Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 Robert A. Nye Staffan Müller-WilleHans-Jörg Rheinberger, eds. Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. x + 496 pp. Ill. $50.00 (978-0-262-13476-7). This multiauthor volume originated from a long-term collaborative project initiated by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. It is the first in a series of planned volumes on the history of heredity from the early modern period to the present that will focus on the cultural, legal, and practical origins of modern heredity. The present volume examines various themes in the early modern era, ending at about 1870 on the threshold of Mendelian genetics. The introductory essay attempts to provide some unity to what is in fact a very diverse set of subjects and approaches to hereditarian thought and practice. The editors group the eighteen chapters of the book in sections pertaining to law, medicine, breeding and hybridization, generation and evolution, and anthropology, but apart from exercising a certain amount of control over the form each chapter takes, they have allowed authors a considerable amount of freedom to concentrate on particular subjects that do not always clearly demonstrate the overall themes of the volume. Nonetheless, almost all of these well-documented and clearly written chapters contribute something to our understanding of the cultural origins of heredity. The contemporary meaning of the term itself, the transmission of traits in organic reproduction, is of quite recent provenance. The problem this volume seeks to analyze is the remarkably late development of scientific theories of inheritance in contrast with many other disciplinary fields in the life sciences. Why did “genetics” appear only around 1900 when embryology, cytology, and evolutionary biology were already mature fields? The editors develop the notions of “epistemic space” and “knowledge regime” to describe the complex body of speculation and practice that surrounded conception, pregnancy, embryonic development, parturition, and lactation, to speak only of the human aspects of the phenomena that were historically linked to the transmission of particular qualities from parent to child. Various authors demonstrate how metaphors for understanding heredity were drawn from the legal theories and practices that governed the inheritance of land and goods, initially on a patriarchal and patrilineal model but from the late eighteenth century on a model based on affinal patterns of inheritance reflecting an increasing marital endogamy throughout Europe. Hereditarian thought, in other words, moved gradually from a vertical axis in which individuals were believed to be the product of a genealogical lineage to a horizontal one in which the emphasis was on difference from generation to generation. Throughout much of early modern times, the biology and character of living things were identified with the places that gave rise to them, making it a matter of relative indifference whether their natures were determined by “nature” or “nurture.” Much room was left for “epigenetic” explanations of individual peculiarities that might diverge from the norm, and thus there was little incentive to formulate [End Page 733] general rules of inheritance. However, with a rise in social and economic mobility, travel, and the discovery and exchange of plants and zoological specimens in the eighteenth century, the ancient connection between place and character began to dissolve, and it was possible to begin more serious speculations and experiments aimed at distinguishing between the contributions of genitor and environment. This development focused the attention of doctors on anomalies, particularly inherited diseases; the efforts to understand their patterns of appearance inspired the compilation of pedigrees that tracked the degeneration of breeding lines—animal, plant, and human—and the equal possibility of their improvement, which led, as we know, to the rule-of-thumb breeding practices that inspired Darwin’s notion of artificial selection. There are excellent chapters on the inheritance of mental illnesses, proclivities to alcoholism, and gout, and, on the improving side, chapters on strawberry hybrids, sheep, and the ideology of the “self-made man,” all examples of praxis informed by ad hoc theorizing. As Ohad S. Parnes summarizes the nature of pre-Mendelian...