Staffan Müller-Wille & Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Eds): Heredity Produced. At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870

Abstract

This substantial volume contains a selection of the papers that were presented at workshops held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin under the general title, ‘‘A Cultural History of Heredity’’. With the inclusion of several additional papers this volume provides a wide spectrum of topics, the overall aim being to explore ways in which our conceptions of heredity have been shaped by the cultural, social and political contexts in which they have been gestated. This is a bold attempt to broaden the scope of historical investigation in the history of the science now known as ‘‘Genetics’’. Stepping beyond the limited purview of the ‘‘history of Ideas’’, and ‘‘a mere social history’’, or even a disciplinary history, the editors explain that the scope of the workshops has been to explore ‘‘the history of a broader knowledge regime …’’ dating back to ‘‘the social illusions and illuminations of the Enlightenment.’’ To this end the focus has been on the developing meaning of inheritance in a variety of different contexts—legal decisions on paternity, restricted inheritance (primogeniture), racial crossing, the medical world of diseases, experimentation in the eighteenth century, nineteenth century animal and plant breeding, the inheritance of genius, and the heredity of poetics. Emphasis on the ‘‘material culture’’ of current historiography is seen in the emphasis placed on the nature of practice whether legal as in rules concerning racial identity, botanical as in the institution of botanical gardens, or generational as in the treatment of hybridization. Such an agenda should distance our historiographical practice yet further from the Whiggish tendencies of former years. And in using the term ‘‘knowledge regime’’ the editors mean also to reject the restrictive vision of the older sociology of science, and the abrupt Foucauldian ‘‘epistemological breaks’’ as applied by