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Trade paperback, 349 pages Borrowed from a friendPublished 2009 (originally 2006) Read June 2018 |
Smith's book takes up the idea of how do you illustrate natural selection? He argues that while Darwin was all about mutation, the visual conventions of science are all about fixity, so there's an inherent contradiction (1). Smith explores the use of illustrations in Darwin's work, especially as contrasted with John Ruskin's views on scientific vision, and also contextualizes what was going on in Darwin by looking at scientific illustrations in some contemporary works. As he says, "All parties in the Darwinian debates agreed that seeing is believing, but their confidence in ocular proof was no naive realism, for they argued vigorously about what counted as seeing and what it meant to believe" (18).
It's good work-- but often the kind of literature and science work that doesn't hold a lot of interest for me personally. Like, I feel like Smith is way more into pictures of birds or faces than I will ever be. The strongest parts of the book are when Smith taps into those bigger cultural debates I cited in the previous paragraph; Smith lays out Ruskin's view of science very well, which will be of use to me as I work with those concepts in the book I'm working on. But the close readings of how Darwin worked with images sometimes got monotonous to me.
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