So my book is a study of this habit we have in western science of reducing everything, no matter how complex and vital and alive, to small dead things called atoms -- or the particles inside of atoms, whatever the current name might be for the smallest of all these particles. Now, I think it's the quark, but there are those that think even quarks are made up of smaller particles. Why are we in the habit of interpreting small dead things as more important than organic things or psychological studies of human behavior, and so on? That's the question I raise in the book. And the answer to that question is that there's a connection between that habit of material reductionism and its claim to objectivity and male supremacy in western society. And that still lingers on, even in these fields that are considered to be so free of distortion and subjectivity.

So this is certainly a very highly controversial way to come at western science. But my hope is -- and I suppose it's what we cling to in every field of knowledge -- that if you can find such distortions and clear them out of the way, that the view you have for the world will become more accurate. I mean, science is not alone, physics is not alone, in having a certain warp or distortion or bias in it. These are all human endeavors, and human endeavors tend to be flawed by our own imperfections. I'm simply saying that this is as true of science, including physics, as it is of law, or medicine, or my own field of historical scholarship -- you can find these distortions and these biases in every field. The hope is that if you can identify them and eliminate them and rise above them, that your view of the world will become that much more accurate. So the finish of my book is an appeal for a science that frees itself of gender bias, rises above its long history of gender bias, and will see the world with a clearer vision.

One of the chapters in your book is titled, The Black Madonna. In that chapter, you explain how the Black Madonna was a representation to believers in her time of an earth goddess, much like Isis in Egypt and Kali in India. How do you see her returning to our scientific society?

The book I've written is very essayistic, and it takes a lot of liberties and makes the sort of connections that you try to make when you're writing an essay. One of these connections is the contrast between the world that Mary Shelley experienced in the very Protestant, Calvinist, Geneva. There's a connection between that very strict, logical, legalistic vision of religion and modern science that I try to spell out in the book. In a very real sense, the first steps toward a kind of ruthless objectivity came with modern Protestantism, and many people have observed that Puritanism is peculiarly connected to modern science along the lines of a sensibility. Isaac Newton was a very puritanical man, in his insistence upon logic and literacy, a literal interpretation of things. Whether it's the Bible or nature at large, there is a psychological connection there. So my study in this book is largely of that worldview.

It contrasts markedly with a very different vision of nature that you can find by simply traveling to the other side of Switzerland, in the same country. In a few hours you can go from Calvinist Geneva to the very Catholic Einsiedeln. Einsiedeln is the name of a town that has had a shrine to the Virgin Mary for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there's a very famous church there. It's a center of pilgrimage. The reason the church is such a special attraction is that it houses this mysterious but intriguing image of a Black Madonna. It's the Virgin Mary, but she's black, she's made out of a black wood. The explanation for this in official church accounts is that the church once caught fire and the image of the Madonna was blackened. She has since been replaced by a more recent version, which was deliberately carved out of black wood to preserve some sense of connection with the previous figure that was there. But many historians now think that this is simply a cover story, that it's not that these images were blackened by candles or by smoke in the church, they are actually related to earth mother images that were normally made from earth and were dark. So what we have here is a connection between Christianity and its pagan predecessors, along the lines of the Virgin Mary, associating the Christian Madonna with the earth mothers and earth goddesses of the past. And that's a pretty well established scholarly connection, and in many parts of Europe, indeed, many parts of the world, the Virgin simply took over from a pre-existing mother goddess cult or tradition. Like the Virgin of Guadeloupe in Mexico pre-dates the Virgin Mary and her shrines were simply taken over by the new religion.

There's a connection between that very strict, logical, legalistic vision of religion and modern science... many people have observed that Puritanism is peculiarly connected to modern science.