The biologist Jacques Loeb (1859-1924) helped to shape the practice of modern biological research through his radical emphasis on reductionist experimentation. This biography traces his career and convincingly argues that Loeb's desire to control organisms, manifested in studies of both reproduction and animal behavior, contributed to a new self-image for biologists. The author places Loeb's experiments and the controversies they generated in their intellectual and institutional contexts, tracing his influence on the development of behaviorism, genetics, and reproductive biology.

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal placed a hoax article in Social Text mimicking the social constructionist view of science popular in the humanities and sparking the science wars which had rumbled throughout the 90s. This book puts the controversy into the context of earlier debates about the two cultures, between F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, and Mathew Arnold and T.H. Huxley.