Evolutionary Works and Texts: Reading Dobzhansky in an Age of Genomics

Scientific writing is the most powerful and pervasive nature writing of our era. Instead of using science to interpret literary texts, ecocritics should read classic scientific "works" as "texts" (as Roland Barthes defines these terms), uncovering grounds for stories about nature and premises of modern environmental narratives. This essay examines a classic text of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), where the conservative force of heredity battles the random change of mutation in an "adaptive landscape," yielding resultant "species." Tensions between metaphors and maps structure his exposition and reveal a still-influential master-narrative.