Cultural-Inheritance-Review-of-A-Cultural-History-of-Heredity-by-Staffan-M-ller-Wille-and-Hans-J-rg-Rheinberger-University-of-Chicago-Press-2012-and-H.pdf

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Book review
Endeavour
Vol. 38 No. 3–4
Full text provided by
www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect
¨
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Cultural Inheritance: Review of A Cultural History of Heredity by Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, University of Chicago
¨
Press, 2012; and Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century by Bernd Gausemeier, Staffan Muller-Wille, and Edmund Ramsden, Pickering &
Chatto, 2013.
Myrna Perez Sheldon
Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251-1892, United States
Muller-Wille and Rheinberger’s
A cultural history of
¨
heredity
begins with a puzzle: Why is it the case that
earlier thinkers and scientists were actively engaged
in understanding the genealogical relationship between
parents and offspring, a relationship now taken for
granted? To answer this question, this slim but insightful
and carefully written volume explores both deliberate
researches into heredity as well as the broader cultural
changes and factors that formulated the conditions of
¨
possibility for these intellectual transitions. Muller-Wille
and Rheinberger argue that the current acceptance of
Mendelian genetics has obscured many years of cultural
and epistemic transformations. This new book is their
attempt to recover a deeper history of heredity.
´
A cultural history of heredity
is at once a longue duree
story – tracing the slow accumulation of cultural transi-
tions from the early modern to the twentieth century – as
well as a brisk account of the history of scientific research
into concepts of heredity. The authors argue that heredity
emerged as a central problem in nineteenth-century biolo-
gy, first going through a period of problematization and
only later solidifying as a research object that that could be
poked and prodded by molecular technologies. These
changes at once prefigured thinkers such as Charles
Darwin and Francis Galton, were essential to these Victo-
rian naturalists, and extended into the following century.
Hereditarian concepts went beyond the purview of the
intellectual elite – turning up in botanic gardens, in legal
disputes about the exchange of property, and in the taxo-
nomic organization of European exploration and collecting.
¨
In a remarkably rapid and coherent set of chapters Muller-
Wille and Rheinberger demonstrate that heredity was
an epistemically novel way to organize the natural world,
and yet the result of deep political, economic and social
transformations in Western Europe over the last several
centuries.
In the best sense of the word this book is a distillation –
of a difficult and unintuitive concept, of a complex histori-
¨
ography, and of a rich methodology. Muller-Wille and
Rheinberger organize an inherently unorganized concept,
tracing its coalescence without giving undue agency to any
one person or thing. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of
the volume is its conciseness. When historians dig down
into the particular, seeing richness even in a single case, an
analysis of long-term conceptual shifts and large-scale
epistemological transformations typically requires many
¨
pages of spilled ink – yet Muller-Wille and Rheinberger
condense the story into less than 300 pages. It is still
perhaps too esoteric for a general audience, but is best
suited as a scholarly introduction into this material. For
those who wish for a book that would quickly, dynamically,
and authentically take them into the richest and most
exciting area of a large body of scholarship, this book does
this and does it with style. The result is an eminently
enjoyable read.
A cultural history of heredity
betrays its debts from the
body of previous scholarship of its two authors, both of
whom are key innovators in the history of biology as well as
in the theoretical framing of history of science. Rheinber-
ger’s seminal work
Toward a History of Epistemic Things
(1997) utilized a close study of a molecular biology labora-
tory to argue that research itself could be seen as a process
by which new epistemic things were created and trans-
¨
formed. And Muller-Wille has written extensively on the
conceptual innovations in the taxonomic work of Carl
Linnaeus. Together the authors have been working on a
history of heredity through the Max-Planck Institute since
2001, a project which has resulted in a series of interna-
tional workshops, a series of preprint volumes and one
published volume of essays, and a further edited volume in
preparation.
1
Continuing this legacy is the most recent edited volume
to emerge from this research program:
Human heredity in
the Twentieth Century.
This is the first volume to synthet-
ically examine the development of the science of heredity
from the consolidation of genetics as an academic discipline
after World War I to the emergence of biotechnology in
the early 1970s. Fittingly, the contributing authors have
widened the scope of the volume beyond the professional
science of genetics in order to include ‘all of the concepts,
practices, and institutional frameworks’ that were in-
volved in the production of knowledge about heredity in
this period. Thus the essays move fluidly between the
worlds of the clinic, the lab and public health policy. The
authors have taken up the methodological and theoretical
framework proposed by Muller-Wille and Rheinberger and
shown its fruits in a diverse range of geographic, institu-
tional and intellectual contexts. As such, this volume is an
ideal companion to
A cultural history of heredity
for those
who wish for a more extensive examination of the concept
during key decades of its development in the twentieth
century.
Corresponding author:
Sheldon, M.P. (myrna.p.sheldon@rice.edu)
Available online 18 October 2014.
www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.09.002
¨
Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, eds,
Heredity Produced: At the
¨
Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture,
1500–1870 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007); Staffan Muller-Wille and Christina Brandt, eds,
Heredity Explored: Between
¨
Public Domain and Experimental Science,
1850–1930 (in preparation).
1

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