and dispersal, which promote social col- laboration, but may also allow social parasitism.

The chapters on the first theme address mostly ultimate, evolutionary questions. A central insight is that the costs, benefits and kinship factors, interconnected by what is known as Hamilton’s rule, are now gener- ally accepted as the major evolutionary model for understanding social behaviour in paper wasps. Kinship predictions are borne out by findings that early, collaborative nest foundresses are related (Turillazzi, Strassmann), whereas late-joiners are un- related to the wasps whose nest they usurp (Strassmann, Gamboa). Another obser- vation consistent with theory is that worker wasps who take over a nest from their mother do not destroy brood, whereas workers taking over from an unrelated nest- mate do (Strassmann). Complementary to kinship factors, both Gadagkar and Queller emphasize that high mortality rates of adult wasps select for social living, because half an offspring counts when raised in collabo- ration with survivors, but not when working alone. In the evolutionarily more advanced Rhopalidia paper wasps, the relative importance of kinship versus ecological cost-benefit factors is reduced (Gadagkar), which makes sense as this group has excep- tionally long-lived nests (Yamane). The early evolution of helping behaviour is treated from a different angle in the chap- ter by Gervet, Anstett and Kjellberg. Comparative aspects of nest construction and their evolutionary implications are reviewed in chapters by Hansel1 and Wenzel.

Interesting general results from the sec- ond category of chapters are that all female paper wasps can recognize nestmates, but have to learn to do so after eclosion (Gamboa), that glandular secretions and cuticular chemistry are essential factors for individual dominance and successful usurpation (Jeanne), that social parasites modify the odour of hosts nests and adjust their own body odour after take-over (Lorenzi, Bagneres and Clement), and that socially parasitic species have behavioural syndromes that are a logical extension of less elaborate behaviours in free living species where hostile nest take-overs are facultative (Cervo and Dani). The plastic and context dependent expression of social behaviour is elaborated in a chapter by West-Eberhard. Contributions by Beani on mating behaviour and Ugolini and Cannicci on homing review aspects of paper wasp sociality that take place far away from the nests.

The book closes with an interesting philo- sophical account (Burian) of paper wasps as model systems, which also argues how progress in science can be achieved by plac- ing anomalies into the right (novel) perspec- tive. The book would have benefitted from an epilogue summarizing the progress achieved since Pardi wrote the first chapter. In all, however, a recommendable book,

both for those seeking an introduction into a new field, and for specialists trying to explore new horizons.

.I. J. Boomsma

Scientific Knowledge. By B. Barnes, D. Bloor and J. Henry. Pp. 230. The Athlone Press, 1996. f 15.95. ISBN 0 485 12078 X.

This book offers an introduction to the soci- ology of scientific knowledge written by pioneer members of the ‘Edinburgh school’. The group has become notorious (as far as many scientists are concerned) for its insist- ence that the creation of scientific knowl- edge is a social process and has to be under- stood on the same terms as any other human activity. Science cannot be privileged because it creates ‘truth’. This position has been vilified as an attack on the objectivity of science, and caricatured as a position which implies that scientists can make up any theory they choose in response to social pressures, whatever the evidence. This is dismissed as obvious nonsense because if it were true science would not offer us ever- greater control over nature.

The authors of Scientz$c Knowledge insist that they are only applying the scientific method to science itself. Their position does not imply that scientists can ignore the evi- dence, only that in any new research en- vironment, there is such a mass of evidence available that decisions have to be taken on what lines to pursue - and it is these deci- sions that are open to social analysis. The view of classification known as jinitism assumes that we must choose which of the many ‘facts’ are to be taken as significant - and what is information as far as one theory is concerned is merely noise to another. The process by which certain kinds of facts are marginalized, while others become the basis for a research programme, is necessarily a social one. A programme can only succeed if it generates control over nature - but this does not mean that another programme might have been chosen which would have generated another (quite different) avenue of control.

To support their analysis, the authors appeal to a number of detailed historical case-studies. An important area is the changing perception of scientific authority. Here Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s study of the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes provides ideal evidence that what counts as scientific evidence is open to negotiation. The controversy engen- dered by Robert Chambers’ evolutionary text Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) is used to show how pro- fessional scientists react to an outsider’s efforts to introduce a hitherto forbidden area of study. Gerald Holton’s detailed analysis of Robert Millikan’s experiments to estab- lish the charge on the electron is interpreted in sociological terms. Millikan himself mar-

Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right reserved. 0160-9327/97/$17.00.

ginalized inconvenient results, while the sci- entific community was ultimately persuad- ed to ignore alternative lines of evidence (even though this evidence was never prop- erly ‘explained away’ in terms of what became the orthodox picture).

It is to be hoped that this authoritative statement of the sociological approach to science will persuade at least some critics to take a second look. As an ‘introduction’, however, the book is perhaps a bit on the heavy-handed side; I found some parts extremely hard reading, and newcomers may not see the book as the most user- friendly way into this important topic.

Peter Bowler

A Theory for Everything. By Jeremy Bernstein. Pp. 320. Springer- Verlag, 1996. DM39.80. ISBN 0 387 94700 0.

Jeremy Bernstein entered Harvard in 1947 with an aversion to science, he tells us, from his high-school exposure to physics. All the same, he ended up an academic physicist, for he was entranced by courses on the his- tory and philosophy of science contained in the Harvard General Education program for freshmen. After ten years at Harvard, he researched and taught in New York, now at Rockefeller University. For many years, Bernstein was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and contributed essays to The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Scientific American. His latest book is a collection of these essays, which have been updated and extended with new material.

What gives coherence to the book is the author’s witty and often-mordant style, forged in the days of the old New Yorker, during lunches at the Algonquin Hotel with Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson and others. He ranges over a miscellany of topics: four pieces of fiction; nine articles on the thoughts and passions of major figures in recent physical science; two on fiascos (the story of cold nuclear fusion, and an aborted clean-up of mining wastes in Colorado); and a tribute to the linguistic skills of a simulta- neous translator with the International Labour Organisation in Geneva.

‘Leptons’, the light fictional section, tells us how to estimate the average density of ghosts, apply catastrophe theory to inter- sexual relations, or to a seminar on Wittgenstein’s pronouncements on apple- counting, and how to thwart the attempts of a College President to confer an honorary degree on a potential donor specifying an unwelcome colleague as the tenant of the chair to be funded. The weightiest chapters are on black holes, a tribute to Bernstein’s mentor at Harvard, Julian Schwinger, and an appraisal of Einstein’s scientific legacy. In contrast to Niels Bohr, who was ‘pro- found about things that didn’t really mat- ter’ , everything Einstein published over some 30 years ‘was a mine of gold’, even

Endeavour Vol. 21(l) 1997 43

though he resisted the black holes implied by general relativity, and came close to being ‘not even wrong’ at the very end.

Bernstein’s mordant review of Emilio Segre’s autobiography evoked protests from Segre’s widow. His review of Marie Curie’s biography reveals that she declined to attend the Stockholm award ceremonies for the Nobel Prize in 1903, being far too busy in Paris at the time, but she insisted on attending the Stockholm award for her sec- ond Prize in 1911, when Arrhenius asked her to withdraw, following reports of her relationship with Paul Langevin. That all- American chemist, Linus Pauling, oddly dubbed un-American, displayed poor taste in Bernstein’s view by demonstrating against nuclear testing outside the White House just before entering for the US Nobelists’ dinner put on by Kennedy.

This book is recommended to scientific connoisseurs of the golden age of The New Yorker.

Stephen Mason

Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. Pp. 653. By Frank J. Sulloway. Pantheon Books, 1996. US$30.00 ISBN 0 679 44232 4.

In 1970, science historian Frank J. Sulloway initiated what would become his life’s greatest project. Twenty-six years later, the masterly Born to Rebel was released. With primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s predic- tion on the cover that the book ‘will have the same kind of long-term impact as Freud’s and Darwin’s’, it was with great expectation that I began reading it.

Sulloway’s initial approach is to examine why some people have the genius and potential to reject the conventional wisdom of their day and revolutionize the way we think. ‘Why, during radical revolutions, do some people rapidly discard their old, erroneous ways of thinking whereas others hold tenaciously to the prevailing dogma?’ (p. xi). Sulloway finds convincing argu- ments in personality psychology; most in- dividual differences in personality arise within the family. The question of why some people rebel turns out to be almost synony- mous with the question of why siblings are so different. Siblings raised together are as different in their personalities as people from different families. The most probable single factor responsible for why the shared family environment is experienced differ- ently for the siblings, is birth order. Birth order entails different exposure to several variables, and the concept is actually a proxy for differences in age, size, power, and privilege within the family system. The ultimate answer to why siblings develop so different personalities seems to lie in the theory of sibling-sibling conflict, that is, competition between the different siblings for the investment from the parents (time,

44 Endeavour Vol. 21(l) 1997

attention and resources). Sibling-sibling conflict is actually a part of parent-off- spring conflict, or - to use Sulloway’s words - ‘Parent-offspring conflict is driven by conflict between siblings’ (p. 60). Divergence in personality minimizes com- petition for limited or scarce resources.

Sulloway suggests that firstborn and later- born siblings behave differently when, among others things, they are confronted with radical ideas. The firstborns are less open to change (more ‘conservative’), more assertive, more socially dominant, more ambitious, more jealous of their status, and more defensive, and it is natural for them to identify more strongly with power and authority (thus becoming more strongly allied with their parents). Later-born, on the other hand are more open, more flexible and seem to have a larger propensity to change their views. When later-born are confronted with radical ideas, they will more easily accept knowledge which challenges the established order. Thus, the most important factor in predicting radical behaviour is birth order.

In reaching these findings, Sulloway ana- lyzed 28 innovations that have highlighted the history of science during the past five centuries. These revolutions in social and scientific thought are divided into four cat- egories: radical ideological revolution (e.g. copemican revolution; darwinian revolu- tion), technical revolutions (e.g. the scien- tific method of Bacon and Descartes; freud- ian psychoanalysis; Einstein and relativity theory), controversial innovations (e.g. mes- merism; phrenology; Semmelweis and puerperal fever) and conservative theories (e.g. germ theory; eugenics). Sulloway has examined 6000 lives in Western history and culled half a million biographical data points from tens of thousands of biographies!

His main results are that later-boms are consistently overrepresented among the champions of conceptual change. For the 28 innovations, the odds are two-to-one in favour of greater later-born adoption. Even when the initiators of new theories turn out to be firstborn - as was the case with Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein and Freud - their supporters are still predominantly later-born. To explain such exceptions to the rule, Sulloway writes that: ‘Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical . . . , such indi- viduals are likely to have experienced sub- stantial conflict with a parent. Parent-off- spring conflict makes honorary laterboms out of some firstborns’ (p. 123).

Let me exemplify the general trend with the reception of darwinism:

“The nineteenth century has sometimes been called ‘Darwin’s Century’ owing to the dramatic impact that Darwin’s ideas had on science and social thought. So great is the disparity in the reception of evolutionary ideas by birth order that the adoption process occurred in two waves that were nearly a century apart. By 1875, firstborns

had achieved the same support level for evolution (40 percent) that laterboms first achieved around 1775. Simple arithmetic tells us that ‘Darwin’s century’ only became a historical reality because laterboms out- numbered firstborns 2.6 to 1 in the general population. A curious fact of demographic history is relevant to the reception of Darwinism. France began the demographic shift during the late eighteenth century, about 50 years earlier than other European countries. This fact helps to explain why French scientists were so hostile to Darwinism compared with scientists from other nations. Darwin himself complained about the ‘horrid unbelieving Frenchmen’, but the problem had little to do with being French. In 1859, French scientists had only 1.1 siblings compared with 2.8 siblings among scientists in other countries. During the remainder of the nineteenth century, Darwinism never did take hold in France, and the widespread adoption of natural selection in this country had to wait until the 195Os, nearly a century after the publication of the On’gin of Species. Contraception and family planning, not the school of Cuvier, lie behind this extraordinary delay” (pp. 35-36).

The book consists of four parts and 15 chapters. Each part adds a new layer to the basic argument. Each chapter is clearly ended with a conclusion, and Part 4 is a syn- thesis of the book with its own concluding chapter. Born to Rebel is richly illustrated with figures, both photographs of the historic persons which are presented in the text and central diagrams which present the general trends. Even though the book con- sists of 653 pages, the main text is only 368 pages. The rest is ten appendices (which, among other things, present the methods in closer scrutiny), a large section with supple- mentary end notes and sources, 76 pages reference list and an index.

Sulloway establishes once and for all that parts of the study of history may be quanti- tative and nomothetic - that is, it is possible to propose general and testable hypotheses about human behaviour and the cultural evolution of our societies. This does not imply that the author ignores the uniqueness of any historical event and epoch. Quite to the contrary, he exposes both the general- ities in the unique events and uses the unique events to explain why general tendencies are not always realized. The following pas- sage should convince even (firstborn) social scientists and humanists that the application of a modem evolutionary perspective can be useful and nothing to ‘fear’: ‘From an evo- lutionary perspective, such competition [between siblings] is natural. It is hard wired because it is adaptive. Paradoxically, so is altruism among siblings. The choice between fratricide and sacrificing one’s life for a sibling is dictated by environmental contingencies, and only secondarily by the repertoire of Darwinian strategies that have proved adaptive in the past. When it comes

Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right reserved. 0160-9327/97/$17.00.