Sour Grapes 英文参考文献.docVIP

Book Review/Science in the Media Sour Grapes William Foster susceptible to the insect, which had being an excellent scientist, he was a doughty polemicist, with a vivid turn of phrase. “Facile arguments devoid of facts need only a little puff of rhetoric to seduce the ignoramus,” he wrote in 1874 as the French establishment went into denial about the disease. He was himself capable of great gales of rhetoric. “If Burgundy should be wiped out,” he urged the delegates at a congress in Lyon in 1872 “—along with Bordeaux—one could say that France itself had been overthrown.” The chief supporting actor in the story is Charles Riley, an English-born American entomologist who had fought brie?y in the Civil War: a convinced Darwinian, he quickly understood why American but not European vine species were resistant to the insect. Both men were empiricists and happy to get their feet dirty: Riley poured scorn on evolved with the native American vine species and did not cause them appreciable damage. Phylloxera spread slowly but inexorably across the wine-growing regions of France, reaching the Champagne in 1890, and it eventually conquered all the major wine-growing regions of the world, with the exception of Chile. America provided the cure as well as the cause. American vines, the insects’ Trojan horse, were not harmed by the insect, and could be used as rootstocks on which the susceptible European vine species Vitis vinifera could be grafted. This method was amazingly successful and continues to be used to keep the insect at bay. In hindsight the solution may seem obvious, but this book makes clear what an immense struggle was involved. Indeed, Campbell’s book illustrates what a dif?cult, messy, and unpredictable business science can be, and what sheer hard work it is to translate scienti?c results into action. The insects themselves are exceptionally dif?cult to study. They are small (less than 1 mm), they are hidden underground or in galls, and they usually have disappe