Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism After Darwin

In Wild Experiment, Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of "cogency theory" to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Cogency Theory: An Essay on Our Intellectual Affects  1 Part I. Cogency Theory 1. The Longing to Believe: Philosophers on Conspiracy Theory and the Sense of Science  33 2. Sensualized Epistemology: Affect Theory on How Reason Gets Racialized  57 3. Science as an Intoxication: Secularism Studies on Enchantment and Critique  80 4. Feeling is Believing: The Triune Brain, Mere Exposure, and Cogency  107 Part II. Feeling Science and Secularism 5. Only Better Beasts: Darwin, Huxley, and the Sense of Science  137 6. The Secular Circus: Science and Racialized Reason in the Scopes Trial  169 7. The Four Horsemen: New Atheism as Secular Conspiracy Theory  200 Epilogue. From Creationism to Climate Denialism  230 Acknowledgments  239 Notes  243 Bibliography  281 Index

About the Author :
Donovan O. Schaefer is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, also published by Duke University Press, and The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power.

Review :
"Inaugurate[s] a project of secular theorization that adds a distinctive and needed methodological angle to studies of the secular in North America. . . . A must-read for scholars of American religions. . . ." - Valeria Vergani (American Religion) "Wild Experiment is an indispensable addition to any course syllabus on race, religion, affect theory, and any interdisciplinary topic on the intersections between feeling and thinking." - Abdulrahman Bindamnan (Material Religion) "Through Schaefer’s endeavor to expand the conversation between secularism studies and STS, the field of STS has an illuminating new vantage from which to look at knowledge, feeling, and belief. And it feels right." (Society for the Social Studies of Science Ludwik Fleck Prize Committee) "This fascinating book is a valuable contribution to the field of affect studies and secularism studies, as it starts a first conversation between these previously somewhat unconnected fields." - Nur Yasemin Ural (Politics, Religion & Ideology) "Perhaps humanities scholars such as Schaefer can be useful in the climate crisis. They can help scientists pay attention to how knowledge feels-and thus how to be more effective in communicating it." - Amy Frykholm (Christian Century) "Wild Experiment is a very well-written book that sheds a new light on how to perceive science. It provides good grounds for rejecting naÏve arguments about objective and value-free knowledge in science." - Kostas Kampourakis (Quarterly Review of Biology) "Reading Donovan Schaefer’s book has been an experience. At times I felt almost dizzy as his intellectual range is breathtaking. Schaefer effortlessly engages with a vast range of topics normally not discussed in one breath, in one book. He gives us an outline of cogency theory on how thinking feels and then debates it in relation to racialized reason, secularism, Darwin and Huxley and their science,  new findings in neuroscience, creationism and more. Each chapter is like a stand-alone episode of the most gripping drama, reading which I had a Hitchcockian feeling-never a dull moment. The book is a page-turner. The nuance, the richness, the poetics of Schaefer’s prose-the book is indeed a testimonial of a passionate love affair with an idea." - Esha Shah (Zygon) "As someone who has not previously engaged with religious studies in any substantive way, I did not expect to be captivated by this book. And yet it drew me in, held my attention, and has continued to resonate with me since. . . . Part of what made the book accessible to me-in addition to the lucid writing-was its robust engagement with canonical STS literature as well as with the feminist and antiracist scholarship I do know well. He brings together bold-faced names for STS such as Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, as well as incisive antiracist thinkers ranging from Audre Lorde to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. And yet a key thing that made it interesting to me was that it brought those too-often-siloed literatures together with each other and with new-to-me literatures in a way that is original." - Anne Pollock (Zygon)