The Mirage Of A Space Between Nature And Nurture

In this powerful critique, the esteemed historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller addresses the nature-nurture debates, including the persistent disputes regarding the roles played by genes and the environment in determining individual traits and behavior. Keller is interested in both how an oppositional “versus” came to be inserted between nature and nurture, and how the distinction on which that opposition depends, the idea that nature and nurture are separable, came to be taken for granted. How, she asks, did the illusion of a space between nature and nurture become entrenched in our thinking, and why is it so tenacious? Keller reveals that the assumption that the influences of nature and nurture can be separated is neither timeless nor universal, but rather a notion that emerged in Anglo-American culture in the late nineteenth century. She shows that the seemingly clear-cut nature-nurture debate is riddled with incoherence. It encompasses many disparate questions knitted together into an indissoluble tangle, and it is marked by a chronic ambiguity in language. There is little consensus about the meanings of terms such as nature, nurture, gene, and environment. Keller suggests that contemporary genetics can provide a more appropriate, precise, and useful vocabulary, one that might help put an end to the confusion surrounding the nature-nurture controversy.

Why are objectivity and reason characterized as male and subjectively and feeling as female? How does this characterization affect the goals and methods of scientific enquiry? This groundbreaking work explores the possibilities of a gender-free science and the conditions that could make such a possibility a reality. "Keller’s book opens up a whole new range of ideas for anyone who cares to think about the history of science, that is, the history of the modern world. . . Let us be glad to be in times when such a sparkling, innovative. . . book can be produced, a book to start all of us thinking in new directions.”--Ian Hacking, New Republic "A brilliant and sensitive undertaking that does credit not only to feminist scholarship but, in the end, to science as well.”--Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones "This book represents the expression of a particular feminist perspective made all the more compelling by Keller’s evident commitment to and understanding of science. As a lively and important contribution to the scholarship of science, it will undoubtedly stimulate argument and controversy.”--Helen Longino, Texas Humanist "Provocative arguments, presented with authority.”--Kirkus Reviews "Consistently thoughtful, provocative, and interconnected. . . A well-made book that will be useful in upper-level undergraduate and graduate women’s studies, philosophy, and history of science.”--E.C. Patterson, Choice "Written with grace and clarity, [this book] will stand as an important contribution to feminist theory, to the sociology of knowledge and to the continuing critique of the established scientific method.”--Lillian B. Rubin "A powerful book.”--Jessie Bernard

Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist’s Book is a portrait of the space between things, whether they be neurons, quotations, comic-book frames, or fragments in a collage. This twenty-year project is an artist’s book that juxtaposes quotations and images from hundreds of artists and writers with the author’s own thoughts. Using Adobe InDesign® for composition and layout, the author has structured the book to show analogies among disparate texts and images. There have always been gaps, but a focus on the space between things is virtually synonymous with modernity. Often characterized as a break, modernity is a story of gaps. Around 1900, many independent strands of gap thought and experience interacted and interwove more intricately. Atoms, textiles, theories, women, Jews, collage, poetry, patchwork, and music figure prominently in these strands. The gap is a ubiquitous phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of neuroscience, rabbinic thinking, modern literary criticism, art, popular culture, and the structure of matter. This book explores many subjects, but it is ultimately a work of art.

What do biologists want? How will we know when we have 'made sense' of life? Explanations in the biological sciences are provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogenous as their subject matter. This text accounts for this diversity.

Refiguring Life begins with the history of genetics and embryology, showing how discipline-based metaphors have directed scientists' search for evidence. Keller continues with an exploration of the border traffic between biology and physics, focusing on the question of life and the law of increasing entropy. In a final section she traces the impact of new metaphors, born of the computer revolution, on the course of biological research. Keller shows how these metaphors began as objects of contestation between competing visions of the life sciences, how they came to be recast and appropriated by already established research agendas, and how in the process they ultimately came to subvert those same agendas. Refiguring Life explains how the metaphors and machinery of research are not merely the products of scientific discovery but actually work together to map out the territory along which new metaphors and machines can be constructed. Through their dynamic interaction, Keller points out, they define the realm of the possible in science. Drawing on a remarkable spectrum of theoretical work ranging from Schroedinger to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Refiguring Life fuses issues already prominent in the humanities and social sciences with those in the physical and natural sciences, transgressing disciplinary boundaries to offer a broad view of the natural sciences as a whole. Moving gracefully from genetics to embryology, from physics to biology, from cyberscience to molecular biology, Evelyn Fox Keller demonstrates that scientific inquiry cannot pretend to stand apart from the issues and concerns of the larger society in which it exists.

Based on author's thesis (doctoral--Oxford University, 2009) under title: Opportunity pluralism.

From public health luminary Nancy Krieger comes a revolutionary way of addressing health justice and the embodied truths of lived experience. Since the 1700s, fierce debates in medicine and public health have centered around whether sources of ill health can be attributed to either the individual or the surrounding body politic. But what if instead health researchers measure--and policies address--how people biologically embody their societal and ecological context? Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health represents a daring new foray into analyzing how population patterns of health reveal the intersections of lived experience and biology in historical context. Expanding on Nancy Krieger's original ecosocial theory of disease distribution, this volume lays new theoretical groundwork about embodiment and health justice through concrete and novel examples involving pathways such as workplace discrimination, relationship abuse, Jim Crow, police violence, pesticides, fracking, green space, and climate change. It offers a crucial counterargument to dominant biomedical and public health narratives attributing causality to either innate biology or decontextualized health behaviors and provides a key step forward towards understanding and addressing the structural drivers of health inequities and health justice. Bridging insights from politics, history, sociology, ecology, biology, and public health, Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health presents a bold new framework to transform biomedical and population health thinking, practice, and policies and to advance health equity across a deeply threatened planet.

This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally. Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of 'shadow' ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.