Evolutionary History Uniting History and Biology to understand Life an Earth, by Edmund Russell, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 216 pp., UK £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-74509-3
Evolutionary History is an interesting and compelling study, in which the author Edmund Russell argues that integration between evolutionary biology and history, or evolutionary history, offers fresh insights into, and reinterpretations of, our past and our future. He demonstrates, for example, how domestication and the agricultural revolution began by accident and not human intention (p. 60), how the US and Columbian coca eradication plan became “a free ariel weed killing service” for the producer (p. 37) and how fishing for larger fish eventually lead to smaller catches (p. 29). Russell also offers a reinterpretation of industrialisation as a “revolution in the ability to capitalise on the variation and abundance of nature” (p.131), argues that organisms can be technology (p. 144) and ponders both on why evolutionary biology has played such a minimal role to date in environmental history in spite of the clear overlap (p. 145).
The book is structured in 12 chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction in which Russell sets out his main arguments. Chapter 2 examines the key concepts of evolutionary biology, describes the processes involved, highlights current thinking and explains the terminology. It offers a good starting place for readers who are not familiar with the topic. In Chapters 3–8, Russell develops three of his four key points; that man has shaped all evolution, human and non-human; human evolution has shaped human history; all populations have evolved in response to each other (p. 2). He uses a wide variety of examples to demonstrate and support these contentions ranging from resistance in pests and pathogens, to skin colour and domestication.
From Chapter 9 onwards, Russell applies these ideas to demonstrate his fourth point that evolutionary history offers a greater depth of insight into history and the present day that either discipline in isolation fails to reveal (p. 2). He focuses on the traditional historical interpretations of the industrial revolution and uses the cotton industry as an example. Russell persuasively argues that anthropogenic evolution resulted in long cotton fibres capable of being machine spun and woven into cloth and this factor “laid the ground work” for Britain’s industrial transformation rather than the “inventors and their machines” (p. 110). They simply responded to a biological innovation in raw cotton production in the New World.
In Chapter 10, Russell challenges the common assumption that living organisms are not technology to demonstrate how evolutionary history has the potential to augment technological history. For example, he notes that burglar alarms are technologies engineered to protect the home against intruders. So why, Russell asks, should we not perceive guard dogs bred for the same purpose as technology (p. 135)? Consequently similar approaches and methods adopted by historians of technology, he suggests, can be applied to living organisms shaped by man to serve man to offer new interpretations and greater depth of understanding.
The theme of enhancing scholarship is continued into chapter eleven, where Russell tackles environmental history, and also in the concluding Chapter 12. Chapter 11 lacks the rigour and thrust of his reinterpretation of the industrial revolution, and to a lesser degree the perception of living organisms as technology. For example, Russell notes that environmental historians have not engaged strongly with evolutionary biology (p. 146). He offers explanations as to why this might be such as a lack of science requirement to study history (p. 147) and suggests that integration will bring “trees heavy with low hanging fruit” (p. 153). Yet in contrast to, for example, Russell's adoption of an evolutionary biological approach to political history in which he illustrates the role of the state in the emergence of elephants without tusks in Zambia (p. 19), he offers little in the way of firm examples to convince environmental historians of the benefits of harvesting such fruit. To Russell the relevance of evolutionary history in a field that studies “the interaction between people and their environments over time” seemed clear (p. 145). Environmental historians are already well schooled in the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, and will no doubt recognise the value of evolution in enhancing their studies, but to reach out to a more mainstream traditional historical readership, illustration of the benefits of collaboration would be more convincing.
Many of Russell's examples of evolutionary biology are likely to be familiar to even the non-scientific reader and certainly the first two thirds of the book are unlikely to tax the evolutionary biologists. The author does state that the study is “designed for the novice” (p. 168), but this perhaps should have been made clear in the introduction rather than in “notes on sources” at the end of the book. The study does however exemplify some of the difficulties of interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly in ensuring accessibility to both sides in diverse subject areas such as science and the arts.
Russell achieves ease of understanding by writing in the first person. For instance, he asks the reader to have their walking shoes and Mackintosh to hand for a walk through the English countryside (p. 42), to leave on their “Parka” in preparation for Siberia (p. 61) and to engage in ecological thought experiments (p.40). He takes the reader on a journey that follows his line of thinking from the origins of his ideas, their development and their final crystallisation. Much of this is grounded in his personal life, such as the death of his grandfather which demonstrated the evolution of pathogens resistant to antibiotics and the activities of his pet dog Riley who is “a testament to the extraordinary power of human beings to shape the evolution of other species” (p. 54). This style of writing makes evolutionary theory much more user-friendly both to academics who have very little or no scientific grounding and importantly to the wider public.
Although the author is clearly targeting historians as his key audience, the study is not a traditional history based on manuscript evidence and archive material, but more a review of the literature based on his selected themes that often drifts into the philosophical debate, but it does offer new approaches and directions for historical study. Evolutionary History has clarity and humour and is a thought provoking and stimulating read. Whether or not the traditional historians take up Russell's challenge, remains to be seen, nonetheless, he certainly achieves his aim to debunk the idea that evolution is distanced from the individual (p. 5).