LARB Digital Edition: A Legible Science

By Los Angeles Review of Books

We’re all prone to excess, even in discussions of excess, observes biologist and science writer Marlene Zuk. This year has been marked by another rainfall of books about humans destroying the environment in which they evolved, a few about the a priori Darwinian mismatch between humans and their so-called natural” environments, and a great many more about the even greater mismatch between humans and their constructed environments.

This month's Digital Edition gathers some of the best essays and reviews from LARB's Science Section that deal with aspects of the mismatch, and how scientific discoveries and agendas are changing how we think about them. Several also deal with issues of legibility how science goes about making legible human experience, not to mention environmental impacts. From the exploding fields of neuroscience and genetics to reading the movement of glaciers, this month's selection of articles is the perfect match for readers in search of a legible science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940660158

Book preview

Introduction

A Legible Science

We’re all prone to excess, even in discussions of excess, observes biologist and science writer Marlene Zuk. Indeed, natural selection has not provided us with brakes — whether brakes to stop consuming sugar, pills, or carbon, or to stop engaging in any number of other planet-destroying or self-destroying activities. This year has been marked by another rainfall of books about humans destroying the environment in which they evolved (see Robert Proctor’s essay), a few about the a priori Darwinian mismatch between humans and their so-called natural environments (see Zuk’s essay), and a great many more about the even greater mismatch between humans and their constructed environments, including cybertech environments, which obviously involves its own excesses (the subject of next year’s volume). Many of the following essays deal with aspects of the mismatch, and how scientific discoveries and agendas are changing how we think about them. Several also deal with issues of legibility — how science goes about making legible human experience, not to mention environmental impacts.

With respect to the human body, one of our reviewers, Jordan Smoller, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology and a researcher in genetics at Harvard, writes from his disciplinary vantages that ours is an age marked by the end of normal. The DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for classifying mental illnesses, is in more disarray than ever. In addition, there’s an ever-growing recognition that normality is, as the historian and presidential scion Henry Adams put it over a century ago, a precarious act, and the ego or identity a bit like a bicycle rider, mechanically balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior personalities. Natural and normal are both up for grabs. The exploding fields of neuroscience and genetics are, if anything, confirming the thinness of the line between health and dysfunction. Notably, both fields are offering new kinds of data for understanding distributions, but as several reviewers point out in the following essays (Smoller, Yoder, Reiss), these are often misread or rendered overly legible in fits of interpretive zeal.

Indeed, this is precisely what happened in Nicholas Wade’s much heralded and much reviewed book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. Wade tried to argue — from the purported vantage of 21st-century science — that race is real and has shaped societies, accounting for current inequalities. University of Minnesota biologist Jeremy Yoder, in an essay collected here, skewers Wade’s misuse of clustering algorithms and of soft versus hard sweeps in our genes, but to his credit does so in exquisitely lucid, evenhanded prose. For instance, he shows how the five-race continent-based scheme invoked Wade invokes is a doctored construct, born of excessive zeal to make race tidily legible.

Another essay goes back a century and a half to that formidable icon of science: Louis Agassiz, the top naturalist at Harvard at the time but who came out on the wrong side of history. In his review of a new biography of Agassiz, Andrew Benedict-Nelson argues for the importance of understanding what the world looked like on the other side of the Darwinian paradigm shift. Agassiz was all about making the Creation legible via natural history. Like Wade today, he also thought to make race scientifically legible; and, of course, in his own time, he had the kind of traction that derives from operating within the consensus view of the moment.

Agassiz’s work on melting glaciers remains prescient, however. Benedict-Nelson runs with Bruno Latour’s idea that the power of modern science derives from its ability to create stable, portable, durable inscriptions — precisely, as Benedict-Nelson explains, what Agassiz did in reading the movement of Switzerland’s Aar glacier in the mid-19th century and thence mobilizing it to scientific ends.

The essay of Stanford science historian Robert Proctor calls for understanding (and naming) our age as precisely the age of melting glaciers in order to highlight the fact that we’ve entered an age in which the earth itself is shifting under our feet and all around us. A carbon economy obviously changes the tenor of our relationship to the planet, not to mention demanding new reasons for self-scrutiny. His essay is chock-full of illuminating details regarding the interactions among science, special interests, and policy. It is also a withering critique of J. Radkau’s landmark book The Age of Ecology. This book is about environmental movements, but Proctor takes its author to task for neglecting crucial players in this history: the opponents of environmental policy. He also reminds us that several climate deniers cut their teeth denying cigarette-cancer links. And, finally, he neatly solves one of Radkau’s riddles about why secondhand smoke — and the little-talked-about subject of radioactivity in cigarette smoke — has so rarely been part of broader movements against air pollution.

Biologist Zuk’s essay is a delightful read — about how and why our desires, honed over millennia, are at odds with our long-term health. As for Smoller, the aforementioned psychiatric scientist at Harvard, he writes in his essay that the Y chromosome tends toward producing psychopathy almost by definition, which is perhaps why psychopathy is not legible as a disorder per se; even the label-happy DSM doesn’t include it. Smoller scathingly reviews the neuroscientist James Fallon’s autobiographical book, published to considerable media fanfare last year, in which Fallon happily claims the label for himself thanks to a brain scan.

The medical doctor and writer Suzanne Koven addresses the flip side of psychopathy: empathy. She asks what it means to make empathy culturally and medically legible. Notably, empathy is now the subject of hundreds of medical articles — and the subject of emerging literary writer Leslie Jamison. Koven also asks what it means to see empathy as a choice that involves remodeling one’s brain.

The final essay — by Benjamin Reiss — addresses the excesses of critical sleep studies. He focuses on three of the dozens of books that have been written on the subject, and corrects some of their inaccuracies. At the same time, he reminds us that the need to control the sleep-wake cycle has been a constant in American culture, from the time of Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s sermons (he made the wrong sleep schedule legible as the devil’s work) to the excesses of our own era’s competitive wakefulness.

Michele Pridmore-Brown

Science Editor

Cluster-struck

By Jeremy B. Yoder

CHARLES DARWIN is more usually cited for his scientific discoveries than his moral insights. In the closing pages of his travelogue The Voyage of the Beagle however, he condemns the practice of slavery — which he observed firsthand in the colonized New World — in blistering, heartfelt terms worthy of an Old Testament prophet:

Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; […] picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth!

In