Across more than 500 pages, Sommer capably conveys the complexity of [the lives of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Julian Huxley, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza], particularly the contestations and accusations that their projects provoked. It is as yet too early to say whether disciplines like social and environmental epigenetics will fulfill their ambitious task, but their practitioners would do well to heed lessons learned from past attempts to read human history into biology.
Science This is good, solid scholarly research. The scientific issues are discussed clearly and effectively, and the history is first-rate. These three scholars
Osborn, Huxley, and Cavalli-Sforza
separated by time, space, and ideology, are nevertheless bound by the concentration and exercise of scientific power, and by the ambition to narrate human ancestry with the authoritative voice of science. One comes away with an appreciation for the ethnographic generalization that the ancestors are always sacred; consequently, even in science, nobody can study human diversity or origins apolitically.
Metascience Sommer carefully examines history and memory, as embodied and expressed in some particular areas of human biology concerned with evolution. With this book, she presents the intriguing notion of a 'history within' and offers much in her deep exploration into the intersections of history, memory, and human evolution.
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, University of Florida History Within offers an ambitious analysis of efforts to construct scientific narratives about human evolution and biological variation over the long twentieth century. Sommer focuses on three distinctive episodes that, when considered together, span more than a century to arrive at our contemporary genomic age. Specifically, she examines the ideas and strategies of three men: Henry Fairfield Osborn, Julian Huxley, and Luca Cavalli-Sforza. For Sommer, each serves as a representative of three successive eras of academic efforts to read human history through the evolutionary sciences. Throughout History Within, Sommer presents a multitude of fresh, fascinating materials that show how ideas about history itself have animated thought about what it means to be human. A leader in the emerging field of the history of biological anthropology, Sommer is well positioned to synthesize major themes, and the long period of time covered in the manuscript
more than 100 years
provides new and important contexts for evaluating contemporary attitudes about race and genomics. Sommer has written a rigorous social and intellectual history of the human-oriented life sciences that is sure to be an important contribution to the history of science.
Joanna Radin, Yale University With History Within, Sommer sets out to understand the role of the life sciences over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the expanding landscapes of public and popular history. Through the works of three key figures
Osborn, Huxley, and Cavalli-Sforza
she analyzes the different ways in which evolutionary theory framed the past of the human species and not just for its own sake, but as the ground upon which moral and political visions for a just society and future would be built. In doing so, she frames the historical narrative in terms of a few key concepts: that of 'phylogenetic memory' on the one hand, and the 'genographic network' on the other. History Within is an admirably erudite book, rich in historical detail and expansive in its understanding of the works of these three historically influential figures.
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College, Columbia University