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  • Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity by Banu Subramaniam
  • Heather Shattuck-Heidorn
Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. By Banu Subramaniam. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $95.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper).

Banu Subramaniam’s Ghost Stories for Darwin provides both a roadmap and a travelogue for those exploring interdisciplinary spaces. As an evolutionary biologist and feminist scholar, Subramaniam skillfully traverses disciplinary boundaries, and indeed, her central thesis is that we must venture into these spaces to truly engage with the world around us. Using themes of variation, difference, and diversity to focus an analysis of her own experiences and research, this text relays the results of Subramaniam’s experiments into how to recognize the complexity inherent in phenomena, as well as the social embeddedness of scientific practice.

Subramaniam writes in a recursive fashion, returning to her themes repeatedly yet providing new insight and clarification upon reiteration. This is a purposeful technique, invoking the recursive nature of her key questions as they appear and reappear in science and society. How do we, as scientists and as members of society, understand variation, difference, and diversity? How do the social and the scientific constitute each other? Subramaniam contends that these questions, among others, are ghosts of our insistence on binary conflicts between nature and culture, biology and the social, and will haunt us until we can transcend our disciplinary thinking.

Subramaniam also explores the borders of genre, weaving together personal accounts, journal entries, history of science techniques, experimental biology methods, and Foucauldian analysis. At times this book creates a radical, imaginary world where fiction provides an avenue for thought experiments of alternative science models. Yet one also encounters serious discussions of how the social positions of key evolutionary biologists influenced debates over heterozygosity or a rhetorical analysis of invasive species biology. This style choice risks becoming inaccessible to those who are not comfortable wandering disciplinary borders, yet Subramaniam skillfully uses this synthesis of techniques to deepen the main arguments of the text. Ghost Stories for Darwin continually asks how we can best reflect the reality of our world, in which there are not discrete categories between the scientific and the social, and the style choice is a continuation of this central question.

In the first section of Ghost Stories for Darwin, Subramaniam employs techniques from feminist science and technology studies to critically analyze her own dissertation research, an experimental genetics project examining morning glory color variation. She asks herself, retrospectively, why variation was the most obvious question when she viewed the fields of morning glory flowers. While the review of the early ties between evolutionary biology and eugenics will likely be familiar territory to most readers, she traces these [End Page 209] beginnings into more recent history, such as the classical/balance debate. She demonstrates here that questions of the meaning of heterozygosity and whether diversity increases fitness have been fundamentally and inextricably connected to social and political ideologies. Her dissertation project was haunted by eugenic origins, and disciplinary training obscured both this history and alternative questions. It is rare for a scientist to explore her own research program in this way, and this honesty and self-reflection illuminate alternative possibilities for conducting experimental research.

Following her reflections on her dissertation work, Subramaniam offers a detailed account of an experimental biology project designed as an interdisciplinary study of native and naturalized plant communities. Using rhetorical analysis, she situates the field of invasive species biology in its social context, asking how we form our ideas of nature and what constitutes the native. She argues that the rhetoric of invasive species connects to anxiety over immigration, with the overlap especially clear in rhetoric around sexuality and fear of hyperfertile aliens displacing “native” communities. Repeatedly, the idea of the “native” is associated with ideas of purity, which raises the specter of eugenics again. She argues that disciplinary thinking obscures the connections between societal fears of immigration and hysteria over alien plant communities, as well as the historical context of the question of native and alien communities. She details how her collaborative, experimental project moved...

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