This is definitely one of the more interesting books I’ve read. Lin covers the history and contemporary debate on biological metaphors in textual criticism - primarily New Testament textual criticism. Lin leans too heavily on historical and cultural considerations for my taste; I would prefer a more application heavy treatment. However, there’s plenty to sink your teeth in. At the end, Lin argues that the current biological metaphors face a serious challenge by digital texts and proposes a cyborg model metaphor that overcomes some of the current weaknesses of biological metaphors and offers the resources for digital texts.

Overall, very intriguing if a little light on biology.

Rating: 3.8/5 ( )

All writings created before the invention of printing survive in manuscripts. And, except for the tiny handful of cases where the original manuscript survives (and, for literary works, that handful is tiny indeed), all manuscripts are copies of other manuscripts. For instance, the ninth century Codex Sangermanensis of the Epistles of Paul is a copy of the sixth century Codex Claromontanus of the same Biblical books.

Because (effectively) all ancient literary manuscripts are copies, they all contain error. If we want to find the original words of a book -- be it the Bible or Xenophon or Vergil or Chaucer -- we have to sort through those manuscripts. And we have to learn their ancestry. Take the case above of Sangermanensis and Claromontanus. Since Sangermanensis is a copy of Claromontanus, Sangermanensis can tell us nothing about the original text of Paul except whatever it derived from Claromontanus. All readings in Sangermanensis are either readings derived from Claromontanus or are mistakes in copying Claromontanus.

It's fairly easy to tell when one manuscript is a copy of another, because they share particular errors. It's a lot harder to tell when one manuscript is, say, the great-great-great-great-grandparent of another. The intervening scribes may have corrected some obvious errors in the older manuscript; they will have added their own errors; they may even have brought in some material from an outside source. To determine if manuscript Y is derived from manuscript X is not a straightforward process.

And that is where the biological sciences come in. Over the last several generations, biology has developed many tools to test relatedness. And I don't mean DNA testing! Sure, that's the best biological tool -- but biology has also developed mathematical tools for classification, of which the most important is a method called cladistics.

The potential of cladistics for textual criticism (that is, the reconstruction of the ancestry of manuscripts) is obvious. At least, it's obvious to me, and it was obvious to a few textual critics who used it on Chaucer. It's not obvious, sadly, to textual critics who think their discipline should be an art, not a science -- which is most of them. As a result, writings on cladistic textual criticism are mostly in obscure, extremely expensive, typically unavailable publications. When I saw what seemed to be an affordable discussion of the topic, I had to get it.

Fair warning: This is not a book about the practice of cladistics and other biological methods as applied to the New Testament or any other ancient writing. There is no mathematics here, and no real science. Nor is Stephen C. Carlson, who has successfully applied cladistics to small parts of the New Testament tradition, mentioned. This naturally colors my view of this book, because it's not what I hoped it would be.

But I think it is rather a failure anyway. It's too vague, talking in somewhat philosophical terms about the analogies between a stemma of manuscripts (that is, a family tree of copies of a text) and a stemma of organisms (the "tree of life," in which, for example, humans are classified as a member of the primates, who are a group within mammals, which are a group within vertebrates, etc.). Some of this frankly strikes me as wrong-headed -- for example, in textual criticism, there is a tendency to call certain groups of manuscripts by names that are geographical but can also be interpreted as racial: "Byzantine," "Western," "African," "Asiatic." Author Lin thinks that these titles have led to prejudice against the particular groups described by these names. I really don't think this holds up. First, I've never seen any hint that any textual critic interprets these titles in racial ways. Indeed, the type that you would expect to be held in highest esteem if racial descriptions meant anything, the "Western" type, is in fact held in very low esteem by most critics.

Lin also betrays some misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, which lies at the heart of cladistics; on p. 94, for instance, he says that "Darwin emphasized progress in development" -- by contrast to the corruption that characterizes generations of copies of manuscripts. But Darwin emphasized no such thing; although some of his followers had a false belief in evolutionary progress, Darwin himself merely stressed change. A horse has not made more "progress" than a crow; it has simply gone in a different direction.

Indeed, Lin sometimes fails to understand history. The King James Bible is translated from an extremely corrupt version of the Greek New Testament known as the Textus Receptus, which a few scholars still support and use even though it was badly edited from a handful of very late manuscripts. Lin blames its continued use on the actions of textual critics who have failed to convince the remaining users of the TR that they should set it aside. But this is not the fault of textual critics, who are doing their best to convince people. It reminds me more of the anti-vaccine movement, where scientists are desperately trying to convince people that vaccines are not a problem, but a subset of the people listen to YouTube propagandists rather than data.

It is ironic to note that Lin is at his best in exactly the place where textual criticism turns its rear end firmly on the biological sciences: A recent development in textual criticism is something called the "Coherence-Based Genealogical Method," or CBGM. This is an attempt (I think a bogus attempt) to get away from the descent of manuscripts and create a sort of manuscript network. Published descriptions of how this works have universally been awful (it doesn't help that the people who came up with it are all native speakers of German, but the problem lies deeper than that). Lin -- who is not a textual critic and is not a user of the CBGM -- gives the best explanation I've yet seen of several parts of the method.

So there are useful parts to this book. But I think the title over-sells the contents, and I think there is much here that distorts history. I'm glad I have the book. But it's truly useless to biologists who are interested in textual criticism, and I think people will have to be pretty deeply involved in textual criticism to want it. There is a place for this book. But it's a small one. ( )