Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins  . Edited by Denis R.Alexander and Ronald L.Numbers . Chicago : The University of Chicago Press , 2010 . 453 pages. $35.00 .

This book contains thirteen essays by leading scholars in the history and philosophy of science, religion, and theology. Following an introduction by the editors, the book moves from analyses of the authority of the natural sciences in the early modern and modern periods to an examination of a range of issues related to the history of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Each essay in its own way sheds light on how biology has been used to further ideological interests that go far beyond science. While Karl Marx (1818–83) and his followers were the first to expose the ideological abuse of science by those who sought to defend the social and political interests of the bourgeoisie, the concern to identify the (perhaps inescapable) connection between science and ideology became a major issue in the twentieth century, especially among historians of science who undermined the notion that science is a “value‐neutral enterprise.” One thinks, in particular, of Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary and best‐selling book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which demonstrates that science is not a progressive, cumulative activity. Less than a decade after the publication of Kuhn's groundbreaking study, Robert Young was defending a notion that Kuhn himself rejected, namely, that science is ideology, since the latter “is an inescapable level of discourse” and all definitions of reality are connected to “concrete power interests.” Less radical than this position was the general conclusion of David Bloor, one of the founders of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh, namely, that science is always shaped and in some ways even determined by psychological, social, and cultural factors. “The social component is always present and always constitutive of knowledge.” Other scholars connected with the Science Studies Unit, such as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, have come to similar conclusions that undermine the traditional separation between science and ideology. While most now reject the radical view that science is only a social construction, there appears to be a consensus among historians of science that ideologies do play a constitutive role in the formulation of scientific knowledge.

The essays in this volume reveal the extent to which biology, to quote the editors, “has been particularly susceptible to ideological manipulation and application, a trend that shows no sign of abating” (p. 6). Cumulatively, the authors show the various ways in which biology has been used for a variety of social, religious, and political purposes, whose outcomes “may be beneficial, benign, or harmful,” and yet whose aims are not necessarily intrinsic to biology itself.

Peter Harrison examines how the first investigations of nature were used to support traditional understandings of natural theology and a moral order. In the early modern period, the practice and status of natural history underwent transformation as the new sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including biology, asserted their legitimacy over Aristotelian understandings of nature, as the proponents of the new sciences argued that these sciences could undergird moral and religious ends consistent with a humanist education, and as they paved the way for these new disciplines to become central to the scientific enterprise as a whole.

But the uses of biology in early modern Europe were not limited to the support of moral ends. Shirley Row's essay on biology and atheism in eighteenth‐century France demonstrates that the study of nature could also be harnessed to materialistic arguments that were often used by the philosophes to undermine moral and social order. Likewise, as Peter Hanns Reill shows in his chapter, biological research was used at this same time in Britain and Germany to defend particular conceptions of nation states whose structures were understood to be analogous to living organisms.

The majority of the essays in the book examine how Darwinian evolutionary biology has been used and abused for ideological, nonbiological purposes. For example, Edward Larson revisits the emergence of the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Paul Weindling examines the complex relationship between Darwinian biology and Nazi racism during the Hitler regime, and Nikolai Krementsov exposes how Darwinism was used by various Marxist factions in the Soviet Union (and not merely by Lysenko who linked socialist doctrine to his disastrous view of Lamarckian biology). Michael Ruse explores how frequently evolutionary biology has been understood to imply ideological notions of progress, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Erika Lorraine Milam's essay discloses how biology has been used to defend notions of sexual difference and gender, such as man “the hunter” and woman “the sexually‐available mother.”

Building on his magisterial study of so‐called “scientific creationism,” Ronald Numbers summarizes the roots of anti‐Darwinism in America and extends his analysis to include those creationists who want to introduce Intelligence Design theory into public school classrooms. For creationists of all kinds, Darwinism has frequently been perceived as implying an antireligious worldview that is purely and merely materialistic and naturalistic. Some public popularizers of evolutionary biology, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have not helped the promotion of biology's legitimacy among such religious folk since they stridently assert that evolutionary biology is inherently atheistic. As Alister McGrath shows in the book's final chapter, the atheistic, ideological rhetoric of Dawkins will continue to subvert public understanding of science (contrary to the stated aim of his former professorship at Oxford!) and fuel anti‐Darwinian positions that are also ideological in nature.

These are meaty essays that will reward the patient reader with insight and deeper understanding of the ways in which biology has been used for political, racial, social, religious, and antireligious ends that are distinct from biology itself and that have often led to truly horrific consequences. So the book as a whole serves as a helpful warning, to be wary of how biology remains susceptible to such ideological abuse.