Spring Spotlight on Books www.biosciencemag.org March 2006 / Vol. 56 No. 3 • BioScience 267 ideas within plant communities is a ma- jor opportunity for future research. Although my particular interest in the geographic mosaic theory is in its rele- vance and importance to community ecology, Thompson’s fundamental goal is to squarely identify the process of co- evolution as a foundational biological principle. I think he succeeds. Old argu- ments against coevolution, based on the lack of irrefutable experimental proof of reciprocal evolutionary relationships—as if anything big in ecology or evolution were based on irrefutable proof—seem hollow in the light of carefully described evolutionary mosaics of crossbills and pine trees, parsnips and webworms, yucca moths and yuccas, toxic newts and resis- tant garter snakes, and hummingbirds and heliconias. New arguments for the importance of interspecific interactions, variation in their outcomes in different communities, and local adaptation of populations to each other are robust and compelling. Thompson’s empirical ex- amples and cogent arguments provide a new way to look at community ecology’s past, but evidence that “reciprocal evo- lutionary change shapes interspecific in- teractions across continents and oceans and over time” points to its future. RAGAN M. CALLAWAY Ragan M. Callaway (e-mail: ray. callaway@mso.umt.edu) is with the Division of Biological Sciences, Univer- sity of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812. References cited Stinchcombe JR, Rausher MD. 2001. Diffuse se- lection on resistance to deer herbivory in the ivyleaf morning glory, Ipomoea herecaea. Amer- ican Naturalist 158: 376–388. ———. 2002. The evolution of tolerance to deer herbivory: Modifications caused by the abun- dance of insect herbivores. Proceedings: Bio- logical Sciences 269: 1241–1246. RETHINKING THE GENE The Epistemology of Development, Evolution, and Genetics: Selected Essays. Richard M. Burian. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2005. 288 pp. $32.99 (ISBN 0521545285 paper). R ichard Burian, although not as well known as some more prolific philos- ophers (e.g., Elliott Sober, Phillip Kitcher, Michael Ruse), has been an important fig- ure within the philosophy of biology for 25 years. Burian was awarded a doctor- ate in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971 and currently teaches at Virginia Tech, with joint appointments in philosophy and in science and tech- nology studies. After a transformative year at Harvard studying with Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould, Burian began working in the philosophy of bi- ology. The Epistemology of Development, Evolution, and Genetics will finally make his ideas available to a wider audience. This book is not light reading, but his- torians and philosophers of biology, as well as practicing biologists with interests in the history or philosophy of their dis- cipline, will benefit from the breadth and depth of Burian’s historical, philosophi- cal, and biological insights. The Epistemology of Development, Evo- lution, and Genetics contains an intro- duction and 11 other chapters (9 of which were previously published). Part 1, “Methodological Issues,”consists of two chapters. The first addresses epistemo- logical questions about the use of model organisms (e.g., What makes an organism a good model? What epistemic problems might arise from focusing on model species?), while the second argues that unification is an important method- ological ideal guiding biological research. Part 2 has three essays on evolution, one of which suggests that a tightly integrated evolutionary biology is neither desirable nor possible, while another defends Dobzhansky’s claim that “nothing in bi- ology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”Part 3, entitled “Genetics and Molecular Biology,”contains three chap- ters about gene concepts, focusing par- ticularly on philosophical questions about conceptual change. The third essay ex- amines different ways of conceptualizing adaptation. Part 4 includes three chapters on development. The concepts in part 3 merit elabora- tion. Burian outlines a distinctive realist explanation of how scientists maintain continuity of reference in the face of sometimes dramatic changes in the meaning of terms. According to Burian, historians and philosophers should dis- tinguish two kinds of gene concepts. Re- search often begins with an imprecisely defined (“schematic”) gene concept. In time, geneticists also develop “substan- tive” concepts that specify more fully what genes are. This framework allows us to understand the continuity of genetic research (via the schematic concepts) while recognizing the important discon- tinuities in the substantive concepts. In this way, Burian tries to defend a form of realism about genes and to answer Kuhn’s worry that our successive theories about genes are incommensurable. Although only a small sample of Burian’s oeuvre, the essays in this vol- ume provide a wonderful introduction to his work, revealing both the tremendous range and the philosophical, biological, and historical depth of his scholarship. Burian turns with ease from the history of genetics to thorny philosophical prob- lems about conceptual change in genet- ics, to the subtle ways in which recent work in “evo–devo” may force a reexam- ination of the homology concept. Fur- thermore, although the essays were written over a span of 22 years (1983– 2005), the collection is surprisingly well integrated. Indeed, one might view the es- says as extended meditations on the two counterpoised themes of part 1, the role of model organisms and the goal of in- tegration (unification). Thus, two main themes of the book are contextualism and the struggle to develop a unified un- derstanding of biology in the face of the hierarchical complexity of the biological world. Burian presupposes that the biological world is hierarchically structured. Im- portant biological processes occur on different temporal, geographic, and tax- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article-abstract/56/3/267/333108 by guest on 15 June 2020