Ghost Stories for Darwin

I owe this one to Finncon, or more precisely to the traditional academic conference that takes places on the Friday before Finncon. Irma messaged me to tell me that one of the papers was about Oryx and Crake, and this strange academic book, neither of which I was familiar with. Could I help? Well, I had some memory of reading Oryx and Crake, and being deeply unimpressed. But as for this Ghost Stories for Darwin thing? A book on evolutionary biology written by a woman with a very Indian name. WTF? As I believe people say these days.

My expectations were not improved when I started to read the book on the train to Jyväskylä. I explained to Ursula Vernon and her husband, Kevin, why I would have my nose in a book during the trip. They looked at me as if I had just confessed some sort of masochist fetish. What good could possibly come of this bizarre exercise in self-immolation?

I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much myself. I have always viewed evolutionary biologists as being insecure white men who are racist, misogynist, queerphobic and ableist, and who invent pseudoscientific theories to justify their bigotries; said theories being provable as correct solely by the existence of patriarchy.

Thankfully I soon changed my mind. Banu Subramaniam grew up in India and traveled to the USA to pursue a PhD in evolutionary biology. She was, by her own admission, naive and starry-eyed. She saw the USA as being a land free of the classism she was familiar with in India, she saw science as being a discipline free of sexism, and she had no idea about the level of racism in US culture. That she survived the experience is a testament to her strength of will, and also to the support she gained from the Women’s Studies department in her university.

Subramaniam’s subject for her PhD was the Morning Glory, a plant closely related to the notorious British Convolvulus, hated by gardeners throughout the land. The convolvulus does have very pretty white flowers (there will probably be lots in my back yard when I get home), but the morning glory has a wide variety of flower colourations, and it is these that Subramaniam was planning to study.

Doing so, and in the process experiencing life as a woman of colour in the USA, led to a political awakening that has established Subramaniam as one of the foremost experts on gender in the sciences. And if that immediately brings to mind the phrase, “women in science”, well you are exactly the sort of ill-informed person that Ghost Stories for Darwin is intended for.

I should note at the start that the book does not entirely succeed. Subramaniam is not a professional science communicator, and there are times, particularly when she is talking about her own academic specialisms, that she veers into complex jargon. Thankfully I have a science degree and was able to make sense of most of it, but other readers may find it very hard going.

Being an academic book, Ghost Stories for Darwin has a subtitle. It is, The Science of Variation and The Politics of Diversity. This is a good place to start looking at the argument. One of the great debates within evolutionary biology is the role of variation in evolution. Some people in the field believe that diversity has an evolutionary advantage for the species, as that provides a wide range of mutations to help it evolve into something better. Others believe that all variation is bad, and that only the fittest variation should be allowed to pass its genes on to new generations. This latter view leads inevitably to eugenics.

But, and here is our first important feminist lesson of the day, all binaries are false. Neither of the explanations above helps us understand why variation in the colour of morning glory flowers persists through hundreds of generations, and can exhibit stable shares of the population to which the species will return if the balance is perturbed. Variation in flower colour appears to be baked in to the morning glory as a species.

The answer to this conundrum is that evolution is not just driven by genetics. It is also influenced by a range of environmental factors including, but not limited to, climate, pollinator preference, soil conditions, human cultivation and so on. Subramaniam quickly discovered that the scientific ideas of doing a simple, one-variable experiment on a field of morning glory flowers tells you nothing.

Exploring the underlying assumptions of her field, and seeking support as a doubly marginalized person within US academia, led Subramaniam both to discover the horrendous eugenicist underpinning of her discipline, and the fundamentally masculinist nature of science as it is practiced.

One interesting aspect of Subramaniam’s section on eugenics is the fact that many of the pioneers of the field saw themselves as striving for a better world, and even as being good Socialists. The idea that the socially inferior should, for their own good, not be allowed to survive, is deeply seductive. While most of the extreme horrors perpetrated in the name of this belief have been minority ethnic groups, the differently abled and queer communities can recognise the syndrome. There have been many times when I have been told that my life would have been easier had I not been born.

Subramaniam moves on from eugenics to matters of race, and the complicated discipline known as Invasion Biology. We are all, I am sure, familiar with stories about how our native ecosystems are being “invaded” by dangerous foreign plants that are “taking over” and “crowding out” native species. Would it surprise you that there is a direct correlation between the frequency of such stories in the newspapers and the level of popular concern about human immigration? And the two types of story use exactly the same types of language.

Of course migration of plant species around the world has a long and in many cases glorious history. Where would our cuisines be without the potato, the tomato, and the chili pepper, all of which were unknown outside the Americas before Columbus accidentally ran into them on his way to India. The famous Georgia Peach is an immigrant from China. The same is true for animal species, though sometimes a little creative marketing is required. The Patagonia Toothfish was unheard of in restaurants before it cleverly changed its name to the Chilean Sea Bass.

The final section of the book is about gender, and it focuses on how the practice of science has been socially constructed in a very masculine fashion. A woman wishing to practice science has to buy into that construction and present herself as “one of the boys” in order to be taken seriously as a scientist. She must not wear make-up, she must not show emotion, and so on. Or at least, she should do so inside the lab. Outside the lab, in social spaces, she must present as conventionally feminine. After all, she will soon want to give up her career and become a wife and mother instead.

Feminist lesson two of the day is that all too often talk of gender focuses solely on the “woman problem”. It talks about how women must change themselves in order to fit into the masculine world, or about the accommodations that must be made for women because they do things like have families. (Men never have families, they have wives to do that for them.) Subramaniam says:

[…] the consistent emphasis on family and women reinforces essentialist ideas about women. What has remained unchallenged is the normative model of the male as the ideal scientist, which insists on productivity that can only be achieved by very long hours, a singular dedication to work, and an exclusive focus on one’s profession.

It occurs to me that many of the lessons Subramaniam presents about life in academia, particularly about the sink-or-swim culture of graduate education, are equally applicable outside of the sciences. Indeed, the failure of senior staff to properly train their subordinates in anything other than the technical aspects of the job at hand (and not in how to do things like be a good manager) is endemic in the world of work at large.

Ghost Stories for Darwin was published in 2014, and there are probably areas where its analysis of academic culture in the USA are out of date. In particular, while Subramaniam did see the commercialization of universities coming, she did not know how close it would come to destroying the institutions it was supposed to rescue.

I noted also that there is very little discussion of sexuality as a marginalized identity. Subramaniam does note that it is an issue, but when she actually talks about it she tends to do so by contrasting the profoundly asexual nature of laboratory life with the expectation of normative heterosexuality outside of the lab. She does make brief note of the famous trans masculine neurobiologist, Ben Barres, to illustrate just how foolish misogynist ideas of what makes a good scientist are, but her discussion of gender is primarily limited to performance rather than identity.

These, however, are minor quibbles. Ghost Stories for Darwin is a fascinating and well-argued book that gave me lots of useful pointers as to how to think about gender and its effects on the world.

Which leaves us with one question: where do the ghosts come in? It turns out that Subramaniam has borrowed the metaphor from Bollywood cinema. In a Bollywood movie, a ghost is always someone who has been unjustly forgotten and ignored after their death, and perhaps in life. They desperately want to be listened to, understood, acknowledged, and recognized so that they can stop haunting the living and rest in peace. The history of feminism, in all areas of life, is a story of Bollywood ghosts.

Title: Ghost Stories for Darwin
By: Banu Subramaniam
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Purchase links:
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