Liz Borkowski
Liz, who is one of our own bloggers here on ScienceBloggers over at The Pump Handle, is a Research Associate at the George Washington University School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. She received a BA in English from the University of Delaware and wote for several years about environmental and social justice issues for Co-op America (now Green America). She lives in Washington, DC and loves public transportation and pumpkin empanadas.


Karen Starko
Karen M. Starko, M.D., a graduate of Temple University School of Medicine, completed her internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital and served as an infectious disease fellow at the Brown University Hospitals and a fellow in Clinical Medicine at Harvard University. She entered the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) of the Centers for Disease Control in 1978 and was stationed at the Arizona Department of Health Services, Phoenix, Arizona when she conducted the first quantitative study linking salicylate, most commonly aspirin, with Reye’s syndrome and a study with Floribel Mullick, M.D. of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, showing the similarities between the pathology of Reye’s syndrome and salicylate intoxication.

Dr. Starko was Acting State Epidemiologist for Arizona and Assistant Bureau Chief at the Maricopa County Health Department in Phoenix and also worked as a clinical trials expert at several San Francisco Bay area biotechnology companies including for twelve years the groundbreaking company, Genentech.

In 2009, Dr. Starko was the keynote speaker for the 35th Annual Meeting of the National Reye’s Syndrome Foundation meeting. She recently published a paper in Clinical Infectious Diseases hypothesizing that aspirin played a role in the high mortality associated with the 1918 influenza pandemic. She is currently writing a book on the history of Reye’s syndrome.


Mark Rosenberg
Mark L. Rosenberg has worked in government, academia, and the private nonprofit sector. Dr. Rosenberg currently serves as President and CEO of the Task Force for Global Health. Before assuming his current position, Dr. Rosenberg served 20 years with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including early work in smallpox eradication, enteric diseases, and HIV/AIDS. He was instrumental in establishing CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) and became the first permanent director in 1994, serving as director and Assistant Surgeon General until 1999.

The Task Force for Global Health (formerly The Task Force for Child Survival and Development) is a not-for-profit organization that helps save and improve the lives of millions of people around the world each year by addressing specific health-related issues, from infectious diseases to injury prevention to child development. Its work focuses on the most vulnerable populations, whether in Atlanta, Georgia, or communities in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The Task Force also served as the secretariat for a coalition working to promote global road traffic safety in developing nations–including UNICEF, UNDP, The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The World Health Organization, The World Bank, and The FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society.

Dr. Rosenberg has done research and consulted widely–with WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank–on effective collaboration in global health and is the lead author of Real Collaboration: What Global Health Needs to Succeed, a book that will be published by the University of California Press in 2009. Dr. Rosenberg is a member of the Institute of Medicine, where he served 7 years on the Board on Global Health. He also served as co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion.

Dr. Rosenberg has broad experience in medicine and public health, ranging from infectious diseases, to injuries, and mental health. He is board certified in both psychiatry and internal medicine with training in public policy. He was educated at Harvard University where he received his undergraduate degree as well as degrees in public policy and medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, a residency in psychiatry at the Boston Beth Israel Hospital, and a residency in preventive medicine at the CDC.


Steve Schoenbaum
Dr. Schoenbaum is Executive Vice President for Programs at The Commonwealth Fund and Executive Director of its Commission on a High Performance Health System. From 1993-1999, Dr. Schoenbaum was the medical director and then president of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care of New England, a mixed model HMO delivery system in Providence, Rhode Island. Prior to that, from 1981-1993, he was Deputy Medical Director at Harvard Community Health Plan in the Boston area, where his roles included developing specialty services, disease management programs, clinical guidelines, and enhancing the plan’s computerized clinical information systems. Nationally, he also played a significant role in the development of HEDIS (the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set).

He currently has an appointment as lecturer at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Population Medicine (formerly Ambulatory Care and Prevention), a department he helped to found, and is the author of over 150 medical publications. He is vice-chairman of the board of the Picker Institute; former president of the board of the American College of Physician Executives; a longstanding member and now chair of the International Advisory Committee to the Joyce and Irving Goldman Medical School, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel; an honorary member of the British Association of Medical Managers; and an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Before writing Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Atlanta native Mark Pendergrast authored a history of another of the city’s cornerstone institutions, the Coca-Cola company, in addition to a history of coffee and two other books.

Pendergrast graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature before receiving his Masters degree in library science from Simmons College. In 1991 he began writing full-time, and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Analyst, among other publications. He lives in Colchester, Vermont. 

Stay tuned for Mark’s first post on Inside the Outbreaks, coming up!

Nope…that’s the sound of the ScienceBlogs Book Club becoming active again!

It’s been awhile since we hosted a Book Club discussion here on the blog – not since Paul Offitt’s Autism’s False Prophets back in 2008 – but we thought it was about time to get things going again. Luckily Mark Pendergrast, author of the recently published Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service agreed to lead a discussion of the book, and starting next week you can follow along right here.

Joining Mark will be four contributors, including our own Liz Borkowski from The Pump Handle, former EIS officer Dr. Karen Starko, Dr. Mark Rosenberg of the Task Force for Global Health, and Dr. Steve Schoenbaum of The Commonwealth Fund. We’ll be posting a bit about each of them this week, so stay tuned.

We also have away seven copies of Inside the Outbreaks to give away to the readers who respond first. Email us at editorial@scienceblogs.com to get yours! And if you’re not one of the lucky seven, the book is also available for purchase on Amazon.

tags: book review, Sleeping Naked is Green, green living, environment, Vanessa Farquharson

Carbon footprints, global warming, green living — are these phrases an inconvenient truth that keep you awake at night, wondering how you can live in a more environmentally friendly way? For many people, merely contemplating these things is enough to make them give up trying to help the earth before they even start! But before you allow yourself to become discouraged, there is a book out there that will inspire you to make changes in your life that are beneficial to the earth; Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009) by Vanessa Farquharson.

This amusing and chatty book is both educational and irreverent, putting to death the notion that all environmentalists and “greenies” take themselves far too seriously. The idea behind writing and publishing this book was to provide inspiration to everyman, to convince the public that we all can make small changes to our lives that result in less damage to the environment, and to show people how easy (or difficult) those changes are to make.

Farquharson is a journalist with a taste for the finer things in life. But unable to shake her growing environmental worries three weeks after watching Al Gore film’s An Inconvenient Truth, she decides to change her life to become more environmentally friendly. Her strategy is to make one change each day for one year, announce it to the public on a blog created specifically for this purpose, and to write about that change; how it helped preserve the environment and how disruptive to her life that particular change ended up being. The author makes small changes, like giving up paper towels, to large changes, like unplugging her refrigerator (something that I have long contemplated doing, but cannot due to the wildlife roaming my apartment). Farquharson’s cat also makes changes, like changing to corn cob litter, which the author enthuses about. (After years of pet care experience, I always recommend corn cob litter to all my cat and small animal clients as being the best litter to use in small NYC apartments.)

Farquharson’s rather dry and sometimes sardonic sense of humor combined with a wonderful storytelling instinct makes her book more than just a “how to” guide or checklist; it is a personal journal/journey; informative and interesting in turns, and always amusing. I often felt like we were friends, sitting in a coffee shop and talking about a variety of topics from how to save the environment without smelling bad to looking for love. She writes about how certain “green” lifestyle changes didn’t work out so well for her (but could work better for other people) and discusses what I think is her strongest criticism of the green movement: the inability of individuals to calculate how important each lifestyle change is to the environment, which leaves those who wish to change their habits floundering around in the dark trying to decide which changes have the most impact. I agree with Farquharson that it would be immensely satisfying to be able to visualize the importance of one’s changes, and would likely broaden the appeal of the environmental movement overall.

There were a few lifestyle changes that Farquharson made that were not well explained, and I mention these because I was genuinely confused, not because I am trying to split hairs. The author doesn’t say how giving up chewing gum or stopping Q-tips use help save the environment, for example, and I always thought that using a microwave was more environmentally-friendly than using either an electric or gas-powered range, yet she advocates not purchasing one (but there is no explanation why).

This humorous book provides an accessible and realistic look into one woman’s struggle to make personal lifestyle changes that benefit her community and her world. Even though this book originally was published as a series of blog entries, this is the first example of a book that I’ve read that successfully makes that magical leap from blog to book. Additionally, unlike a blog, it is possible to read this book on the subway or an airplane, or when you lack internet access. And without getting eyestrain. Since I am also trying to “reduce, reuse and recycle,” and because I think you will really like this book, I am happy to mail my copy of Sleeping Naked Is Green to the first person who emails me or comments here asking for it.

Vanessa Farquharson is an arts reporter and film critic at the National Post, based in Toronto, Canada. Her blog, Green as a Thistle, tracked her year-long green adventure. She has been published in Eye Weekly and the Ottawa Citizen, profiled on Treehugger.com and featured numerous times on CBC Radio.

previously reviewed

Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I’d say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due … it will be an excellent reference.

This is a well done and highly recommended book.

Birds… is highly specialized. It deals with only one topic: Bird flight. I like that. Who needs just another book on birds. Demonstrating to the little ones that there are questions that can be asked about nature, and interesting explanations, and even some experiments, one can do is a clear step above the pretty picture and the cute story.

The illustrations are excellent. You may have seen Wynne’s illustrations previously in the African Savanna book (which, as an older volume is a great bargain at less than 10 bucks). Both author and illustrator of Birds… have been producing excellent kids books for a long time.

At the very least, this book has value because it introduces kids to the fact that birds don’t just sit there looking pretty and making noise, and they don’t just fly from place. They have more complex behaviors that vary across species and across context.

By the way, the author, Caroline Arnold, is a home-girl from Minneapolis! As you can tell because of the excellence of her work.

Other book reviews

tags: book review, Unholy Business, religious antiquities, biblical antiquities, fraud, Christianity, Judaism, Nina Burleigh

There are two different types
of people in the world,
those who want to know,
and those who want to believe.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

In November 2002, an ancient carved limestone burial box designed to hold the disarticulated skeleton of a dead person was put on public display in Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum. Although common throughout Israel, this particular box, known as an ossuary, was unusual because it was inscribed. Even more remarkable, its ancient Aramaic inscription — “Ya’akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua” — translated to read, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” This sent waves of hysteria through the Christian and Jewish communities, causing tens of thousands of faithful to mob the museum. But even before the ossuary was publicly displayed, experts declared the inscription to be a fraud. Unfazed by facts, the religious preferred to believe it was real. In Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land (NYC: Collins; 2008), the author, Nina Burleigh, uncovers the trail followed by forged biblical antiquities, from illegal excavations in Israel to a world-class museum in Canada.

Since the early 20th century, at least, young earth creationists have attempted to blame Charles Darwin for genocide, world wars, and whatever political movements seemed most threatening at one time or another (i.e. communism). What Darwin is faulted with changes with the times, but most recently young earth creationists have focused on hot topics from Darwin’s own era: racism and slavery. From the Answers in Genesis tract Darwin’s Plantation to the upcoming (and unethically produced) documentary The Voyage That Shook the World, creationists claim that Darwin’s evolutionary vision undermined the “consanguinity” of all members of the human species, thus justifying slavery.

While acknowledging the popularity of these views among creationists, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s latest book Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s View of Human Evolution does not attempt to direct refute creationist propaganda. It is not a defense of Darwin, but rather an explanation of how the famous naturalist integrated his concerns over racism and slavery into his work. Born into a high-class Whig household Darwin imbibed the anti-slavery sentiments of his family early and hung onto them throughout his life. Darwin may have had a paternalistic view that blacks, native peoples, &c. were culturally inferior to whites, but this was about as far as his racism extended. Darwin was truly revolted by slavery and the racist science of contemporaries like the creationist naturalist Louis Agassiz.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Desmond and Moore’s new work, however, is that human evolution played an important part in Darwin’s ruminations about evolution from the very beginning. Darwin often made comparisons between what he observed among animals in the wild to what he saw in human society, especially in terms of sexual selection. Indeed, even though the second half of the Descent of Man is thought of as Darwin’s fullest explication of sexual selection, Darwin had actually been thinking about it for decades, even comparing the well-armed sailors of the Beagle to flashy male birds trying to attract the attention of females.

Questions of human evolution and the common ancestry of all races were on Darwin’s mind almost constantly, but it was such a complex (and loaded) topic that he held back until he had collected enough information to more fully make his case. Darwin had collected a lot of material for his large (and ultimately unpublished) manuscript, Natural Selection, but the rush to publish On the Origin of Species caused him to shift focus and excise everything he had written about humans. This was probably just as well. If On the Origin of Species had considered race and human evolution critics surely would have seized on those passages for the prospect that humans had evolved has always been central to the controversy surrounding evolution. (It didn’t matter that Darwin was cautious; his critics acted as if he had written about human evolution in On the Origin of Species anyway.)

While Darwin provides the central character of the book, though, what really makes Darwin’s Sacred Cause unique is that Desmond and Moore wander far afield to explain the social and political world Darwin was situated in. Darwin, his family, and close friends form a central point of discussion, but the dramatis personae inflates quickly. While exciting, this requires the utmost attention from the reader to catch all the changes. The book is so rich in historical detail that it can fill a reader’s appetite rather quickly, and even though it is only about 375 pages it takes much longer to read than the average popular science book of the same length. This is a good thing, but I only mention this point for potential readers who might be expecting lighter fare.

While the evolution of Darwin’s science can be viewed from multiple perspectives (Darwin as a geologist, Darwin as a young clergyman, &c.), Darwin’s Sacred Cause provides one of the most compelling. Beyond Darwin’s motivations and inspirations, Desmond and Moore aptly describe Darwin’s interaction with some of the thorniest social and political issues of the day. If you are planning on picking up any books to celebrate this special “Year of Evolution”, Darwin’s Sacred Cause should definitely be near the top of your list.

For more video book reviews by Joanne Manaster, see her page on YouTube.

As I was strolling through town a few weeks ago, I saw a flyer advertising a talk on campus by Prof. Barbara Oakley, talking about her book “Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend.”

I couldn’t go to the talk, due to a conflicting engagement, but the book was in my review pile, so I popped it up to the top and plowed through it.

The book is quite a fun read.
It starts off as a personal story, with the death of the author’s sister, and her reflection on the life of her sister, and why she was as she was: was it genetic, environmental, due to neurological changes from severe viral illness, or some mix if all of the above.

The author leans to the genetic explanation as a root cause, with enviroment and contingent events considered as triggers or suppressors of genetic propensities.
There is some interesting discussion of brain structure, and a lot of reliance of functional MRI studies, which the author is clearly familiar with. There is also some good discussion of allele variations and correlations with various clinical syndromes, as well as the game theoretic aspect of why such propensities would persist in a population despite their apparent low fitness in many cases.

From there, the book takes two uneasy and parallel courses: on the one hand it goes through a variety of psychological syndromes, which the author initially puts under the umbrella of “Machiavellian” and later refers to a “Borderpath” – the terms cover a wide variety clinical and sub-clinical psychological syndromes, generally short of outright sociopathy, but covering a range of symptoms.
Broadly speaking, she is talking about unempathetic, manipulative and irrational personalities – most people have encountered them, and the discussion of their tactics, and how people deal with them or fail to deal with them is interesting and potentially useful should you ever encounter, and recognise such.

On the other hand, the author uses a series of examples from history, and in her personal life, her sister; and argues for how people ranging from Mao through to Enron executives are such borderpaths, and how this explains much. She also contrasts examples of “good” strong personalities – people who were ruthless, short tempered and often unpleasant, but were not borderpaths. She explores how borderpaths can rise to power in social structures, and the effects they have on other people and the functioning of the structures they manipulate. In particular the heritability of the genetic vulnerability to such syndromes is interesting and could explain much.

It is a good read, and provides a good set of “just so” stories; but the whole book left me slightly unconvinced, despite the abundant footnotes and references.

First, too much of the evidence is sparse and anecdotal. I am not entirely convinced that all her examples were actually borderpaths, by her definition, nor that some of her counterexamples were not borderpaths, again, by her definition. But the clinical evidence is lacking either way.

The flaws of the book can be illustrated by two examples: in chapter 9, discussing Mao, there is a figure (9.5) a photograph of a particularly tortuous mass execution in China.
The problem is, that the photo is from 1915, at which time Mao was 22 and a student teacher, not generally going around ordering mass executions and torture. So it proves nothing except that there was some systematic general nastiness in the general vicinity of where Mao spent some formative years.
The second example is in the last chapter, where the author suddenly mentions how untalented Machiavellians, who have inserted themselves into the high echelons in the monolithic American educational system, might explain the poor performance of the educational system.

Ok.
Except, the America educational system is not monolithic at any level, some states exsert some control over the local K-12 system, but even there most control is local and dispersed.
Further, the author provides no actual evidence that there are any peculiar abundances of Machivellians, talented, or not, within the educational system. Not in comparison with other social structures, nor in comparison with other, apparently better performing, educational systems.
In fact, the poor performance of the American educational system is not explained, in so much as how it is poor, how poor it is, or which bits of it are poor.

So, I’m picking a little bit here, but this is also illustrative of the general flaw. There are an awful lot of assertions providing explanation for some assorted badnesses, but the chain of reasoning is often lacking. Too much anecdote, too many poorly justified examples and too little evidence for actual clinical syndrome being an underlying cause.

And, the book really does not explain, at all, why Rome fell.

Evil Genes
Barbara Oakley
Prometheus Books
ISBN 978-1-59102-665-5 (ppb)

When I was growing up, I had no introduction to evolutionary theory. Sure, I assumed it was true, and I went through the usual long phase of dinosaur fandom, but I was never taught anything at all about evolution throughout my grade school education, and what little I did know was largely stamp-collecting. That all changed, though, when I went off to college.

I can’t credit the schools I went to, unfortunately: most of my undergraduate education (with a few wonderful exceptions) was the usual mega-survey course, where the instructor stuck a funnel in our heads and poured in facts for a term — so more stamp-collecting. What happened to me, though, was that I was struck by two thunderbolts at almost the same time. The hot science book that was published during my freshman year was E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, and I bought it and devoured it and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was more buckets of facts, but in this case, these facts were deployed to illuminate an overarching idea about how the world works…and I found it wonderful.

The second thunderbolt was Stephen Jay Gould. He was doing the same thing, promoting ideas powerfully with evidence and rhetoric, and he was far easier to read than Wilson, and communicated even more clearly. It was also wonderful.

Of course, if you know anything about the intellectual landscape of the 1970s, you know that I had acquired as two scientific god-parents two warring camps who were hellbent against one another in a period of angry evolutionary ferment. I am the product of a broken home! It was especially tragic, because in my naiveté, I thought most of the conflict was a waste, that each side had an important perspective, and that the right answer was an appreciation of the power of selection and an understanding of the other modes of change operating over history.

I’ve long been interested in the battle royale that went on in that period — it’s like a child’s morbid dwelling on the scab of an ugly parental divorce — and in particular with that central figure, Steve Gould. Last week I was sent a copy of a book by David F. Prindle, Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, so of course I had to read it.

This is going to be a mixed review. Overall, it’s a good book and brings together some important insights, but at the same time, it’s a book about an author I’ve read obsessively for more than 30 years now, so I’m also going to pick on many of the details. Don’t let my personal investment in the subject deter you from reading Prindle’s book!

There are some key points that Prindle makes that are absolutely central to understanding Gould. He was most definitely a political man and he was strongly leftist (but not, as the book makes clear, a Marxist…a baseless claim that was often trundled out to slam him, ineffectively — since he also wouldn’t have regarded it as an insult). Gould was an advocate of human equality and social justice, and you can’t read him without seeing that ideological agenda dripping from every page. Prindle puts that front and center, and makes it the lens that we have to view Gould through, and I think that is entirely appropriate. It also clarifies those ugly battles: what stirred the vehemence was not just the scientific interpretation of the evidence, but an awareness of the political implications of those ideas. Gould was not at all averse to waving the banner of his political cause while charging into the fray with his scientific colleagues and critics.

Another powerful attribute that Gould had was that he made science passionate and personal — he was the popularizer of science who had a direct shunt from his heart to his pen. No science writer has equalled him in that, and it was central to his appeal. He made science human and important.

Now none of those properties — politics, passion, and personality — are necessarily regarded as virtues in the scientific community. We’re supposed to be dispassionate, aloof, objective, non-partisan, and there’s a prejudice that you’re a lesser man (yeah, it’s also a male bias) if you step away from the illusion of impartiality. Prindle treads the difficult line well, showing both how Gould used his political position as a strength, but also how it was a weakness, especially since it provoked such animosity in his critics. Of course, he also explains that the demeanor of objectivity by his intellectual opponents was also often a rhetorical pose, just as political as Gould’s overt position.

So I think it’s a good and accurate book that examines Gould from a political perspective, and especially in his case, that is a very useful viewing angle. It’s not a hagiography, either, but an honest assessment of Gould’s contributions to the history and politics of science, and there are a few places where it is uncomfortably critical of the man…and I can’t really argue against Prindle’s judgment in many of those cases.

The book also has some weaknesses, though. One is a contrast: Gould is an engagingly open writer who tells us not only what he thinks, but how he came to think that way, and that is tellingly illustrated at many points in the book. But who is David F. Prindle? The author does not show through at any point at all, and often the perspective is of an outsider looking in, making notes of the antics of those belligerently evocative scientists, and pretending to be completely uninvolved. We know you’re not, Dr Prindle! Take a lesson from your subject!

That isolation from the subject sometimes weakens his analysis. For instance, Prindle wonders at some length about the absence of critiques of J. Phillipe Rushton from the Gould corpus, and seems to think it odd that a such a scientist should be neglected. It didn’t seem unusual at all to me, but then I share Gould’s politics: he didn’t bother with Rushton because Rushton is a racist crank. Simple. Remember, this is a book about the importance of Gould’s politics, and those politics would have informed such a dismissal.

Prindle is also not a biologist, but a professor of government. Generally he does a good job of summarizing Gould’s views on contingency, and pluralism, and punctuated equilibrium, etc., but I think that’s because he has steeped himself deeply on Gould’s own writings on those subjects. When he walks into the broader domain of biology, though, there are some places where he missteps. For instance, he actually concedes some plausibility to the creationist arguments from the improbability of successive useful mutations. Prindle is most definitely not on the creationist side, but still — that has always been one of their weaker arguments, frequently refuted. In one place, he even cites a counter-claim by Ann Coulter, which was jarring — does anyone take Coulter seriously? It felt very much out of place.

As I said, this is not hagiography, so I was also surprised to see one criticism that should have been made that was not. Gould’s reputation rested on his strength as a writer, and when he was on, he was very, very good. Personally, I think that if we extracted the best of his essays, he was the best science writer of the 20th century. Unfortunately, he also had a weakness: an extravagant prolixity that at its worst, made him almost unreadable. If we compare him to Dawkins, for example, Dawkins’ strength as a writer has always been his clarity — with Dawkins, you are always on a bullet train straight to the heart of his point. Gould was more the slow but elegant train that took long detours through the scenery, occasionally stopping to give the passengers time to take in a museum or the opera. It was wonderful when it worked, but sometimes, especially in his later years as he tried to pack more and more stops on the itinerary, it got in the way of his message. His last book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, is particularly afflicted with the excesses of his style, which means it is less well read than it deserves.

There is another, more serious omission from Prindle’s book, one that perhaps is a product of some of my biases. Where is development? Gould was not a developmental biologist by any means, but one of his frequent messages, noted in the book, is that evolution is driven by much more than natural selection. And one thread that came up frequently (and admittedly, I am perhaps sensitive to it) was the role of developmental processes in shaping evolution. It was a long-term interest of Gould’s, as well, and can be traced back to his first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Prindle mentions it briefly in a discussion of Gould’s appreciation of formalism — the idea that form imposes constraints on and enables particular opportunities for evolution, steering lineages into general ranges of potential — but otherwise, it’s a large and neglected gap in the Gouldian weltanschauung. I missed it.

Furthermore, Prindle notes that it was an important part of his final synthesis. He even quotes from Structure:

These discoveries [of homologous processes in diverse forms] had caused a “general shift in viewpoint—from a preference for atomic adaptationism…to a recognition that homologous developmental pathways…strongly shape current possibilities ‘from the inside’.” Therefore, evolutionary biologists should now recognize that “these internal constraints can surely claim equal weight with natural selection in any full account of the causes of any particular evolutionary change.”

It’s right there. In other parts of the book, Prindle points out that Gould, despite his reputation for railing against panadaptationist explanation, often seems to be quite content to accept the principles of selection and even discusses the importance of selection. Prindle suggests that this is because he has no better explanation than selection, rather than the more pragmatic reason that as a scientist, he knew that selection was an irrefutable phenomenon, so of course he acknowledged it. It is important. However, at the same time, Gould wasn’t just conceding selection for lack of an alternative, he was a radical pluralist who had many other processes, including development and certainly including selection, to which he accorded considerable importance.