Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on April 3, 2008
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2008 48(4):536-538; doi:10.1093/icb/icn013
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Book Review |
Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, editors.
Department of History, Wayne State University, Detroit
MI 48202
Correspondence: E-mail: marsha.richmond{at}wayne.edu
Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, editors.
Cambridge, MA and London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2007. 496 pp. ISBN 0-262-13476-4 and ISBN 978-0-262-13476-7 (cloth), $50.00/£30.95.
Heredity is such a fundamental concept in how we interpret the world that it is hard to imagine that modern understanding dates from the period after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Tracing the various threads of thought that eventually coalesced into our modern notion of heredity is the aim of Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870. This volume of 19 essays ranges over the grand sweep of social, cultural, and historical context to examine references to inheritance within the purview of law, medicine, natural history, breeding, biology, and anthropology from the early modern period up to the final decades of the 19th century. It is an ambitious undertaking, but one that I believe ultimately succeeds on a number of levels. First, unlike most edited volumes of essays, this volume delivers what it promises: it provides a wealth of data on hereditary thinking, ranging across different intellectual divides and time periods. Second, each article is exemplary, offering consistently well-sculpted arguments on a given topic grounded in both primary research as well as in current secondary scholarship. Third, the authors well integrate their findings with those of other essays, and this provides a level of synthesis that is rare in such scholarly undertakings. In short, this volume provides a comprehensive, highly informative, and ultimately fascinating journey through the vast intellectual terrain—or "epistemic space," as the editors define it—that heredity occupied prior to the rise of Mendelian genetics. Heredity Produced will long remain the standard work on the prehistory of heredity.
No doubt much of the success of this volume can be traced to its genesis in a collaborative research project carried out since 2001 at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The editors, Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, have, to date, organized a series of four conferences focused on different chronological periods in the "Cultural History of Heredity." The present essays were drawn from the earliest workshops, supplemented by other topics subsequently deemed important. This conscientious selection strategy, coupled with careful editorial guidance, makes for a well sculpted, synthetic volume.
The editors’ comprehensive introduction well sets the stage, laying out the book's intent and providing both a thematic overview and a clear statement of its thesis. As they noted: "concepts of heredity initially developed in widely different ways and independently of each other in the context of a variety of knowledge regimes like medicine, natural history, or breeding. Their merging into one domain subject to a general theory of heredity in mid-nineteenth-century biology was a historically and culturally contingent process whose prehistory needs to be unfolded in all its entanglements." (p 9) Indeed, because this thesis is collectively constructed, it is a pity that space permits mentioning only a few of the ideas presented in the essays.
In the realm of law, inheritance entered discourse in matters involving the transfer of property and kinship relations. David Warren Sabean points out that "a shift took place during the second half of the eighteenth century away from ... kinship organized through descent and consanguinity to kinship organized around alliance and affinity" (p 37), and he traces this change to the rise of industrialization, which sought to break down the earlier system that concentrated wealth in large family estates through the system of primogeniture in favor of accumulating capital through a network of kin. Impacted in this shift were marriage practices, influenced by theological prohibitions against marriages among close relatives and by medical knowledge of inheritance passing between parents and offspring. Two contrasting approaches influenced thinking—the Galenists, who viewed males and females as providing equal contributions, and the Aristotelians, who held that females contributed matter but males determined the form of the child, a belief that favored patrilineal inheritance patterns.
The Galenic humoral medical tradition, according to which resemblances within a family were predominantly influenced by environmental factors—similarities in the proportions of different humors to which children were exposed, along with contingent factors like "maternal imagination"—dominated well into the eighteenth century. Although jurists and physicians thus largely ignored evidence we would associate with heredity, Sylvia De Renzi described a 17th century paternity legal case in which physical resemblance of father and daughter proved convincing. This indicates that the complex interplay of ideas and influences that began to initiate a break with medical tradition began earlier than previously believed.
Carlos López-Beltrán traces the rejection of humoralist conceptions to the rise of "mechanistic solidism" in the 17th century, with its notion of material traits passing between generations and determining the makeup of individuals. It was French physicians seeking a physiological explanation for the inheritance of diseases within families he believes provided a conceptual shift from regarding "hereditary" phenomena to focusing on "heredity" proper. His view is supported by other authors, including Laure Cartron's study of hereditarian models of mental diseases in post-Revolutionary France and Philip Wilson's examination of Erasmus Darwin's approach to familial inheritance of the "noble" disease of gout.
Similar evidence of the gradual loosening of environmental influences in favor of ascribing causative agency to internal factors comes from the essays on natural history, biology, and breeding. Staffan Müller-Wille points to the use of genealogical tropes in "a shift of emphasis from vertical relations of descent to horizontal relations of affinity," and he gauges this by focusing on the changing understanding of variation (p 179). Linnaeus regarded variation as an "accidental" deviation from the species type owing to contingent environmental circumstances. Botanists, as a result, almost totally ignored variation to focus instead on permanent "species" characters useful for classification. Practical plant breeders, however, as Marc Ratcliff shows, were dependent on finding new, stable varieties to make their living. This resulted in a practical as well as theoretical divide in botany that hampered the development of hereditarian views even after Darwin identified variation as important in the formation of new species.
Again, it appears that an interest in human biology may have provided key elements in effecting this transformation. Peter McLaughlin highlights Kant's interest in the problem of human races, particularly his recognition that while the environment appeared to have produced racial differences, evidence provided by contact between Europeans and Africans indicated that racial characteristics remain uninfluenced by environmental dislocations. Gradually, a new understanding of adaptation emerged, first fully delineated by Darwin. Thus, the newly rising discipline of anthropology helped diminish the old idea of "natural places" for individuals and species, as Nicolas Pethes explores in his essay on experiments on heredity in children raised in the wild. Renato Mazzolini, examining the roots of hereditarian thinking in the castas system developed in early 16th century Spain and Portugal to provide social categorizations for the new groups produced by race mixing between Europeans and indigenous peoples, identifies elements of a new understanding of constancy versus variability in human racial traits. The hereditary roots of other human traits gradually began to be viewed as inborn rather than acquired, as Stefan Willer describes in his study of genius and Paul White considers in the 19th century interest in the "self-made man" and such diseases of character like alcoholism.
In the life sciences, new developments leading to a naturalistic concept of heredity are featured in the essays on generation by Mary Terrall, the cell theory by François Duchesneau, and the alternation of generations by Ohad Parnes. Terrall highlights the role played by theories of generation—life emerging by means of preexistence (preformation) or by epigenesis—in providing a new understanding of heredity. Duchesneau explains the delayed linkage of cell theory with heredity by noting that while cell theory dates from 1839, it was only after 1870 that the nucleus came to be regarded as the seat of material particles responsible for heredity and development, and only then did biologists refocus their investigations away from the protoplasm. Parnes highlights the significance of the discovery of alternation of generations, claiming that "it was out of this new understanding of generational dynamics that the modern notion of heredity emerged" (p 323). As this book amply demonstrates, this recognition was actually a complex affair, requiring multiple generations of scholars working in many different fields, against the backdrop of economic and social changes wrought by colonialism, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Heredity, as noted in the title and amply illustrated throughout this volume, was indeed a produced, not a natural concept.
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