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and dung flies and the like. On the subject of hu-
mans, he would have given Edward O. Wilson a run
for his money. Darwin’s favorite book would be
Dawkins’The Selfish Gene.
Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection is a won-
derful read. A bit like Dickens. But caveat emptor.
Michael Ruse, Program in the History & Philoso-
phy of Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee,
Florida
The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity,
and Doctor Moreau.
By Ronald Edwards. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press. $29.95. xv + 274 p.; ill.; index. ISBN:
978-0-19-021209-4. 2016.
Sarapiquí Chronicle: A Naturalist in Costa
Rica. Revised and Expanded Edition.
By Allen M. Young. Albuquerque (New Mexico): Uni-
versity of New Mexico Press. $29.95 (paper). xviii +
350 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 9780826357816 (pb);
9780826357823 (eb). 2017.
In 1994, when the band Aerosmith visited the forest
where Allen Young had studied Morpho butterflies
years before, the rock stars were unimpressed: “I
only saw a mass of green leaves,”one member com-
mented. But had Young been his guide, he would
have “seen”the network connecting those leaves
with herbivores, carnivores, and decomposers, all
animated by the solar energy that keeps the system
going and now threatens to overheat it. That is ex-
actly what Young does in this book: he guides read-
ers through some Costa Rican ecosystems and
uncovers what is hidden behind the sea of green,
and even under it. With characteristic skill for men-
tal images, he describes a forest flipped upside
down, with roots exposed, where energy also flows
from producers to decomposers, in a symphony
played by cicada nymphs, symbiotic fungi, and de-
composing bacteria.
The first two chapters describe a trip from the
capital, San José, to Sarapiquí, stopping many times
on the way to explain, for example, that hidden in-
side bromeliads, mosquito larvae graze on bacteria
and then become food for dragonfly nymphs, which
in turn are captured by tadpoles, always with a per-
sonal vignette: “our fingers numbed by the chill
and wetness, we shook the bromeliads, upside down,
over the pans, freeing creatures that scurried and
scratched on the metal’s slick surface”(p. 23).
Chapters 3 through 7 tell the story of his work
with butterflies, as well as natural history studies of
cicadas, bees, and other insects. You feel like an eye-
witness when he describes how, after one year of
frustration, he finally discovers a Morpho peleides
butterfly about to lay eggs. He follows her up a
creek, the cold water almost to his armpits, until
he sees her laying eggs on a vine. The exhilaration
of discovery is so strong that he forgets the cold,
and the fear of accidentally touching a deadly fer-de-
lance, to wade against the current until he secures
thepreciouseggsfromwhich,dayslater,thefirst cat-
erpillars will emerge. He ends with some personal re-
flections about the interconnection of nature, and a
description of what has become of the field station in
later years.
The book is written in a literary style that paints ev-
ery scene with words. He describes rooms, trails, in-
sects, landscapes—and even equipment—in a detail
that some readers may want to skip, but it is my hope
that most will read to really visit those places in their
imagination. The black-and-white photographs mostly
show a pleasant, even artistic composition, but the
quality of reproduction is uneven and in some cases
it is hard to distinguish what is being represented.
With this book, Young has preserved a portrait of
research in a Costa Rica that no longer exists, from a
time when foreign scientists still made a significant
proportion of research, a time of nearly inaccessible
places and primitive facilities that will be as alien to
foreign readers as it is to scientists working in Costa
Rica today. The volume is already a classic of Central
American natural history.
Julián Monge-Nájera, Revista de Biología Tropi-
cal, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica
The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the
Human Future. The Norton Global Ethics Series.
By Sheila Jasanoff. New York: W. W. Norton & Com-
pany. $26.95. xi + 306 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-
393-07899-2. 2016.
This is a comprehensive collection of case studies
about biotechnology and information technology,
organized thematically to highlight connections be-
tween cases, the persistence of unresolved ethical
issues across cases, and the prospects for develop-
ing tactics to more equally realize the promises of
new technologies. The cases should be familiar to
avid consumers of technology-related news. The
book’s value is the alternative it offers to conven-
tional narratives about technological progress—hope-
ful, without succumbing to pessimism and without
indulging in flights of fancy. It should interest sociol-
ogists of technology, policymakers, and community
activists. The author’s driving concern is the connec-
tion between the ubiquity of technology and the
fragility of human freedoms. Technology nowadays
governs our lives, structuring our interactions with
others, the possibilities available to us for living well,
and the meaning of being human. Because we do
not understand how technology manages to govern
us, we lack control over it. Technology thereby
NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKSDecember 2017 455
threatens to endanger our freedoms. But—and this
is the author’s note of hope—we can safeguard
those freedoms by better understanding the struc-
tural flaws in our standard approaches to control-
ling technology.
The opening chapters evaluate methods for reg-
ulating technology. Chapter 2 considers risk as-
sessment, which aims to analyze risks and design
regulations to reduce those risks. Jasanoff identifies
several flaws with this method: it is not designedto op-
timize collective well-being; it tends to ignore un-
equal distributions of risk, qualitative factors, and
experiential knowledge of local (nonexpert) com-
munities; and it allows minimal opportunity for early
public deliberation, and is therefore biased toward al-
lowing rather than forbidding innovation. Chapter 3
engages withnarratives of technology-driven disasters
as accidents or rarities. The author shows how disas-
ters disproportionately affect the vulnerable, who
tend to perform high-risk work for low rewards, and
who lack bargaining power and political access to af-
fect policy decisions. Chapter 4 contrasts risk-driven
stances toward technological innovation with precau-
tionary stances, which favor experiential wisdom over
scientific knowledge, local artisans and consumers
over large corporations and industries, and stability
over disruption. The remaining chapters relate tech-
nological innovation to human vulnerability. Chap-
ter 5 examines how biotechnology changes our sense
of human identity and potential—but also how those
most affected by these changes tend to have the least
say in whether and how to release or regulate such
technology. The next chapter explores information
technologies, noting that our current social structures
allow companies to act like governments, capable of
controlling and exploiting data-driven vulnerabilities,
albeit without the sort of accountability and interest
in our welfare familiar in democratic societies. Chap-
ter 7 shows how technologies that blur boundaries be-
tween human biology and data property create tension
between cultural concerns with human dignity and
governmental interests in progress. Chapter 8 evalu-
ates extant techniques for technology assessment, not-
ing their intention to better involve communities in
policymaking, but their penchant toward securing
buy-in for innovation. A final chapter gestures toward
promising directions for research and policymaking,
albeit without much by way of concrete recommenda-
tions.
Nicholaos Jones, Philosophy, Universityof Alabama,
Huntsville, Alabama
Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy, and
Conflicts Over Animal Disease Control.
By Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode. Cambridge
(Massachusetts): Harvard University Press. $49.95.
xi + 465 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-674-72877-6.
2015.
Economists Olmstead and Rhode tell the relatively
unknown story of the Bureau of Animal Industry—
an agency within the U.S. Department of Agricul-
ture—funded in 1884. By the end of the 19th century,
animal agriculture, international trade, and com-
merce across U.S. state boarders increased dra-
matically. Local and state-level governments were
ill-prepared to face the spread of infectious disease
that followed the increase in herd sizes, trade, and
commerce. The federal government created the
bureau—a science-driven institution to control in-
fectious disease in livestock. The bureau led nu-
merous breakthroughs in the understanding and
control of livestock diseases. The authors argue that
it was also the first federal attempt to regulate a ma-
jor industry and became a model for subsequent
agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.
Chapters are organized chronologically. The sec-
ond chapter provides an overview of the changes in
the animal industry and trade that led to the crea-
tion of a federal agency to control livestock diseases.
Chapter 3 summarizes the numerous challenges
and opposition that took place in Congress over
the creation of the bureau. Subsequent chapters fol-
low its evolution. As the bureau faced new diseases
and food safety challenges, the agency evolved from
onewithnarrow powersandasmallbudgetto one with
a growing mandate to control the numerous diseases
that threatened the U.S. livestock industry and its in-
ternational trade in the first half of the 20th century.
Chapters are often centered around one of the major
diseases that the bureau confronted, including con-
tagious bovine pleuropneumonia, Texas fever, hog
cholera, trichinosis, bovine tuberculosis, and foot-
and-mouth disease. Olmstead and Rhode recount
in an engaging way how the bureau endured self-
interest groups, a culture of denial, and powerful
stakeholders and prevailed to set numerous large-
scale, science-based government interventions that
improved animal and human health and advanced
U.S. agriculture. The book is very well researched
and providesample detailson the politics, economics,
disease epidemiology, and research discovery under-
lying the history of the bureau. At times, the authors
include lengthy justifications to support their argu-
ments, slowing the flow of the chapter.
Although this volume’s proposition is to demon-
strate the role of the agency in the origin of eco-
nomic regulation, the authors also showcase the
bureau as a historical case study on the interaction
of science and politics in shaping public policy. In
456 Volume 92THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY