period, many of which were historically associated with contraception and abortion, it remains an open question as to whether these substances were actually dispensed for these purposes, particularly as information on what apothecaries sold and more importantly, their actual advice on usage, is so scanty. This problem is compounded by the fact, noted by Riddle, that explicit references to abortion causing drugs in pharmacy guides had all but been eliminated by the start of the nineteenth century. While apothecaries may very well have been prescribing these plants for contraception, real allowances must also be made for the fact that these plants were also utilised for other purposes. Although one can also question the representativeness of individual case studies employed to demonstrate the wide dispersal of birth control knowledge and the practice of abortion, in the pre-modern period, the dearth of additional documentary data relevant to the topic makes it difficult to challenge. Unless strong evidence to the contrary can be produced, Riddle must be given the benefit of the doubt as, for the most part, the documentation to support his assertions on the availability of this knowledge is rather compelling. Even though Riddle is often forced to read between the lines, his research reveals a continuity in the production and dissemination of this sometimes underground knowledge. No where is this more clear than in the medieval and Baroque periods--a time when both church and law became increasingly opposed to birth control for different reasons. The church, under influence of a Tomistic philosophy that equated intercourse with procreation, along with the state, which was increasingly concerned with security and economic prosperity dependent upon a healthy population, led a joint attack against exponents of these practices, particularly against midwives, who were often branded as witches. Even though the 'black magic' practice of contraception and abortion was increasingly pushed underground and generally beyond the public domain, popular culture retained possession of this knowledge even though the religious and legal opposition climate of the period made it difficult for women to share the secrets of the garden. Even as religious scholars and the legal profession began, during the middle of the nineteenth century, to support the idea that a foetus was a human from the moment of conception, women continued to avail themselves of these products even though information became increasingly obscured in medical texts, and self-help books. By the end of the nineteenth century, American women in particular were increasingly turning towards patent medicines that often disguised abortion drugs as menstrual regulators, before the advent of 1906 Food and Drug Act placed these products under stringent federal control. Although the 492

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REVIEWS changing legal, religious and intellectual climate made it increasingly difficult for women readily to source contraceptive knowledge, another issue worthy of greater consideration is the process of urbanisation. With the virtual collapse of strong communal and kinship ties that characterised the pre-modern period and the gradual concentration of population in emerging cities, individuals became considerably removed from herbs and plants that characterised pre-industrial rural life. This transformation was undoubtedly a contributory factor in the loss of this knowledge. Although this study is primarily concerned with the natural herbs employed by women to maintain a measure of control over their bodies, practices that most contemporary physicians and scientists would generally dismiss as folklore, the impact of science on the practice of birth control and the conceptualisation of the foetus is not neglected. Riddle shows how ideas of the Scientific Revolution, particularly William Harvey's theory of epigenesis, which outlined a process of gradual foetal emergence, led to the gradual dismissal of semen-dominated theories of reproduction in favour of egg and sperm co-contribution theories of generation. Similar detailed attention is paid to the Albrecht yon H a l l e r - Caspar Friedrich Wolff debate, over organic development, that was so influential in shaping the new science of embryology. Wolff's ability to demonstrate that organisms formed in an egg according to stages of development, overturned old Aristotelian notions of ensoulment during the second trimester and led to the abandonment of quickening as the yardstick of when a foetus became human. As the title indicates, this study's frame of reference is clearly restricted to the western world. However, a comparative consideration of the welldeveloped herbal traditions of societies in the East would have contributed to the development of a clearer and much more fuller picture of the general nature of fertility-controlling practices. Similarly, an examination of the herbal contraceptive practices utilised by the native peoples of the United States and Canada might also have added another interesting dimension to the discussion. These quibbles should not, however, detract from what is otherwise an important and very persuasive contribution to the scholarship on the history of contraception. Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, N S W 2006, Australia.

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A Massive Compendium But no CD-Rom! By John Merson Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. D o r d r e c h t : Helaine Selin (ed.) Kluwer,

1997. Pp. 1117. US$420

HB.

I

RECALL hearing the comment recently that the last scholar who knew all there was to know about science, at least in its western incarnation, died in the late eighteenth century. Now while there is no way of verifying such a statement, we do know that around that time the growth in research and specialist journals increased at an extraordinary rate from 100 at the beginning of the nineteenth century to 10,000 at the end. The delineation of specific disciplines of astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry, medicine had by this time begun to build clear professional boundaries. So by the end of the nineteenth century when popular encyclopaedias like Britannicawere all the rage, encyclopaedias of science were of ever diminishing professional value. This phenomena can be seen in a whole range of academic fields as the sheer volume and specialisation of research leads to the creating of new sub-disciplines with highly technical languages of discourse. T h e present volume is therefore an intriguing tome and reflects how recently historians have begun to take an interest in non-western traditions of science, technology and medicine. This eleven thousand page encyclopaedia is built out of 600 thumbnail accounts of everything from the origins of the Abacus to differing cultural perspectives on the Zodiac. Most major world cultures for which there are records seem to be represented. The editor is the science librarian at Hampshire College in the United States, who along with an advisory board of six scholars, including two Australians, Ho Peng Yoke (now at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge) and David Turnbull from Deakin University, commissioned and edited the short essays into a loose conceptual whole arranged in 494

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REVIEWS alphabetical order. These essays approach their subject matter in some interesting ways, for instance, while there are some highly technical accounts of African metallurgy and Mesoamerica calendars, there are some quite philosophical essays dealing with medical ethics in India and China, as well as accounts of knowledge systems from the Incas to the Australian Aborigines. The primary value of such a massive compendium is that for the first time, a student can easily compare a variety of traditional systems of mathematics and cosmologies, for example. One can easily go from astronomical ideas in traditions in Islamic cultures, to those of India, China, Africa, Tibet, Mesoamerica, and again amongst the Australian Aborigines. However, from an academic perspective, this very strength is also the encyclopaedia's great weakness. The entries on Chinese astronomy and medicine, for example, take up a couple of pages, while anyone who has ever ventured into the area knows that it is a minefield of controversy. Joseph Needham's contribution alone to the history of these two areas amount to several volumes, and there is also considerable literature on these subjects which are critical of his approach. So from the perspective of the professional historian of science, an alphabetically organised series of short essays can easily seem like a frustrating set of generalisations, especially when there is already a large body of historical literature on each of the subject areas. But to the editor's credit, each of the essays contains a list of references, and as such provides a valuable window for those wanting to dig deeper into any of the diverse fields on offer, from magic squares in Indian mathematics to map making amongst Marshall Islanders. Also many of those contributing to this volume are scholars with a profound knowledge of their subject. So for students, be they at school or university, such an encyclopaedia offers a point of access to a literature that is often inaccessible. For the average academic it could also prove an invaluable arsenal of abstruse and arcane facts with which to astonish and impress even the most world weary of students. Of course one of the problems with this huge and well intentioned tome is that its impossibly expensive, and even though it is clearly designed for the library market, at US$420 it will be beyond the range of most school and many university libraries. It is an extraordinary oversight that this encyclopaedia is not also being made available as a CD Rom, which could make it both cheaper and more accessible for students. More importantly it would allow the contributors to upgrade their entries as new research and developments in their field occur. It would also mean that as a relational data base it would allow for interesting comparisons that could be more easily accessed from a computer-based source. Given that a couple of CDs could hold the entire collection of essays and more, and 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS allow for regular upgrades, it does seem an odd omission. After all, that old war horse of encyclopaedias, Britannica, has just released it latest C D upgrade, and were it not for this form of electronic publishing, it would probably have suffered the fate of many encyclopaedias before it. For the modern encyclopaedia, instead of being a static and time fixed compendium, needs to be a dynamic and evolving vehicle for international scholarship, particularly in newly developing fields. It is therefore a shame that this approach was not taken in conjunction with the more cosily print version. Could it be that the editor's role as science librarian explains its form, or was it perhaps the academic careers of the contributors which has determined the form of publication? After all, academic CVs need articles in reputable journals or in learned volumes, not accessible popular media such as C D Roms. The sad thing is that this worthwhile enterprise may simply gather dust and grow outdated on the overcrowded shelves of a few State and University libraries, while those students who could most benefit from its valuable scholarship are unlikely to ever get their hand on it. School of Science and Technology Studies, University of New South Wales, Kensington, N S W 2052, Australia.

The Triumph of the Biological By Nicolas Rasmussen Jacques Roger, The

Thought.

Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xliv + 760. A$135

HB.

INALLY we have an excellent English translation of this monumental book, first published in 1963, still the most essential work on the scientific revolution in biology, and now enhanced with a subject index and a new introduction. Standard histories of the Scientific Revolution focus on physical science and tend to tell little of this diffuse

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REVIEWS event's impact on biomedical theory, save an obligatory reference to Harvey's discovery that the heart is a pump and perhaps Borelli's treatment of musculature as levers and pulleys, both of which tend to give the impression that the new science progressed smoothly as an advancing mechanisation of the living world below, just as the heavens above. But as one discovers in reading Roger's impressively detailed and erudite account, such a story could hardly be farther from the truth: after a brief period in which the mechanist world-view led the advancing forefront of knowledge, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, the progress of life science and the growth of a genuinely biological understanding was enabled by a continual retreat of the rationalistic and mechanistic methodology of the physical sciences. The style of analysis throughout represents the best tradition of the history of ideas, in that factors such as social institutions, cultural and political movements, personal characters, and above all, religious beliefs are taken into account in describing the growth, clash, dance, and decay of the concepts that are in reality the book's main characters. As the reader will have gathered, the title of this book is far too modest: it covers a period from the start of the sixteenth century, and discusses developments from all comers of Europe, albeit from the French point of view. The weighty text is divided into three main sections, each dealing with one period. In the first section, we are told of the gradually secularised role of the medical doctor over the course of the sixteenth century, and the change in the medical schools that brought with it a decline in the status of Aristotelian theory concomitant with a rise in the popularity of chemical and especially Galenical theory. This sets the stage for the introduction of early seventeenth century mechanism, not so much by characters like Harvey (regarded merely as an eccentric Aristotelian in his context) but by the physicists Descartes and Gassendi. The importance of embryology to Descartes' system is stressed, explaining why in the obvious, utter failure of his theory of reproduction by self-assembly of seminal particles, the entire enterprise of rationalist system-building for life science fell into disrepute. Gassendi's Epicurean notion of reproduction through guided movements imparted to the seminal substances was preferable to the medical world, not only because it could better explain the accurate replication of complex form, but also because it was easier to harmonise with the Galenical theory of active faculties in charge of physiological activity--a theory still essential to medical practice. Thus the first section ends and the second begins in the midseventeenth century, with the widespread rejection of the Cartesian mechanism of reproduction (even by Cartesians), and the appearance of what Roger generously categorises as the first generation of true life 9

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REVIEWS scientists. F r o m this point until the middle of the eighteenth century, we have a century described as dominated by the rise of an empirical and skeptical mentality driven by the growing experimental skill and observational acumen of this new breed. Those mechanists holding to Cartesian ideals of clear and distinct rational science gravitated to preformationist theories of reproduction, in which embryos existing since the beginning of time in egg, sperm, or ubiquitous seeds merely expand upon the fertilisation event that initiates life, by material apposition of parts. The price for this clear account of reproduction and the retention of totally passive matter was the removal of the origin of organic form from the material world, and by thus referring reproduction to the direct hand of G o d at the initial Creation, from the realm of science. By comparison with such traitors to science, even Stahl with his vitalist notions of matter appears a hero of true biology. But Roger's main heroes in this era, the ultimate victors of "the long battle waged by observation against apt%ristic mechanism" (p. 364), were the Leeuwenhoeks, de Graafs, T r e m b l e y s - careful experimentalists who brought to light too many of Nature's marvels for the overconfident, rationalist systematisers to assimilate. Skepticism has triumphed by 1745, the date of the Encyclopedie, chosen by Roger to mark the end of the second of his eras. F o r all but the most skeptical biologists, it had begun to seem increasingly preferable to conceive of an active matter, whose laws might in Newtonian fashion be deciphered even if not frilly fathomed, than to forsake a life science capable of plausibly claiming any mastery of its subject. This was the situation of the third period, to the start of the nineteenth century. Thus we have the cautious Haller, trying to build a medical theory on the fundamental property of fibrous irritability, and the more adventurous vitalists of Montpellier, with Diderot and others, basing their theory on a universal sensitivity of living matter. With the acceptance of active matter, not only did epigenesis return with a new generation of more sophisticated theories such as Buffon's materialist "internal mould" and Wolff's vitalist vis essentialis, but a history of life itself became conceivable--as demonstrated by the appearance of proto-evolutionary transformist theories from every quarter: atheistic Buffon, pious Needham, and even Maupertuis the deistic Epicurean and Bonnet the preformafionist orthodox Christian. In this context the views of Lamarck, with his odd vitalist-Epicurean hybrid view of a living world driven upward by the flux of sensitive atoms, seems almost an obvious development. As Roger argues, the biological rationalism of the defeated mechanists would survive and reassert itself in the mid nineteenth century, after shifting its model from geometry to the new chemistry. In the "interregnum", however, "transformism had the time to find a complete 498

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REVIEWS formulation" with Romantics such as Geoffroy and Oken; "historical materialism had been made possible" (p. 542). Roger's approach to history is attractive and refreshing on many counts, not least of which is the careful attention to detail and sensitive reconstruction of the intellectual world of many little-studied figures, like Needham and (in the context of biology) Malebranche. Historiographically, the account is very interesting as well, in that we have a story of scientific change in the Bachelardian tradition of emphasis on method and its triumph over internal 'obstacles', but one that bypasses the discontinualistic excesses of the radical 'epistemological break' dividing 'lapsed' from present s c i e n c e - - n o t to mention the similarly overdiscontinualistic treatment in terms of Foucauldian 'epistemes'. Granted, one is still left wondering at the end of the day about what defines an 'obstacle' other than the mere fact that later science came to regard it as so. However, this is no sterile work of philosophy, but a rich history whose justification lies in the compelling vision it communicates; after reading it, one also begins to wonder if Whiggery is always such a bad thing. School of Science and Technology Studies, University of New South Wales, Kensington, N S W 2052, Australia.

Fishing for Little Desert By Nickolas Vakas Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia. M e l b o u r n e : M e l b o u r n e U n i v e r s i t y

Libby Robin,

P r e s s , 1 9 9 8 . P p . xii + 2 0 3 . A $ 2 4 . 9 5

PB.

NVIRONMENTALISM captured the national stage in Australia with the struggles to prevent the flooding of Lake Pedder in 1973 and the damming of the Franklin river in 1983. Prior to these were struggles that provided the basis for environmental politicisation. A turning point was the campaign for Little Desert. Libby Robin chronicles the emerging politicisation of the environment through an insightful historical account of the Little Desert campaign. Earmarked for

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REVIEWS development in the 1960s, it became a focus for diverse interests and highlighted shifting perceptions of the environment. The major focus of this book is "the rise of ecological consciousness" (p. 4). Through examining changes in consciousness, Robin investigates events preceding and following the main campaign surrounding Little Desert in 1969. She has interviewed a number of the key players in the controversy to assist in understanding the roles of community activists, urban-rural issues, government and the bureaucracy. Little Desert, a patch of 'scrub' located in rural Victoria on the South Australian border, was viewed as poor land for farming by those engaged in this controversy. However, proponents of the development, chiefly Sir William McDonald, Victofia's Minister of Lands, argued the land was viable if it was 'improved'. In contrast those interests opposed to development emphasised issues such as the area's intrinsic value and diversity, and argued that development was not economically feasible. In exploring the changing perceptions of the environment, the shift from conservation to environmentalism, and the necessary transition from an economic to a political position this entailed, Robin identifies existing ideologies and subsequent challenges. Prior to Little Desert, 'conservation' was dominated by the language of economics and overseen by government officials in land-management agencies. This dominant view of the environment emphasised 'resource' conservation in contrast to nature conservation and was echoed in government scientific bodies such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. An important person in the early struggle for people's hearts and minds was editor, writer and radio journalist Philip Crosbie Morrison. In the 1940s, the magazine Wild Life, which he edited, blended nationalism, anti war sentiment and the calming effect that nature can bring from the turmoil of war. While this was, as Robin points out, crude it "offers an insight into how Morrison saw such values as becoming politically relevant" (p. 26). Morrison, although scientifically trained in marine zoology, wrote accessibly to embrace exchange and debate between a wide range of professionals and amateurs. He encouraged a questioning of authority and a political commitment to nature. His popular "Wild Life" radio program, that ran for 16 years until 1954, was for many, according to Robin, "the starting point of a life-long commitment to nature and nature conservation" (p. 27). The changing awareness fostered by Morrison and others was translated into political action through the effort of natural history societies, particularly the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria, to protect national parks such as Wilsons Promontory. Robin argues that these societies provided both scientific expertise, credibility and the new found political 500

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REVIEWS commitment necessary to influence government decision making. This book highlights the importance of participation in the protection of Little Desert through the examination of the interrelationship between community, government and science. Rural-urban links were crucial to sustaining the campaign. While acknowledging the significant role of urban activists, Robin does not simplify this relationship to one where urban campaigners educate those in the bush. Rather Robin argues it ~was a constant two-way interchange sponsored and supported by the natural history groups" (p. 43). Rural people who campaigned to save Little Desert included Aboriginal land rights activists as well as farmers. Science played an important role in legitimating opposition to development as a number of scientists advocated the protection of Little Desert's diversity. Scientist Peter Attiwill contended if development was to proceed species loss would most likely occur and he advocated more detailed research. In testifying to a government committee he shifted from a scientific to a moral imperative when summing up: It is the desire to maximise the quality of life---to make the world a fit place in which to live---that has brought to our attention problems of pollution, of contamination, and of conservation. T h e need to control the quality of our environment is, I consider, part of a new morality which is now man's urgent responsibility. (p. 73) Central to Robin's study is the identification and alignment of differing interests in order to understand the dynamics of the controversy. According to Robin agricultural economists of the Department of Agriculture were strongly averse to McDonald's development proposals. Economic considerations of this department were broader, having shifted in recent years away from a narrow focus on resources, and encompassed ~ factors such as soil erosion and drought, as well as long-term environmental considerations and non-money benefits ~ (p. 93). Such bureaucratic opposition manifested itself in leaks, despite McDonald's attempts to prevent these, and critical reports of the development proposal. This opposition undermined the proponents position considerably. Activists were able to exploit government divisions and use scientific research opposed to development to generate additional pressure. One activist, Valerie Honey, drew on published material from a scientist in the Department of Agriculture in her submission to the Acting Premier in July 1969 which highlighted bureaucratic and scientific opposition. Community activism had centred on the Save Our Bushlands Action Committee. The committee included eight urban conservation groups, which organised large protests, attracted media attention and aimed to 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS influence government decision making. The government created two influential 'legitimate forums', the Conservation Council of Victoria in October 1969 and then, the following month the Land Resources Council (LCC). Following the success of the Little Desert campaign, both served to centralise community concerns and increase the power of bureaucrats and conservation 'experts'. Given the considerable uniformity of opinion of a diverse range of interests that opposed the development of Little Desert, this was a logical extension for many conservationists and bureaucrats. The L C C provided a consultative and more publicly open mechanism to evaluate the impact of development proposals on the environment. However, this new body disenfranchised natural history societies and local activists. This type of bureaucratisafion was opposed by the new breed of environmentalists in the 1970s and 1980s whose ecological consciousness shifted away from an emphasis on technical and scientific processes, which characterised the conservationists who campaingned to prevent the Little Desert development. These processes were increasingly viewed as deficient in protecting the environment and being unrepresentative in areas such as indigenous land rights. Criticisms of the government's lack of commitment to the environment appear to be born out when the Victorian government abolished the L C C in 1997. Robin argues this may produce a new bridge between "utilitarian conservationists and radical environmentalists" around "values such as 'democracy' and 'fairness'" and draw in public servants concerned with "the public interest" (p. 154). Robin's book is an important contribution for those interested in public protest, government processes and changing perceptions of the environment. T h e legacy of Little Desert highlights a contradiction faced by many environmentalists internationally. This is the desire to reconcile the need to influence government decision making, maintain participatory measures while holding views of the environment that reach beyond the economic, scientific and technical imperatives of the bureaucracy. Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia.

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Merton Revisited... By John Forge David Resnick, The Ethics of Science. London: Routledge, 1998. Pp. ix + 221. s PB. HE ISSUESand questions that fall under the heading of "ethics of science" divide, more of less, into two kinds. In the first place, there are those that involve the scientist's relations with his or her colleagues, students, rivals, data, etc., matters that, so to speak, crop up within the laboratory. I'll refer to these 'internal' matters as "the ethics of research" or E R for short. And then, in the second place, there are the impacts of science on others, on non-scientists, on people who inhabit the world outside the laboratory. These impacts mostly come about through the medium of technology--technology that is a consequence of R&D--but one should not underestimate the impacts of science as a source of ideas. We can refer to these 'external' ethical issues as "the ethics of application" or EA. One might think that E R and EA need rather different treatment. How a scientist behaves towards her PhD. students and what she thinks and does about the effects of her work on others, ff she thinks about that at all, would not appear to have too much in common. Resnick's book does in fact cover both sorts of issue, so it is evidently not impossible to do so, but it does mean that some way has to be found to give a unified treatment (assuming that the discussion does not simply divide into two separate parts). It is the way in which Resnick tries to unify E R and EA that I will take issue with. The Ethics of Science is intended to be a textbook and on the whole it is a worthy effort in that direction. Resnick begins in what is surely the best way: with some case studies. He chooses the Baltimore 'affair', cloning and the cold fusion debate to illustrate that there are ethical problems associated with science. T h e general idea here is to show that there are indeed issues of a certain kind that arise in science which are not matters of science but are about science. (I prefer to label these as questions of value and then draw distinctions between kinds of value and then, ultimately, distinguish a class of moral values.) T h e next step is to introduce some framework in which to address these matters and sure enough we fund Chapter 2 entitled "Ethical Theory and its Applications". Introducing a

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REVIEWS bit of ethics to students that don't know any is a bit tricky: if they are overloaded early on in their course, they will tend to loose interest, however much the initial case studies grabbed them. So this part of the discussion is crucial. Resnick does a fair job with this chapter, but it would need to be read in conjunction with lectures and guidance for the student, as there are a few too many subtle discriminations for most students to absorb. I have suggested that any introduction to science and ethics needs to start out this way, but there are choices as to where one goes next. What Resnick does is to identify science as a profession, devote a chapter to the ethical standards appropriate to this profession and then go on to address topics that (naturally) arise given these standards. Now, what is supposed to bring ER and EA together is that science as a profession has different sorts of goals, including the elimination of ignorance and the advancement of knowledge and providing "like all professions, socially valued goods" (p. 38). The ethical standards of science are just those modes ofbehaviour that are efficacious with respect to these goals. Thus, ER is taken care of via the goal of the advancement of knowledge--for instance, one should deal honestly with one's colleagues because this is the best way to advance knowledge. Likewise, by aiming to produce 'socially valued goods', EA is satisfied. Resnick then disarmingly admits that his approach and some of his standards closely resemble those of Merton (p. 72). It is almost as if he admitted to being a logical positivist. The criticism that I have of Resnick's approach is thus a familiar one. Once we distinguish the goals of individual scientists from those of science itself, which Resnick is quite willing to do (p. 40), there remains the question as to where the latter comes from. To deal with this, Resnick, like Merton, is committed to the idea that science as a profession exists in some sense over and above the individuals and relations that constitute it. Science has a certain method and goals, even though the individuals that constitute the system may do different things with different outcomes. Criticisms of this sort of viewpoint are familiar. This book is therefore not likely to be recommended by someone who does not have much sympathy with Mertonian sociology of science. But there is perhaps another difficulty here that arises specifically about ethics. It is sometimes said that there is a difference between a norm, just any old norm, and a moral principle when it comes to motivation. Norms point to the goals attained by conformity, but moral standards are adopted "for their own sake", because they indicate what is the right thing to do. So, to reduce moral principles to norms, in this sense, and then to concede that there is a difference between "science's goals and scientists' goals" would seem to leave a gap in motivation for the latter. 504

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REVIEWS M y own position is that it is better to keep ER and EA separated. Moreover, I do not think that science is a profession and hence I do not think that the best way to address ER is as a species of professional ethics. Resnick is sensitive to this and admits that his argument for science as a profession is not decisive. Part of the trouble here is that ~profession" is now becoming what used to be called a "cluster concept", it has no necessary conditions for its application. I happen to think that there is a necessary condition for ~profession", namely that professionals have clients, and since scientists do not have clients, science is not a profession. The upshot of this way of thinking is that ER then becomes rather uninteresting. I have been critical of Resnick's approach, but putting this to one side (Mrs Lincoln), I did like the book. Resnick writes well and much of what he says makes good sense. The code which he presents in Chapter 4 is worth considering as a moral code for science and he does succeed in making the ER-ish issues raised in later chapters interesting. With a firm hand from the lecturer, his book could serve well as a text for a course on ethics and science. School of Science, Griffith University, Nathan, Qld., Australia.

Spinning Through the Years of Discovery By Sunny Y. A uyang Sin-itiro Tomonaga,

The

Story of Spin.

Translated

by

Takeshi Oka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 258. US$

50 HB.

HE QUANTUM mechanical notion of s/yin is an example of a concept which, when first formulated, seem easy and obvious but which, upon reflection, reveal depths that defy simple explanations. Students learn it as a kind of angular m o m e n t u m and

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REVIEWS quickly master it in calculation. Yet spin is not only itself fundamental to the fabric of the universe, it subtly relates to the commutation relations and statistics of elementary particles. What are the bases of these relations, which have the widest consequences? This question, which is covered hastily in most text books, is explored in depth in this fascinating book by the great physicist Tomonaga, who shared the 1965 Nobel prize with Feynman and Schwinger for the development of quantum electrodynamics. The Story of Spin is at once an exposition of important physical concepts and a history of physics from the early 1920s, when the observation of multiplicity in atomic spectra led to the proposal of the bold idea of the self-rotating electron, to the late 1930s, when the burgeoning nuclear physics extended the idea of spin to isospin. These are the years of discovery that brought nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, its union with special relativity, its extension into quantum field theory, and the establishment of nuclear physics. Tomonaga traces through the historical development, pivoting his account around the contribution of spin. By judiciously combining physics with history, he explains the particular difficulties encountered at each juncture, the debates among physicists as they struggled to solve the puzzles, the concepts they proposed, why some work and others fail. T h e historical debates are particularly valuable because the reasons offered by various sides offer much insight into the physical problems which is lost to those who receive the solutions ready made. T h e book, originally published in Japanese in 1974, is based on a series of lectures Tomonaga delivered in the preceding year. It begins with the puzzling features o f atomic spectroscopy that engaged Sommerfeld, Landd, and Pauli, and that were finally solved by the idea of spin introduced by two young physicists, Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit. The narration of how the idea was first met with skepticism and finally accepted even by Pauli the perfectionist is characteristic of the book; it both explains the reasons for skepticism and acceptance and portrays vividly the interplay of the strong characters of the physicists. Next comes the story of Pauli and Dirac competing to incorporate spin into Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and Schr6dinger's wave mechanics, which Dirac had shown to be equivalent by his own transformation theory. By what Pauli called an "acrobatic ~, Dirac derived the quantum mechanical equation that accounts for both spin and special relativity from the simple requirement that the equation be linear in time in conformity to the transformation theory. Not to be outdone, Pauli and Weisskopf resurrected the Klein-Gordon equation by introducing the spin-zero particle. How physical and mathematical considerations 506

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REVIEWS contributed to the judgments of the physicists are especially important in this development. Personalities are not forgotten, but take a back seat to physics in the account of spin in relation to commutation relations and statistics. T h e problem begins with the quantisation of the field and the second quantisation of the wave function. Tomonaga exhibits the "complementary ~ features of two kinds of field. The Klein-Gordon field for spin-zero bosons demands the commutation relation and positive energy, but allows both positive and negative electronic charges. The Dirac field for spin-half fermions demands the anticommutation relation and negative electronic charge, but allows both positive and negative energies. Tomonaga then traces Pauli's argument, based on the general principles of relativity and the requirement that physical quantities be covariant, that these results can be obtained together with the statistics for bosons and fermions. T h e main story leading from the introduction of spin to its relation to statistics is punctuated by numerous excursions into spin-related physics--proton spin in molecular physics, Heisenberg's theory of the helium atom and ferromagnetism, the spinor family and spinor algebra. This is followed by an account of the development of nuclear physics. Tomonaga describes the discovery of neutron, positron and deuterium, and explains how they paved the way to applying quantum mechanics to atomic nuclei. He then discusses Heisenberg's argument for the nature of the nuclear force, explaining how Heisenberg introduced the notion of nuclear isospin by analogy to electronic spin. Finally, he introduces Yukawa's theory of nuclear force. T h e book closes at the time when the Second World War threw a shadow over physics. Some familiarity with physics is required to appreciate the physical insight offered in The Story of Spin. However, the book is so studded with anecdotes and rich in historical narratives that historians and philosophers will get much out of it even if they skip the technical material. Perhaps they will find the last two lectures particularly interesting. Spin is usually regarded as a purely quantum mechanical quantity with no classical counterpart. Harking back to the earliest days when Thomas satisfied Pauli's demand for "classical describability" by a model of spin using classical relativity and classical theory of tops, Tomonaga presents a calculation showing that the answers obtained by Thomas's model and by quantum mechanics agree completely even for anomalous magnetic moment. N o physicist would use Thomas's method because it cannot fit with the descriptions of other quantum mechanical properties, but the possibility of multiple representations would interest philosophers. Tomonaga closes his lecture series by a personal reminiscence of the most exciting period in twentieth century physics if not the history of 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS physics. The book, witty in narrative and clear in exposition, telling the monumental development of physics from an oft-neglected angle, will delight physicists, historians, and philosophers alike. 100 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02142, USA.

Freakish Bodies By Clair Scrine Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.) Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii + 400. US$50 HB. HIS collection is a vital and welcome addition to the ongoing literature that seeks to investigate the body as social object and the cultural construction of difference. In this respect, the work reflects much contemporary analysis, yet, importantly, establishes the significance of the freak to such discourses. In examining the many different intellectual and cultural contexts in which freakery has been constituted, this collection opens out what appears as a glaring omission in the examination of the social construction of bodily difference. While women, Jews, blacks and homosexuals have figured prominently in the analyses of corporeal otherness and embodied deviance, the freak has been somewhat neglected. Yet as this collection so effectively illustrates, the study of the anomalous body is the story of the freak, and has a long and varied history in which the representation of absolute bodily difference couldn't be more pronounced. After reading this collection one wonders why the literature surrounding freaks has been so neglected when the subject is able to present a wealth of insight into the workings of notions of difference. T h e papers that constitute Freakery are concerned with many individuals who have come to be embraced by this culturally constructed term, and the arenas in which they have been presented. From the 'natural' corporeal freaks such as conjoined twins, midgets, fat or bearded ladies, to the 'exoticism' of cultural freaks such as the Igorots, Aborigines,

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REVIEWS Egyptians and Aztecs, to those whose performance or acquired oddity distinguished them, it seems freakery has been ascribed to a wide array of individuals. David Yuan's paper on Michael Jackson as the celebrity freak, and Andrea Stulman Dennett's analysis of the endurance of freakery in contemporary talk shows, are testament to the continuity of this phenomena within today's western culture. The last two sections of the collection "Textual Uses of Freaks" and "Relocations of the Freak Show" in fact turn to a greater analysis of our own fascination with freaks. Indeed, one of the overriding impressions one gleans from Freakery is the ongoing perception within western culture of particular cultural and biological difference as anomalies and oddities. The discourses surrounding the freak are particularly interesting in regards to the shift that occurred from these individuals being an oddity and inspiring awe, to that of horror, with their difference defined by the language of disease, pathology and deviation. A shift that, Garland Thomson argues, illustrates no less than the development of modernity within western culture. Many of the papers within this collection are predominantly concerned with the institutions and discursive practices that have constructed the meaning of freaks as a deviation from the norm. Such an approach seeks to show the fundamental role of the freak within society, particularly how normative values concerning the body came to be legitimated and regulated through such individuals. Inevitably, the role of medical and scientific discourse is shown to be fundamental to this process. In fact, this aspect of freakery is very much about the 'triumph' of rational science to know and master the abnormal body. This medicalisation of human difference has inevitably altered the discourse of the freak and the condition of many people's l~ves, while securing or leg~tirnising the role of various practitioners. This book is evidence of the benefits of moving beyond the limits of determinist analyses of pathologisation, professionalisation and other conceptual tools that, while particularly illuminating to such areas of investigation, can in fact limit the depth of these narratives. Many of the papers are concerned with issues of the freaks' constitution of self identity, including examinations of resistance, agency and control that individuals were or weren't able to orchestrate. F o r instance, while David Gerber seeks to problematise the agency and valorisation of those freaks who made a career of exhibition, Eric Fretz is keen to argue that in the context of the nineteenth century culture of exhibition, many were in fact able to establish an 'authorial autonomy' through their performances. Certainly, notions of exploitation, autonomy, and choice are complex in regards to the exhibition of freaks, and this is successfu/ly explored by many of the papers. AAI-IPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS As its title suggests, one of the dominant concerns of many of the works is with the 'spectacle' of the Freak, in particular, the Freak show. From circuses, museums, traveling shows and fairs through to the modern day body building competition, the fascination, attraction and commercial worth of visible, corporeal difference has been pervasive. Despite their scientific status, even medical discourses concerned with the extraordinary body are in many ways not entirely distinguishable from that of the freak show. David. L. Clark and Catherine Meyser's account of a medical documentary involving the separation of conjoined twins is a stark reminder of the way medical practice uses the anomalous body to commercial success. The use of a performance context continues to inspire a morbid fascination with difference, while glorifying modern day surgery that is able to normalise such aberration. Significant to all these exhibitions is the necessary and interdependent relationship between the orchestrators of the shows, the audience and the exhibitors. Examining this aspect illustrates the power exchanges at work and reveals many commonalities between the narratives of the freak show. Freakery makes a valuable contribution to the analysis of difference. The collection covers a wide terrain of discursive and analytic approaches embracing the sociological, historical, medical, literary and philosophical. It is a welcoming sign to see such a collection moving beyond the limits of cultural studies, and it is its interdisciplinary approach that gives Freakery a real breadth and depth of analysis, recommending it to a wide audience. Beyond the world of freaks though, this collection is equally valid for the contribution it makes to the insights regarding the workings of systematic discourses that operate in defining difference as deviance, and the power at work in such social constructions. Brian Rosenberg states in his chapter on teaching freaks that it is not an exercise in testing the limits of acceptability; rather it encourages complex modes of thought and highlights issues of broad significance---an appropriate assessment I would argue of both the subject material and this collection. School of History, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia.

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Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of German Medicine By Katharina Rowold Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Germany. N e w Y o r k : C a m b r i d g e Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks (eds.),

U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 9 7 . P p . vii + 2 4 2 . A $ 9 5 H B . HIS edited volume originated in a conference at the German Historical Institute in Washington, which, according to Geoffrey Cocks' introduction, had as its purpose to "place the medical crimes and collaborations of the National Socialist era into their larger German and Western context" (p. 1). The book that has come out of it is a fine collection of ten essays that cover a variety of aspects of the history of medicine in Germany from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Issues such as the medicalisation of society, the process of professionalisation of physicians, the rise of social Darwinism and eugenics, shifts in the history of psychiatry, Nazi sterilisation and euthanasia policies, and the relationship between medicine and Nazism before and after 1945 are addressed. Focusing on these issues, the articles engage with questions about the relationship between medicine, politics, and society. Through the lens of the history of medicine, fundamental questions about a unique German past and broader Western patterns, and questions about continuity and discontinuity in the history of modem Germany are explored. They are approached from a variety of perspectives and a number of frequently conflicting interpretations are put forward. The early chapters address the medicalisation of German society. Challenging the Whiggish interpretation of the history of medicine, the process of medicalisation was conceptualised as a mechanism of social control. But, Johanna Bleker argues in the opening essay, this approach,

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REVIEWS although yielding fruitful insights into the role of physicians and public institutions, has so far largely neglected to examine and give importance to patients' role in the process of medicalisation. In her examination of hospitals and hospital care in the early nineteenth century she qualifies the understanding that patients were simply victims of this process, and hospitals places of their oppression. Instead she presents a tentative picture in which "the process of medicalization brought about by the rise of hospital care was not a one-way street" (p. 32), but rather met with a response from patients. Patients, Bleker argues, contributed to the process of medicalisation. If Bleker explores patients' role and agency, Alfons Labisch presents medicalisation as a process solely imposed 'from above' in the next chapter which looks at the aims of governmental policy-makers behind health insurance legislation of the Second Empire and its longterm consequences. The process of medicalisation went hand in hand with the increasing professionalisation of doctors. This process, or its failure, has been the focus of attempted explanations for the involvement of so many doctors with Nazism. If Labisch in his article seems to endorse aspects of the Sonderweg theory, it is challenged by Charles McClelland in his contribution on doctors' professionalisation. McClelland takes issue both with interpretations that see the history of medicine in the Third Reich as the outcome of the peculiar German experience of professionalisation or as a "paradigmatic example of evil consequences of professionalization" (p. 96). In his view, it was rather the consequence of a process of "interrupted professionalization" initiated in the interwar period. Geoffrey Cocks, in another chapter also addressing professionalisation, takes the Nuremberg physicians' trial as the starting point to analyse what the medical crimes perpetrated in the Third Reich say about the history of professionalised medicine in Germany and the West. According to him, the "principal ethical lesson" contained in the history of the medical crimes "concerns the dangers of social corporatism" (p. 184). In questions about the ideological roots of Nazism, social Darwinism has long held an important place. Richard Evans gives an historiographical overview in which he reasserts the view that there existed many varieties of social Darwinism with different political implications, but that selectionist social Darwinist language and concepts became increasingly dominant at the turn of the century. Evans points out that social Darwinism constituted a "discursive framework" that played a crucial part in Nazi ideology developing the way it did. He affm'ns though that there exists no easy and straightforward link between nineteenth-century social Darwinism and Nazism, but that it took the social and political changes and crisis of the early twentieth century for authoritarian and racist social 512

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REVIEWS Darwinism to become part of official government ideology and to be put into effect. One field where social Darwinist ideas had an impact in the late nineteenth century was psychiatry, as Heinz-Peter Schmiedenbach discusses. In his examination of the history of psychiatry from the early nineteenth century to the end of the Weimar Republic, he looks at how the main issues of psychiatric activity changed with changing needs of the state and society and explores why the interests of psychiatrists became closely aligned with those of the state, albeit with a number of interludes, during this period. According to Schmiedenbach, the First World War inaugurated a transformation of ethical values. The worth of a single human being was diminished and the welfare of the community was placed over that of the individual. It also led to the initiation of an "aggressive brutality" in the relationship between the doctors and their patients that continued after the end of the war. The treatment of war neurotics during the First World War has often been seen as a medical-ethical transgression that set the precedent for the atrocities committed by doctors under the National Socialist regime. Paul Lerner, however, sets out to challenge these views of psychiatric continuity. He outlines a variety of methods of treatment during WWI, and agrees that the methods involved were often brutal and inhumane, but argues that inseparable from the discourse of control there was a discourse of healing. He concludes that the treatment of war neurosis should be seen as "heralding the often ambiguous role of medical professionals in the modern welfare state" (p. 148). It has been argued by some historians, who see National Socialist racism as the "final solution of the social question", that the Nazi regime was a welfare state that differed in degree, but not in kind, from other democratic welfare states, as Gisela Bock points out. This is a contention which she vigorously refutes in an outstanding chapter on Nazi sterilisation and euthanasia policies. National Socialism, including its medical dimension, Bock asserts, were a perversion of the modern welfare state. At the roots of Nazi race policy lay a "doubled vision of humanity and human beings" (p. 172) which provided a welfare state for the "valuable ~ kind and persecution and then massacre for the "unworthy" kind. This doubled vision of human beings fundamentally distinguishes the Nazi regime from democratic European welfare states. Viewing eugenic racism as a major radicalising force behind ethnic racism, Bock places Nazi sterilisation and euthanasia policies in their larger social and political contexts. She presents a careful examination of historiographical debates on these policies and examines questions about their historical meaning, origins, how they were put into practice, and how 9 AAHPSSS, 1999.

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REVIEWS they were radicalised. She establishes a number of distinct continuities and discontinuities in the processes that put an end to humane ethics. The last two chapters extend into the period after 1945. Atina Grossman examines the "debate that will not end" on abortion from the period of the Weimar Republic to the present. She shows that there is a history of sharp policy breaks in relation to abortion under the different political regimes, but that there is also a history of continuity in policies being shaped by a tendency to see abortion not in terms of rights but in terms of social and economic conditions as well as of individual 'fitness'. Michael Kater concludes the volume with a discussion of the dimensions and implications of the "Sewering Scandal" of 1993, the election of Hans Joachim Sewering--a former member of the N S D A P and SS, who was provably involved in at least one case of euthanasia selection--to the presidency of the World Medical Association. Doctors were the most nazified profession, and they played an important role in the development and application of the Third Reich's ideology. The Sewering affair, according to Kater, is a symptom of the consistent unwillingness of the German medical establishment to acknowledge and address the past of their profession. In sum, these essays make a useful contribution to debates on the history of medicine in Germany, providing a thought-provoking diversity in interpretative frameworks. A bit disappointing is the fact that although the introduction promises to provide a comparative dimension, none of the essays does so in a sustained way. Many of the topics of the articles which cover the period before 1933 (such as medicalisation, professionalisation, social Darwinism, and increasing psychiatric pessimism during the late nineteenth century) have been subject of a considerable amount of scholarship in relation other countries such as Britain, France and the USA. More systematic comparison could have helped to illuminate peculiarities as well as similarities of the German context. However, all in all this is an admirable collection of essays, adeptly woven together by the editors, which brings together a wealth of material and addresses important themes. Department of Politics and M o d e m History, London Guildhall University, London, England.

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