The Woman and The Hour - Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.
42(2), 177–178 Spring 2006

Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.20146
© 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
B O O K R EV I EW S
Lois A. Reynolds and E. M. Tansey (Eds.). The MRC Applied Psychology Unit. Wellcome
Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine, Vol. 16. London: The Wellcome Trust, 2003.
111 pp. £10.00 (paper). ISBN 0-85484-088-5.
This volume is an edited transcription of a June 2001 Witness Seminar organized by the
History of Twentieth Century Medicine Group of the Wellcome Trust Center for the History
of Medicine at University College, London. Since 1993, Witness Seminars have brought to-
gether clinicians, scientists, and historians associated with a particular event or circumstance
in twentieth-century medicine. These informal seminars, or collective oral histories, have
multiple purposes: to inform those interested in the history of recent medicine and medical
science; to supplement existing, published historical records and provide historians with new
resources; and to press upon clinicians and scientists the importance of their lives and work,
as well as the need for preserving and depositing their personal materials to appropriate
archives for current and future historical research.
This volume addresses the creation and research activities of the world-class Medical
Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit (today the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit).
The unit witnessed the leadership of six men: Kenneth Craik (1944–1945), Sir Frederic
Bartlett (1945–1951), Norman Macworth (1951–1958), Donald Broadbent (1958–1974),
Alan Baddeley (1974–1997), and William Marslen-Wilson (since 1997). It was first created
within the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory, in 1944, by its second director, Sir Frederic
Bartlett. The Industrial Health Research Board, a nonprofit scientific organization, had been
promoting ways of applying psychology and physiology to issues like worker productivity and
occupational health within industry and commerce. The armed services had also requested
experiments on submarine escapes, fatigue resistance, ability to sustain attention, and ma-
chine and weaponry design and display.
Beginning with the use of computers as models for human information processing, the
emergence of cognitive psychology in the late 1950s led to the unit’s focus on short-term mem-
ory research, specifically the information-processing model and signal-detection studies in-
volving selective attention. In addition to trying to establish general principles about human
performance of scientific interest, the unit also studied human behavior of practical value, such
as shared attention in air traffic control. Short-term memory research was expanded to include
testing performance in adverse environmental conditions, as well as measuring perceptual,
motor, and intellectual skills. Sponsorships from British Telecom, IBM, Xerox, and the Coal
Board continued, as the unit continued to address contemporary problems. The computer boom
of the 1970s and 1980s led to new research sponsors in industry, and these decades also wit-
nessed a shift in research focus from normal people in adverse environments to people with
neuropsychological problems resulting from various forms of brain damage, and the impact of
such damage. The early 1990s was marked by collaborations between academic and clinical
researchers in an attempt to study the relationship between cognition and emotion and mem-
ory breakdown in problems such as closed-head injury, amnesia, and rehabilitating memory.
The unit’s name was changed to the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in 1998, to reflect the
current basic research that is being conducted in psychology and neuroscience.
For over half a century, the Applied Psychology Unit has played a central role in the com-
munity of experimental psychologists and within British psychology as a whole. The value of
177
178 BOOK REVIEWS
Witness Seminars such as this is that the principal characters involved in the story of interest
are still alive—very often still actively at work—and can therefore provide us with unique,
first-person accounts of what living and working through the recent medical past was like.
This volume in particular also benefited from an invaluable sample of wonderful photographs
from the 1950s and 1960s that portrayed scientists at work—with either equipment they had
built or were using or with subjects they were testing.
It is unfortunate that only two of the six unit directors were able to attend this Witness
Seminar. The presence of others would have added more detail to some of the research areas
described in the transcript, possibly making the transitions between speakers and topics some-
what smoother. As is common with collective oral histories, it is challenging for readers who
were not a part of the historical event being recorded to follow some of the threads discussed
by participants who were present at the time and who are therefore highly familiar with them.
In that respect, the role of the editor in clarifying and expanding such reminiscences is cru-
cial, and such a task was undertaken quite well here. However, it would have been desirable
to have more information about some meta-scientific issues addressed only in passing, such
as (1) the role that military or commercial sensitivity played in the research that was con-
ducted and its subsequent publication; (2) the type of theoretical research, financed by the
American military budget, that was conducted, and how it was different, if at all, from that
funded by the British military; (3) the types of collaborations that the unit had with other en-
tities in Britain and/or the United States; (4) the existing tension or pressure between trying
to generate good theory—which takes time—and having to address the immediate, practical
problems of the current sponsor; and even (5) the size and composition of the unit through-
out its years. The short reminiscences and abrupt transitions between topics were perhaps due
to the brevity of the Seminar itself (for which the volume should not be faulted). However, a
more concerted effort could have been made to provide ample time to expand on the research
conducted by the unit, and on the social, cultural, and institutional contexts within which it
was conducted. Overall, the transcriptions of these collective oral histories are necessary and
valuable contributions to the published historical record.
Reviewed by INGRID G. FARRERAS, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Hood College,
Frederick, MD.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 42(2), 178–180 Spring 2006
Robert W. Rieber and David K. Robinson (Eds.). The Essential Vygotsky. New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004. 589 pp. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-306-48552-4.
This book aims to provide the reader with “the most important and most interesting
contributions” (p. xiii) selected from the six volumes of The Collected Works of L. S.
Vygotsky (1987–1999). It consists of a prologue, a preface, an imaginary dialogue with
Vygotsky, 19 readings (chapters) divided into six sections, a bibliography of references in
English about Vygotsky, and an index. The six sections are: “Problems of General
Psychology: Thinking and Speech”; “Fundamentals of Defectology (Abnormal Psychology
and Learning Disabilities)”; “Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology: Crisis in
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

BOOK REVIEWS 179
Psychology”; “The History of the Development of High Term Mental Functions: Exegesis of
Vygotsky’s Text”; “Child Psychology: Vygotsky’s Conception of Psychological
Development”; and “Scientific Legacy: Tool and Sign in the Development of the Child.”
Each section is introduced by an editor and/or one of the five collaborators, all of whom have
studied Vygotsky in considerable depth. (Bruner’s introduction is, with a little alteration, his
foreword to the first volume of The Collected Works.) The aim in these introductory essays
is to “explore various aspects of Vygotsky’s biography in order to explain certain parts of his
work and his writing” (p. xiii).
Given the existence of The Collected Works, The Essential Vygotsky is presumably in-
tended for those not well versed in Vygotsky’s research, but who wish to become at least
acquainted with, if not expert in, the area. If so, this book is not particularly helpful in that
regard. First, Vygotsky’s style of exposition is such that what he meant, or may have meant,
by many key concepts is not clear, nor does it always become clear as one works through
the readings. Some concepts are so open to misinterpretation that a glossary of terms would
be an important supplement, but none is provided. Second, comments in one introductory
essay are sometimes at odds with comments in another. For example, Rieber tells us that,
for Vygotsky:
Cognition and speech can emerge along different modalities, which may be more or
less dependent or independent of one another. Furthermore, this relationship between
cognition and language is not necessarily constant over the course of the child’s de-
velopment. The pre-language phase in the development of the cognitive and commu-
nicative aspects of the child’s behaviour is very important, and emotional experiences
in the first five years of life are important social events that may affect future devel-
opments in the child’s life. (p. 28)
This is hard to reconcile with Bruner’s judgment that, for Vygotsky, language and
thought fit so well together that “there was scarcely a situation in which one would not find
words to fit the experience” (p. 13), nor with Ratner’s claim that, in Vygotsky’s theory, per-
ception, emotions, language, learning, and so on, are higher, conscious, psychological phe-
nomena that process incoming stimuli, and that such processes are humanly created artifacts
(pp. 401, 402). And it is not immediately obvious that Ratner’s attribution to Vygotsky of a
complete severance between natural, biologically programmed, lower, elementary processes
and cultural, higher, conscious, psychological processes (pp. 401–404) is consistent, either
with Rieber’s or with Vygotsky’s general view that both psychological and neurological
processes are implicated. There are other inconsistencies both within and across these essays
that hinder attempts to come to grips with Vygotsky’s complex body of thought. Naturally, ex-
perts will differ in their interpretations, but some editorial intervention—to clarify, to recon-
cile, to explain—would have better served the reader.
Vygotsky’s most important contribution was his attempt to demonstrate the encultura-
tion of human consciousness. He is not just important historically; his ideas are considered
relevant to our present-day understanding of cultural-historical psychology. They must,
then, be tested, conceptually and, where possible, empirically. Across the Vygotsky litera-
ture, there has been, I suggest, too little of the former, and the introductory essays do little
to remedy this. No doubt it was not an editorial aim, but it would be a mistake to treat
Vygotsky in the hagiolatrous fashion that has characterized theoretical psychology’s treat-
ment of Wittgenstein.
Reviewed by FIONA J. HIBBERD, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Psychology,
University of Sydney, Australia.

180 BOOK REVIEWS
THE EDITORS COMMENT:

The editors of The Essential Vygotsky are grateful to the journal for reviewing the volume
and to the reviewer for describing its contents; by doing so, they help us to invite people to read
Vygotsky, reread him, and read more deeply. As to the criticisms that follow the description,
most are symptomatic of the current state of scholarship on Vygotsky, and in some of the areas
with which he is identified (e.g., speech development). We wanted our collection to provide an
introduction, but also an intermediate challenge, to those readers who are ready to delve into
some fascinating material; we therefore thought that we needed to offer more than one view of
this important thinker, whose own work indeed thrusts into many directions and requires inter-
pretation. It seemed to us that the strictest kind of editorial control on the section introductions
would be counter to Vygotsky’s own spirit. As we worked together to produce the volume, con-
tributors and editors entered into dialogues with one another, to make sure that we understood
one another. Emphases sometimes diverged. An examination of the context of the seemingly di-
vergent quotations and descriptions, noted by the reviewer, will reveal that there are no funda-
mental disagreements, though admittedly there are still many avenues for interpretation.
We certainly agree that hagiography is not very helpful in scholarship. All the same, as we
worked together, the contributors could not help but increase their admiration for this intellectual
leader, who had a mere decade to present his ideas, find so many connections, and inspire so
much research, still going on today. Disagreements on seminal thinkers are not only inevitable
but also necessary (Freud comes to mind). Let posterity be the judge; we cannot hurry history.
ROBERT W. RIEBER, City University of New York, and DAVID K. ROBINSON, Truman State
University.
Ross A. Slotten. The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 648 pp. $39.50. ISBN 0-231-13010-4.
The place Wallace has occupied in history has, until recently, been straightforward.
Sometime in June 1858, Darwin received a paper, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart
Indefinitely from the Original Type,” from a young naturalist in the East Indies in the middle
of an eight-year collecting expedition. The opinions described in the paper closely resembled
views on the origin of species Darwin had set out in two essays of 1842 and 1844. So far, these
had been shown only to his closest scientific friends and colleagues. Two of them—the geolo-
gist Sir Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker—were approached by Darwin. They shared his con-
cern that he would lose priority. The solution they came up with was to arrange for Wallace’s
paper and a hastily assembled one by Darwin to be read jointly before the Linnaean Society on
July 1, 1858. The event caused no unnatural excitement, and very few saw its significance.
Historically, it is, of course, seen as a defining moment in the birth of evolutionary science.
From this fact arises the problem conventional histories of science have with Wallace.
There were two Wallaces: one, with Darwin, the midwife of modern biology; the other the spir-
itualist, antivaccinationist, land reformer, socialist, vegetarian, and, in later years,
Swedenborgian, who engaged in a variety of projects embarrassing to his more conventional sci-

BOOK REVIEWS 181
entific colleagues. Particularly painful to Darwin and his close allies was Wallace’s assertion,
from the late 1860s, that some special intelligent force must have guided human evolution.
Ross Slotten’s book is very conscious of the second Wallace, fully discussing all
Wallace’s “fads” and “enthusiasms,” and giving very clear accounts of just how far these put
a distance between Wallace and many of his scientific contemporaries. It is one of the merits
of the book that Slotten balances the often cold, punishing, and ungenerous character of the
English scientific community in the late nineteenth century against the elaborate and suc-
cessful efforts of Darwin and Wallace to present a “gentlemanly” picture of their behavior to
the world. As Darwin put it, “I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect—and very few things
in my life have been more satisfactory to me—that we have never felt any jealousy towards
each other, though in one sense rivals” (as quoted in Slotten, 2004, p. 284). Slotten’s biogra-
phy is a thorough, well-written account. Though intended for a wider audience than the
Darwin scholar, it is an excellent book to which to refer students for succinct descriptions of
episodes in Wallace’s life and good summaries of his arguments.
Many of the clues to these two apparently contradictory Wallaces can be found in
Jonathan Rose’s recent book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). Rose
covers also the lower middle class to which Wallace’s family more properly belonged. Partly
due to the difficulties of getting an education and the lack of formal training in the academy,
scholars from that tradition tended toward eclecticism—not exactly ignoring but not seeing
the relevance of disciplinary boundaries and formal academic constraints. Moreover, having
succeeded once in breaking through by their wits and application, why not again in another
sphere? Added to this was the autodidact’s sense of the democracy of knowledge. In Wallace’s
case, this led him into some outstandingly bad judgments. From a more sympathetic stand-
point, however, it meant that most theories had a chance of serious consideration, however
strange or new. One is reminded of the relationship between the novelist Thomas Hardy and
Leslie Stephen, his editor for a while. Stephen’s role was to discourage excesses and tidy the
prose style; fortunately, however, his warning to Hardy on the latter’s tendency to the “im-
proper,” as decreed by Victorian respectability, was ignored. Wallace could perhaps have done
with a Stephen, but not to have listened to him very much.
REFERENCE
Rose, J. (2001). The intellectual life of the British working classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Reviewed by GRETA JONES, Professor of History, University of Ulster at Jordanstown,

Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland.
Jo Anne Van Tilburg. Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her
Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island. New York: Scribner, 2003. 351 pp. $27.00
(cloth). ISBN 0-7432-4490-X.
Rapa Nui—Easter Island—surely ranks as one of the most remarkable places on Earth:
for its remoteness, its “mystery,” its archaeological treasures, and for the quest to understand

182 BOOK REVIEWS
its enigmatic history. A mere 160 square kilometers in area, and situated at the far southeast-
ern corner of the Polynesian triangle, Rapa Nui was discovered and colonized by intrepid
Polynesian voyagers led by their chief, Hotu Matua, around 900 A.D. Over the following cen-
turies, the descendants of these open-ocean voyagers created a unique island culture whose
most distinctive characteristic was the competitive carving of giant stone statues of chiefly an-
cestors, and their erection around the island’s coast on numerous temple platforms. By the
time that Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen stumbled upon Rapa Nui on Easter Sunday, 1722,
the Rapa Nui people had apparently exceeded their fragile island’s agricultural carrying ca-
pacity, and descended into a state of endemic intertribal warfare. While some of the giant stat-
ues were still standing, many had already been pulled down as one tribe after another as-
saulted the symbols of their enemies’ ancestors.
By the time that anthropology and prehistoric archaeology were emerging as modern sci-
entific and academic endeavors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Rapa
Nui population had been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. This was not only the
result of the internal conflicts over land and resources, but also the horrendous effects of dis-
ease, slave raiding, and colonialism that had ravaged the island throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury. The slightly more than 100 indigenous, disease-racked survivors had been herded into a
single small settlement while the island’s undulating, grassy landscape had been appropriated
under Chilean government authority as a vast sheep ranch.
Into this setting—made even more bizarre by the onset of World War I and the presence
of a major German naval fleet in the South Pacific, not to mention a native revolt led by the
Rapa Nui prophetess Angata—sailed the Mana expedition of Katherine and Scoresby
Routledge. Katherine, heiress to a Quaker mercantile fortune who attended Oxford when
women were still barely tolerated, had set herself the task of unraveling the archaeological and
ethnographic mysteries of the island. Her aristocratic husband Scoresby seems to have ex-
pended most of his energies alienating everyone, from the Mana’s crew to the local tribal lead-
ers. Yet between March 1914 and August 1915, Katherine Routledge managed to accumulate
an incredibly valuable record of Rapa Nui archaeological sites and ethnographic lore that still
forms the foundations for all modern work on the island’s history. In part, this achievement
was due to the close cooperative relationship she formed with one islander, Juan Tepano.
Although her methods of excavation and recording were crude by modern standards, her
ethnographic insights led her to a fundamentally correct conclusion: the enigmatic statues had
been constructed by the immediate ancestors of the Polynesian Rapa Nui, and not by some
putative earlier “megalithic culture.”
In this engaging, extensively researched book, Jo Anne Van Tilburg (herself a leading
authority on Rapa Nui archaeology) tells the hauntingly tragic story of Katherine
Routledge, the trouble-plagued Mana expedition, and Katherine’s fateful struggles with
mental illness. Any scholar who has even a passing familiarity with Easter Island will
know of Routledge’s The Mystery of Easter Island: The Story of an Expedition, the semi-
popular book that relates the core of her findings (her intended scholarly monograph never
came to fruition). But few would have any sense of just how complex and at times tortured
were the interpersonal relations that lay behind Routledge’s Rapa Nui research. A work of
exquisite scholarship and at the same time a breathless read into the early days of modern
anthropology, Van Tilburg’s Among Stone Giants deserves a respected place in the annals
of the history of social science.
Reviewed by PATRICK V. KIRCH, Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology, University of

California, Berkeley, CA.

BOOK REVIEWS 183
George M. Marsden. Jonathan Edwards:A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
640 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 03-000-9693-3. $22.00 (paper). ISBN 03-001-0596-7.
In 1879, Noah Porter, president of Yale and one of the last great “old” psychologists in
America, wrote a brief essay on the history of mental and moral science in Yale College in
which he described a century and a half of faithful Christian engagement with the latest philo-
sophical thinking. The frontispiece portrait chosen for that essay was of Jonathan Edwards, a
student during Yale’s earliest years, whom Porter depicted as the patriarch and exemplar of
Yale’s proud tradition.
Porter’s portrayal of Edwards illustrates a broader point that cannot be developed further
in this brief review: Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the famous American theologian, re-
vivalist, and philosopher, is relevant to the history of American psychology. Just as historians
of American psychology have failed to take sufficient account of Edwards in their stories,
George Marsden detects a similar neglect of religious figures in American history more gen-
erally, a preference for Benjamin Franklin over Edwards, for example, although both individ-
uals had a similarly enormous impact on American history.
This general neglect is certainly not due to a lack of specialized scholarly attention.
Edwards studies have exploded over the last half-century. Marsden’s work is a culmination of
these studies, a breathtaking synthesis of this still-burgeoning literature giving us the most
complete and well-balanced portrayal of Edwards yet available. While some biographers have
tended to secularize Edwards, most famously in Perry Miller’s intellectual biography of 1949,
Marsden helps us to understand Edwards the theologian, the pastor, the preacher, the revival-
ist, and the “saint,” to use Edwards’s own term. This success is undoubtedly facilitated by the
fact that Marsden sympathizes with Edwards’s Calvinism. Repeatedly Marsden argues (con-
vincingly, I think) that Edwards’s critique of the Enlightenment was acute, even prophetic.
Nevertheless, he succeeds where other religious historians have not in maintaining an ad-
mirable critical distance from his subject, succeeding in his attempt to portray Edwards as “a
real person,” prone to perfectionism and pride. Also noteworthy is Marsden’s success in show-
ing how Edwards’s theological and philosophical works were of one piece. Indeed, Marsden’s
work is extremely helpful as a general guide and introduction to Edwards’s major theological
and philosophical works, explaining the contexts of each.
A Life also nicely elucidates the many local, colonial, and international political struggles
that shaped Edwards’s life and thought, the ecstatic hopes and heartbreaking disappointments of
the religious awakenings that Edwards led and interpreted, and his paradoxical status as a “con-
servative revolutionary.” Most useful to the readers of this journal, perhaps, is Marsden’s sus-
tained account of Edwards’s lifelong obsession with Enlightenment thought, beginning with his
legendary days at Yale, and his lifelong desire to construct a Calvinistic answer to the
Enlightenment and its theological correlates (especially “Arminianism”). The thing that
Edwards found most disturbing about the humanism of the Enlightenment was that it rejected
his most cherished theological belief: “the sovereignty of God” (i.e., that God controls and or-
dains whatsoever comes to pass). Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, a philosophical defense of tra-
ditional Calvinistic ideas regarding free will and moral agency, a work that haunted many nine-
teenth-century American believers in libertarian free will, flowed out of this broader concern.
If modern scientific psychology is, as Danziger has famously argued, a repudiation of
Wundt, Marsden’s biography helps us to see that the protopsychology of American collegiate

184 BOOK REVIEWS
mental philosophy was a repudiation of Jonathan Edwards. Even those claiming his mantle,
such as Noah Porter (who held that the will has a “real freedom” to arbitrate among alterna-
tives), tended to reject those doctrines that Edwards held most dear.
REFERENCE
Porter, N. (1879). Mental and moral science in Yale College. In W. L. Kingsley (Ed.), Yale College: A sketch of its
history (Vol. I, pp. 386–391). New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Reviewed by RUSSELL D. KOSITS, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Gordon College,

Wenham, MA.
Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the
Founding of Ethology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 636 pp.
$80.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-08089-7. $29.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-08090-0.
One rarely hears the word ethology these days. Dictionaries define it as “the science of
character,” but it was used more commonly in the 1950s to 1980s as a label for “the biological
study of animal behavior.” Burkhardt’s book charts the rise and evolution of ethology, centered
on the charismatic dramatis personae of Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.
This monumental volume has been 26 years in the making and represents a mountainous ef-
fort of scholarship. A densely written text of 484 pages of inspired writing is followed by 93 pages
of small-print notes and 28 pages of bibliography. Burkhardt, a historian, makes a massive contri-
bution to our knowledge of the development of animal behavior science, adding greatly to previ-
ous biographies of the central characters (Kruuk, 2003; Taschwer & Föger, 2003; Wuketits, 1990).
Burkhardt describes the efforts of early American and British naturalists in this field in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with Whitman, Craig, Selous, Howard,
Kirkman, and Huxley foremost among them. It is these naturalists who began to see behav-
ioral structures, mostly of birds, as comparable to morphological features, to be studied sim-
ilarly in a comparative fashion. Their writings prepared the way for Lorenz and Tinbergen,
who diverged in one major aspect from their predecessors: they declined to speculate about
animal emotion associated with behavior. They aimed to describe and analyze animal (and
even human) behavior in purely objective terms.
There was no central theory in Lorenz and Tinbergen’s ethology. One way to character-
ize it is by its set of questions about animal behavior, by the “four whys” of Tinbergen. Why
does a cock crow? (1) Because of its physiological state, and the presence of external stimuli
to which it responds (“causation”); (2) Because in this individual’s lifetime, genetic factors
and previous learning have influenced it to this effect (“ontogeny”); (3) Because the behavior
has immediate consequences for the cock’s fitness (“function”); and (4) Because in this
species it has evolved in this particular fashion (“evolution”). Most of ethology’s early inter-
est was in causation, and a host of concepts were created, especially by Lorenz, such as the
Innate Releasing Mechanism (IRM), appetitive behavior and consummatory acts, displace-
ment and redirected activities, and models of hierarchical organizations of behavior. In later

BOOK REVIEWS 185
years, Tinbergen especially developed projects on “biological function,” exploring reasons
why particular behaviors could have evolved through natural selection. All this now lies
largely abandoned, but in the process new understandings arose that directed behavior re-
search toward other fields, such as physiology and ecology.
One central thesis of this book is the effect of circumstance and individual character on
the course of science, beautifully illustrated by the involvement of Konrad Lorenz and Niko
Tinbergen in the development, successes, and failures of ethology. Burkhardt reveals their
character as scientists and personalities, as well as the important effects that world events and
more peripheral people had on their ideas and development, leading them to the ultimate ac-
colade of science, the Nobel Prize. Lorenz featured largest in this; ebullient and extroverted,
an enthusiastic member of the Nazis, with the overmodest Tinbergen, in contrast, prone to de-
pressions and hostage to the German occupation in Holland. Burkhardt provides a sensitive
analysis of the conflicts and reconciliations associated with their relationship, with Lorenz
publishing papers on “innate,” species-specific behavior in animals and racial purity in man,
and Tinbergen developing his research on ecological effects of behavior. The account of
Lorenz’s involvement with national socialism is a particularly important contribution to our
understanding of the relation between science and politics.
If I have any criticism of the book, it is that there is little evaluation or critique of the
quality of the science involved. Perhaps, however, the blemishes in their research were not im-
portant—it was the ideas that counted, with the unusual abilities of both Lorenz and
Tinbergen to communicate their enthusiasm serving as keys to their success. Burkhardt’s his-
torical account is a fascinating read, and a massive monument to the science of ethology.
REFERENCES
Kruuk, H. (2003). Niko’s nature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Taschwer, K., & Föger, B. (2003). Konrad Lorenz: Biografie. Vienna: Paul Zolnay Verlag.
Wuketits, F. M. (1990). Konrad Lorenz: Leben und Werk eines großen Naturforschers. Munich: Piper Verlag.
Reviewed by HANS KRUUK, Honorary Professor of Zoology, Aberdeen University, Scotland.
John W. Crowley and William White. Drunkard’s Refuge: The Lessons of the New York
State Inebriate Asylum. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
160 pp. $24.95 (cloth). ISBN 1-55849-430-8.
Readers may be familiar with previous work by Crowley, notably The White Logic:
Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction (1994), and White’s Slaying the
Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment in America (1998). In this volume, the former’s
background in American literature and the latter’s experience in the field of addiction studies
are brought to bear on a case study of America’s first medically directed facility for treating
addiction, the New York State Inebriate Asylum. The authors attempt to tie the institution’s
brief but controversial history into the story of broader cycles of American ”recovery” move-
ments. Their intended audience is “individuals working within or living within the worlds of
addiction treatment and recovery”(p. vii).

186 BOOK REVIEWS
Alcohol problems in mid-nineteenth-century America produced two responses: the

broader gospel temperance movement, which viewed drink as a universal moral threat, and a
therapeutic temperance movement based on a medical knowledge. The latter included nonco-
ercive, voluntary treatment in the spirit of the Washingtonians and centered on private homes
for inebriates. The other approach was that of Dr. Joseph Edward Turner in Binghamton, New
York: “sequestration and control” (p. 103).
Turner experienced temperance politics in his native state of Maine before journeying to
Europe. Upon his return, he lobbied for a state-funded asylum in New York. The institution,
which faced hostile board members, politicians, and journalists, was mired in controversy
from its opening in the 1860s to its conversion into an insane asylum in 1881. The fees for
nonindigent patients were high, and the minimum admission period was one year. Turner’s
“moral treatment,” furthermore, was based on strict discipline and control. Most of the mid-
dle-aged, middle-class male patients were committed involuntarily.
Turner was more of a visionary and builder than an administrator. He was forced out in 1867
by enemies who fabricated a spurious charge of arson against the institution’s founder. Turner
moved to Ohio where he attempted to found an asylum for female inebriates. His replacement,
Dr. Albert Day, was more successful in attracting voluntary patients and attempted to employ
moral suasion rather than coercion. Despite his approach, the institution failed to realize its po-
tential and closed in 1879. Medical models of viewing and treating inebriety collapsed by the
early twentieth century. Inebriates were viewed not as medically flawed, but as moral failures, and
specialized institutions for their treatment were discredited by scandal and poor publicity.
Crowley and White suggest that the story of the New York State Inebriate Asylum offers
lessons for participants in the broader recovery movement of the early twenty-first century,
which is based on grassroots approaches, support groups, destigmatization and “many path-
ways to recovery” (p. 102). The authors compare Turner’s failure to translate medical tem-
perance ideals into a self-sustaining, broadly based institution with the rise and decline of
Synanon and the Parkside treatment centers in the twentieth century.
This study is a refreshing reminder that social movements and ideology alone did not
produce laws, institutions, and treatment regimes. Charismatic leaders and publicity were im-
portant in shaping medical—and other—responses to social problems. Other than patient ros-
ters, it is not clear what primary records have survived from the asylum. If available, the pro-
files and experiences of the clients, not simply the managers, of the institution would have
been a nice addition to the discussion.
Reviewed by GREG MARQUIS, Associate Professor of History, University of New Brunswick,
Saint John, NB, Canada.
A. H. Halsey. A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature, and Society. Oxford,

UK: Oxford University Press, 2004. 279 pp. £21.00 (paper). ISBN 0-19-926661-1.
The study of the history of the discipline of sociology can shed much light on gen-
eral debates on the conflict between the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities,

BOOK REVIEWS 187
the complicated question of interdisciplinary work in modern universities, and issues of
policy-relevant social science research. Sociology is a discipline forged alongside moder-
nity and the emergence of the German research university as it began to transform intel-
lectual life, leading to the “academic revolution” that created faculty autonomy in the mid-
dle of the twentieth century. An examination of sociology’s history therefore takes us into
some of the central contemporary debates about the social sciences. Neither purely a sci-
ence nor a literary art, but containing elements of both approaches, sociology offers a
unique angle on the science wars between cultural studies/social constructionism and the
traditional natural sciences. The field is unique in the social sciences for having such an
even match of representatives from each camp within our ranks. While sociology is often
dismissed as a front for socialism, radicalism, or liberal social work as opposed to being
a “real” discipline, the field emerged from profoundly conservative reactions to the French
revolution and has often been linked with social Darwinistic currents, especially in the
United States and Britain.
A. H. Halsey’s A History of Sociology in Britain provides an excellent window into gen-
eral questions regarding the social sciences today, while outlining the single most compre-
hensive history of the British version of the discipline. Halsey is an accomplished sociologist
from Nuffield College, Oxford University, and is well known for his work on stratification
and the sociology of education. This work, therefore, comes from the pen of a consummate
insider in the British sociological scene and is thus not the kind of book that would have been
produced by a professional historian. Despite the limitations that flow from this particular
angle on the topic, A History of Sociology in Britain is an excellent piece of scholarship that
adds much to the intellectual history of the social sciences.
The book begins with a discussion of five major themes central to the history of soci-
ology in Britain. There is also an excellent context-setting section that discusses the rise of
the modern scientific method, and sociology’s dilemma of being caught, creatively, for the
most part, between literature and science. The middle section of the book is a long narra-
tive history of the discipline, organized into the period before 1950, the postwar expansion
from 1950 to 1967, the social turmoil and political revolt from 1968 to 1975, and the “years
of uncertainty” of 1976–2000. Combining traditional narrative intellectual and institutional
history with social science methods, the book ends with excellent survey data that gives us
comprehensive information on the social origins, training, gender, rank, career progress,
and the major intellectual influences on British sociology professors. With the intellectual
contribution of young British scholar Claire Donovan, A History of Sociology in Britain
also contains one of the most thoughtful and useful discussions of citation analysis avail-
able, building on, but going beyond, the Social Science Citation Index method. This is a
nice methodological touch that adds analytic rigor to purely narrative approaches to outlin-
ing the shape of the discipline in Britain. There is also a terrific content analysis of core
British sociology journals, showing empirically how the nature of the field has changed
over the decades. This section of the book contains an excellent typology that could be
adapted and used on research on other disciplines and in different countries to show how
the qualitative versus quantitative debates in modern academic life can be traced and illu-
minated through systematic empirical methods.
Halsey’s discussion of each of his five major themes adds much to the story he later nar-
rates. Darwinism had an enormous influence on the early development of the social sciences
in Great Britain, of course, and Halsey lays out some of the most important specific influ-
ences of these ideas within sociology before the modern postwar period. Central to debates
within intellectual life today are conflicts between those who want to explain and those who

188 BOOK REVIEWS
prefer to interpret the social world, and Halsey expertly develops the story of how this divi-
sion was built into the very fabric of early sociology in Great Britain. This is also the case of
the related “methods” wars between quantitative and qualitative camps, Halsey’s third theme.
Fourth, A History of Sociology in Britain contain a first-rate discussion of the tension many
British sociologists faced as academic scholars concerned with doing policy-relevant research
with an eye toward Labor party programs.
Finally, Halsey highlights the centrality of the London School of Economics (LSE) in the
history of British sociology. He tells the story of several generations of scholars trained in this
remarkable institution, as they institutionalized a new discipline in the context of an elite
Oxbridge university establishment hostile to sociology. One can still see traces of this elite
English view of sociology as excessively radical, lower-class, and vulgarly empirical and
American in academic life today, especially in Canada, where I live and teach. Halsey’s story
thus remains relevant to contemporary debates about the value of cultural studies or conti-
nental philosophy versus sociology in our universities.
Halsey’s status as a sociologist brings this book, unsurprisingly, both its strengths and its
weaknesses. The book is engaging, with well-chosen anecdotes capturing larger themes in
various turns of phrases, quips, or personal details from the lives of some of the major play-
ers in the discipline’s history. My personal favorite among the anecdotes Halsey repeats is the
great French sociologist Raymond Aron’s outburst at a Nuffield College discussion where he
says “the trouble is that British sociology is essentially an intellectual attempt to make intel-
lectual sense of the political problems of the Labour Party” (p. 70).
There is much in this book for those interested in learning about Hobhouse, T. H.
Marshal, Edward Shils, Michael Young, or other important figures in twentieth-century intel-
lectual history. Halsey knows British sociology very well, and this book is absolutely essen-
tial as a resource for any further research into the discipline. A professional historian would
want to go through institutional archives, of course, in ways that Halsey has not done. But the
book provides fascinating general knowledge and context for readers interested in the history
of sociology, British intellectual life, or the dynamic of professionalization and institutional
reform in modern universities. Moreover, Halsey’s expertise in looking for social structural
causes of social and behavioral patterns allows him to share many insights on the social psy-
chology of the upwardly mobile “founding” LSE generation of British sociology. He further
illuminates the ways in which government policy, traditional intellectual elite snobbery, and
the institutional transformations of the higher education system throughout the twentieth cen-
tury shaped the lives, work, and ideas of sociologists in Britain, as well as the structure of the
field. The book is a masterful example of the sociological imagination that Halsey defends
with such eloquence and purpose. And the use of citation indexes, content analysis, and sur-
veys adds much to the analysis. These are methodological tools contemporary intellectual his-
torians could use more often.
There are times, however, when the story seems too idiosyncratic and Halsey’s role as
an important player in the events he narrates looms large, despite Halsey’s undoubted
charm, and the intellectual openness illustrated by the inclusion of alternative perspectives
by prominent British sociologists such as Bauman, Giddens, Oakley, and Runciman in the
epilogue. This is hardly the last word on this history, as the author himself would gladly
concede. Alongside Jennifer Platt’s recent The British Sociological Association (2003),
however, A History of Sociology in Britain is a wonderful addition to the history of the so-
cial sciences. The book also stands as a testament to what the sociological perspective can
contribute in the hands of a master of his craft, suggesting ultimately that the field is nei-
ther science nor literature.

BOOK REVIEWS 189
REFERENCE
Platt, J. (2003). The British Sociological Association: A sociological history. Durham, UK: Sociologypress.
Reviewed by NEIL G. MCLAUGHLIN, Department of Sociology, McMaster University,

Hamilton, ON, Canada.
Jeffrey R. Watt. From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe. London and Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 240 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8014-4278-8.
Suicide is the most unsocial—some would say antisocial—of acts. Paradoxically, it also
shines a peculiarly sharp light into society’s secrets. Just as medical statistics can plot the be-
havior of otherwise hidden microorganisms, so patterns in suicide can reveal strains in the
darkest emotional strata. The difference is that our knowledge of suicide comes through pe-
culiarly subjective sources, ranging from the perpetrator, who may disguise the act, to the
neighbors and judges who record it and have their own agendas. Suicide statistics can there-
fore never be precise. Their student has to measure two variables at once: the suicides and the
legal and religious culture that records them.
The present collection, meticulously prepared and edited, illustrates this rule. Ten estab-
lished specialists combine to depict suicide and reactions to it in Europe from c. 1500 to
c. 1800. They give us many soundings, from Amsterdam, London (twice), Stockholm, Paris,
Geneva, northeastern and northwestern Germany, Spain, and Hungary—all (except for
Hungary, whose documents only begin in the nineteenth century) within that period, stretch-
ing it to 1818 for Sir Samuel Romilly’s suicide, whose impact occupies the last essay.
Emphasis veers from side to side. Among authors concentrating more on the suicides, David
Lederer finds a very high suicide rate in post-1850 Hungary (from 30 to 45 per 100,000), and
relates it to a cult of self-sacrifice, born of that country’s political struggles. Jeffrey R. Watt
rehearses statistics from Geneva between 1536 and 1798. He identifies a suicide “explosion”
there after 1750, linked (he thinks) with the erosion of Calvinist religion. In a sample year,
1775, Jeffrey Merrick finds a contemporary, and perhaps more severe, explosion in Paris. The
Baltic yields another pattern. In Schleswig-Holstein, Vera Lind astonishes us with “indirect
suicides,” who murdered someone else (usually a child, who was helpless and sure to go to
heaven) so as to be hanged, imagining that this way they had a chance to “repent” and avoid
damnation. The pursuit of this barely credible logic is confirmed by Arne Jansson’s essay on
Stockholm, whose more desperate grass-widows—created by Sweden’s military expansion—
took this course between 1680 and 1720 (thereby, incidentally, inverting the usual male pre-
ponderance in suicide ratios).
Essays emphasizing attitudes, rather than the suicides, include a pioneering probe into
inquisitorial Spain and a review of the licenses issued for suicides’ cemetery burial in London.
The professional’s favorite will nevertheless be Craig M. Loskofsky’s replay of a Leipzig dis-
pute in 1702. Who had the authority to decide how a suicide should be buried? The city coun-
cil claimed it. The Lutheran clergy claimed it. Above both stood the prince, who had just be-
come a Catholic to qualify for Polish crown. Now read on.

190 BOOK REVIEWS
The collection has only one fault, perhaps invisible to anyone but this reviewer. None of
its authors betrays any knowledge of medieval history. In a book about trends (as implied in
the title), this matters. Much of what is portrayed here—a high male-female ratio, tugs-of-war
about burial, medical theories, and so on—was around well before 1500. As for the endlessly
repeated view that St. Augustine began the West’s long abhorrence for suicide, he can be—
and has been—shown to have had next-to-nothing to do with it.
Reviewed by ALEXANDER MURRAY, Fellow, University College, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Joel Paris. The Fall of an Icon: Psychoanalysis and Academic Psychiatry. Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 2005. 217 pp. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN 0802039332. $27.95
(paper). ISBN 0802037720.
The term Whig history refers to the ill-considered celebration of contemporary suc-
cess. Paris’s Whiggish book, describing the current “decline” in psychoanalysis within
North American academic psychiatry, is intended to portray the superiority of the latest
fashion in relying on biological metaphors. No attention whatever is paid to the prevalent
corruption of medicine thanks to the power of drug companies. Academic “research” gets
praised in contrast to clinical wisdom, the only realm where psychoanalysis gets accorded
any merit.
Nobody could dispute that analysts, while in power within psychiatry, arrogantly ig-
nored developments within psychopharmacology. In my view, the result of what Paris
paints as the triumph of the biological perspective means that we are back essentially to
where we were at the turn of the twentieth century, when classification and heredity were
the two key concepts. Psychiatry is now at such a dead end that medical students are un-
likely to want to enter psychiatric residency programs, hardly support for Paris’s tri-
umphalistic opening to Chapter 1: “Contemporary psychiatry has a respected and secure
place within medicine.”
No attention whatever gets paid here to unfortunate side effects with medication, and no
thought is given to how prominent a role was once played by relying on various forms of lo-
botomies. Analysts have played a respectable role in challenging fads that did much damage,
a tale apt to be forgotten today. Paris repeats the mantra of “science,” and winds up by itali-
cizing in his last sentence the word doubt, but throughout his book, there is no skepticism di-
rected toward what is most currently fashionable. DSM categories that include two decimal
points have made North American psychiatry the laughingstock among sophisticated practi-
tioners elsewhere in the world.
Analysts made abundant mistakes of their own in the past, which people like Paris are
repeating in a new way from their own positions of power and authority. Although one might
never guess it from reading The Fall of an Icon, the occurrence of psychosis remains as mys-
terious as ever. And neurotics need to be approached with philosophic wariness. Although
Paris does not acknowledge the point, there were some analysts all along interested in the
problem of “follow-ups.” The disappearance of case histories in the literature is no sign of

BOOK REVIEWS 191
“progress,” but rather a testimony to the way in which scientism has temporarily overwhelmed
the significance of the artistic component in understanding psychotherapy. On more than one
occasion, Paris falsely claims that beginning candidates in analytic training were once as-
signed “to read Freud cover to cover” (pp. 53, 183).
The Tavistock Clinic was never “an institution associated with Freud’s daughter
Anna” (p. 61), Elvin Semrad had no “white beard” (p. 39) when I knew him, manuals may
be “wildly popular” (p. 89) and yet worthless for approaching complex human beings, an-
alysts like Sandor Rado were many years ago interested in genetics—but it seems to me
pointless to try and itemize all the slapdash misconceptions that appear in this one book.
If Paris wants an example of an analyst willing to record clinical failure, he should reread
Freud’s “Dora.” Paris claims “to cherish the way British people think” (p. 151) and yet ig-
nores their warnings about suicidality and antidepressants. Paris’s kind of zealotry—he
tells us he has had “the conviction of a convert” (p. 185)—can match any of the past un-
fortunate religiosity within psychoanalysis. Putting mental patients in prisons rather than
old-fashioned asylums seems to me no sign of improvement. Paris’s positivistic outlook is
hardly the way to ensure that psychiatrists learn “to remember how to talk with their pa-
tients” (p. 160). On one page, Paris tells us that “psychiatrists, like other physicians, are
now practicing in a much less authoritarian fashion” (p. 168), and on the very next page,
he claims that “one can make a diagnosis five minutes into an interview, and usually get
it right.” (p. 169)
The Fall of an Icon is an unfortunate book, written by a historical amateur, and I am baf-
fled as to why the University of Toronto Press came to publish it.
Reviewed by PAUL ROAZEN, Professor Emeritus, Political and Social Science, York University,
Toronto, ON, Canada.
THE AUTHOR COMMENTS:

Since I have admired Professor Roazen’s historical research on psychoanalysis, I am
sorry he did not like my book. I do not pretend to be a professional historian, and would be
happy to correct any factual errors (such as which analysts had beards). Yet many of my col-
leagues in academic psychiatry, who are more involved in patient care than historical re-
search, have told me that this volume accurately describes dramatic changes in the field over
the last few decades.
The vitriol in Professor Roazen’s review is not really directed at me, but at what has hap-
pened in psychiatry. If my book is “Whiggish,” Professor Roazen’s views can only be de-
scribed as “Tory.” He seems to believe that the good old days of analytic predominance are
gone forever, replaced by a heartless scientific paradigm. What he ignores is that psychiatrists
and their patients have already voted with their feet on this issue. Very few people are still in-
terested in being psychoanalyzed, and this type of treatment will disappear entirely. Diagnosis
has its pitfalls, but it attempts to describe observable phenomena, not fantastic theories. Drugs
(and other forms of therapy) may not be the answer to all human problems, but they relieve
suffering in a way that analysis never did.
JOEL PARIS, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, PQ, Canada.

192 BOOK REVIEWS
Caroline Roberts. The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 253 pp. $53.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8020-3596-5.
The focus of Caroline Roberts’s excellent study of the nineteenth-century British writer
Harriet Martineau is on her self-assigned role as “a popularizer of controversy” (p. 25).
Grounded in Foucault’s theories on the construction and ordering of knowledge and departing
from the biographical emphasis of much work on Martineau—including Deborah Logan’s al-
most identically titled The Hour and the Woman (2002)—the book examines several of
Martineau’s most important writings. As Roberts notes, Martineau’s prolific and eclectic out-
put poses a great challenge to modern scholarship, but she herself has met it admirably.
Starting with the series of didactic tales collectively titled Illustrations of Political Economy
(1832–1834) that represented Martineau’s breakthrough as a polemical writer, and concluding
with her widely condemned collaboration with the phrenologist Henry Atkinson, Letters on the
Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851), the book spans almost her whole writing ca-
reer. Other chapters deal with two of her travel books, Society in America (1837) and Eastern
Life, Present and Past (1848); her two novels, Deerbrook (1839) and The Hour and the Man
(1841); and her writings on invalidism and alternative medicine. These are works, Roberts con-
vincingly argues, that were simultaneously ahead of and representative of their time.
Although not treated in a separate chapter, a touchstone throughout the book is
Martineau’s famous Autobiography, which is cited in order to highlight her intentions as a
writer, her political convictions, and her strong sense of moral purpose. As Roberts rightly
stresses, Martineau’s authorship was inseparable from her commitment to social reform. She
wrote to educate the public about contentious issues such as abolition, overpopulation, and
women’s rights, and to advance controversial views on religion and sciences (or pseudo-
sciences) like mesmerism and phrenology. Frequent references to the often hostile reception
of her works enable Roberts to situate them in contemporary debates and to demonstrate their
ambivalent embeddedness in the culture and ideologies that Martineau was writing to change.
At the same time, Roberts’s own revisionist readings provide fruitful insights into the thematic
and generic complexities of the individual texts.
In the opening chapter on the Illustrations of Political Economy, for example, Roberts takes
issue with modern critics who have interpreted Martineau’s effort at popularizing the principles
of political economy as an uncritical endorsement of patriarchal ideologies. Both in form and
content, the Illustrations were subversive, according to Roberts. She shows how Martineau, while
translating obscure economic theories into readable narratives, not only made them accessible to
a wide audience, but also exposed the contradictions underpinning them. Using the controversial
tales that illustrate Malthus’s theory of population as her examples, Roberts argues that political
economy, like the other sciences Martineau promoted, had “the potential to act as a socially dis-
ruptive force” (p. 195). Likewise, in her illuminating discussion of Martineau’s best-known (and
recently reissued) novel Deerbrook, Roberts discloses the tensions between its sympathetic por-
trayal of the nineteenth-century medical profession and—by way of an examination of the novel’s
clinical discourse—its implied critique of women’s relationship to that profession.
Both Logan’s The Hour and the Woman and Roberts’s The Woman and the Hour may be
seen as attempts to rehabilitate Martineau as a writer and feminist intellectual. But while Logan
casts her admiringly as a social visionary, Roberts more persuasively, in my opinion, attends to
her participation in the dominant discourses of her time as well as her radical visions.

BOOK REVIEWS 193
REFERENCE
Logan, D. A. (2002). The hour and the woman: Harriet Martineau’s “somewhat remarkable” life. DeKalb, IL:
Northern Illinois University Press.
Reviewed by ANKA RYALL, Associate Professor of English, University of Tromsø, Tromsø,

Norway.
Timothy Shanahan. The Evolution of Darwinism: Selection, Adaptation, and Progress in

Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
342 ix pp. £18.99 (paper). ISBN 0-5215-4198-0.
Much like the popular conception of evolution itself, books about Darwinism tend to
thrive on bravado. In a landscape dominated by the stylish swagger of Richard Dawkins and
Daniel Dennett, the salty wit of Michael Ruse, and the eye-popping prognostications of E. O.
Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould, Timothy Shanahan’s comparatively mild-mannered new of-
fering initially seems like a housecat in a den of cougars. Ultimately, however, this very even-
handedness, together with its peerless reasoning, helps this book stand out in a crowded field.
Shanahan combines a historic narrative of evolutionary theory with critical inquiry into
three long-standing disputes: (1) does natural selection benefit both individuals and groups?
(2) is evolutionary change genuine progress? and (3) is human intelligence a wholly natural
product of evolution? Shanahan ties each question to the changing fortunes of Darwinism it-
self over the last 150 years.
Initially, he argues, it was hard to resist the ingenious yet stunningly simple idea of ran-
domly modified traits “selected” for preservation under pressures of environmental change.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, old Lamarckian ideas of inheritable learned
behaviors and theological speculations about divine guidance were again thriving. And yet by
mid-century, Darwinism resurrected itself upon the “modern synthesis” of natural selection
and Mendelian genetics: for most respectable biologists, adaptation was the only significant
mechanism of biological change, and some went as far as to say that evolution is “for the
sake” of the propagation of genes. In recent decades, the excessively dogmatic and reduc-
tionistic aspects of the modern synthesis have been softened by those who view evolution in
terms of entire “life cycles” rather than the mere replications of genes.
Not surprisingly, in each phase, notions about selection, progress, and human evolution
have also changed. Although it was Alfred Russel Wallace, not Darwin, who insisted that se-
lection is limited to individual organisms, this gradually became the orthodox view, and V. C.
Wynne-Edwards’s rival theory of group selection was widely ridiculed. But, as Shanahan
notes, a modified view of group selection has recently emerged. For if groups with “altruis-
tic” members are more likely to survive than those without them, natural selection can favor
the propagation of “self-sacrificing” individuals. That group selection may be achieved
through individual selection is entirely typical of Shanahan’s reconciliatory approach.
Though “perfection” no longer figures in accounts of adaptive fit, the question of
whether evolutionary change is progressive is still quite volatile. For many, that species ad-

194 BOOK REVIEWS
vance via natural selection is so obvious as to scarcely warrant defending. Evolutionary biol-
ogists, however, hesitate to project normative words onto phenomena they claim should be
limited to objective quantitative description. They further observe that many forms of life
have changed little in millions of years, and that typical gauges of “progress” such as com-
plexity and specialization of organs by no means guarantee enhanced survivability. For
Stephen Jay Gould, evolution merely fills out niches in the “design space” available to organic
forms—a process of diversification that has nothing to do with progress.
While mindful of such concerns, Shanahan defends a moderate conception of evolution-
ary progress. Against the claim that “progress” is subjective, he points out (pace John Dewey)
that normative assessments are integral to the very ability to discern viable scientific methods
and goals. But though ineradicable, such terms can and should be clarified in suitable contexts.
Accordingly, while there is no overarching standard of “progress” that covers all biota, we need
not surrender the functional utility of gauging progress in terms of size, complexity, special-
ization, or perceptual-intellectual development—especially when a species is directly com-
pared to its own ancestors. Furthermore, evolutionary progress need not require that all or most
species advance, or even that there be a “net” gain of complexity. Instead, progress can signify
the “apex” differential between the simplest and most complex forms of life whose upper limit
is achieved by very few species. As such, the very same process Gould sees as only filling out
“design space” can, once properly qualified, admit a genuine sense of progress.
Of course, to speak of an “apex” immediately draws attention to the erstwhile peak-
dwellers, which on most accounts means us. Even though Darwin had long convinced him-
self of the descent of man through natural selection, he was notoriously skittish talking
about it, and ultimately failed to sway even scientifically respectable allies such as Wallace
and Asa Gray. Wallace argued that human minds exhibit something virtually unknown in
evolution—excess. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had no conceivable use for all the brain-
power with which they were endowed. And since natural selection is blind to future affor-
dances such capacities would bestow upon their distant descendents, for Wallace something
other than natural selection—a benevolent and far-sighted something—must have created
the human mind.
On this issue alone, Shanahan’s response seems somewhat thin. He agrees that a fully
“naturalized” account of intelligence means accepting “the significant influence of social
context” (p. 265). And though we’d thus expect a new appeal to ecological or systems ap-
proaches, Shanahan offers us little more than “neural models” mainly “in the head.”
Interestingly, in his own struggles about consciousness, Darwin appealed to the brilliant yet
neglected American philosopher Chauncey Wright, who not only proposed an integrated
model of perception, cognition, and action, but also argued that such high-order abilities
were every bit as vital to our “primitive” ancestors as they are to us. Wright’s legacy contin-
ues today in the groundbreaking work of ecological theorists such as Antonio Damasio,
Andy Clark, and Susan Oyama, who, in Clark’s apt characterization, are helping put mind,
brain, and world back together again.
A single reservation, however, is not enough to diminish the achievement of this mas-
terly book. Time and again, Shanahan convinces us that Darwin’s own approach was re-
lentlessly reconciliatory, pluralistic, and nondogmatic, thus conveying the magnetic idea
of Darwinism itself come full circle in this work. Because it is equally ardent and articu-
late, Shanahan’s own relentlessly moderate voice is likely to survive the fashionable Sturm
und Drang.
Reviewed by FRANK X. RYAN, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Kent State University, Kent, OH.

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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.

42(2), 177–178 Spring 2006

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

THE EDITORS COMMENT:

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

Reviewed by GRETA JONES, Professor of History, University of Ulster at Jordanstown,

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

Reviewed by PATRICK V. KIRCH, Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology, University of

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

Reviewed by RUSSELL D. KOSITS, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Gordon College,

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

Reviewed by HANS KRUUK, Honorary Professor of Zoology, Aberdeen University, Scotland.

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

Alcohol problems in mid-nineteenth-century America produced two responses: the

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

THE AUTHOR COMMENTS:

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

Reviewed by ANKA RYALL, Associate Professor of English, University of Tromsø, Tromsø,

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

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