The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870-1920

Prelude

prelude P e r h a p s i t i s t o o o b v i o u s t o d e s e r v e c o m m e n t , but everyone who has read a late nineteenth-century novel or work of nonfiction knows how expansive these treatises can be. Although written in the early twentieth century, David Starr Jordan’s autobiography is a good example of the unrestrained character of late nineteenth-century representational practices. Days of a Man: Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher and Minor Prophet of Democracy lasts for over seventeen hundred pages in two volumes. The prosaic title of Days of a Man is really more description than simile, for the book is organized chronologically from Jordan’s birth in 1851 to his seventieth birthday and often relates Jordan’s life at the level of the daily event. The detail of Jordan’s account allows a reader to chart the movement of his body through space and time. Indeed, the one organizing principle for the whole book is Jordan ’s strong, or heroic, authorial presence. Although exceptional in its excess, Jordan’s writing shares much with other late nineteenth-century literary conventions. Literary critic Donald Pizer has recognized similar qualities as he has reflected on why American naturalism has refused to die. “Naturalist fiction,” explains Pizer, “usually unites detailed documentation of the more sensationalist aspects of human experience with heav1 4 9 ily ideological (often allegorical) themes.”1 The effect of reading such detailed documentation is “a sense . . . that both internal and external experiences have a kind of describable weight and value.”2 According to Pizer, it is the detail of the rendering of the naturalistic world coupled with the exceptional “weight and value” placed on the bodily dimensions of human experience that mark the formal aspects of this genre. This way of describing the world is not a given. I have been arguing that this was one response to the increased number of detailed descriptions of the world. Borrowing from Wolfgang Schivelbusch, I have called this interesting moment in history “the panoramic mode” and spent some time in Part Two exploring the economic and spatial practices that lent credence to this form of understanding the world. In the chapters that follow, I investigate the importance of narratives for ordering these observations into a logical framework. Stories often supplied the necessary links to forge disparate observations into logically compelling accounts. Especially important are the dynamics of plot and action. They help move time in a story, making it dynamic, as well as structure the overall shape and direction of the story, providing continuity. Using stories also upheld a specific notion of human embodiment and constrained how scientists thought organisms changed over time. The organizing principle was the developmental (Part Three) or the locomotive (Part Four) capacities of the human body. Panoramic-mode subjects utilized the chronological continuity of an individual’s life as a means for ordering an increasing amount of data. The continuity of individual experience, however, turned out to be too limited for experimental researchers. They turned to record-keeping technologies and experiments to fold space and time in ways not organized by the durations of the body of the organism. How did geneticists come to think of time as an element of biological experience independent of bodily and spatial change? One fruitful path was the use of model organisms with short generational times— the literal condensing of the passage of time into an observable duration. Another fruitful path was the application of mathematical tools for thinking about large populations of individuals—effectively condensing a population’s lifespan by increasing the statistical likelihood of rare events.3 Before the widespread use of these tools, however, there were stories. The most relevant of these stories utilize the concept of recapitulation, where the life of the individual organism was thought to recapitulate the history of the species. 1 5 0 / I I I / H I S T O R Y W R I T I N G For instance, as an individual organism grew and matured, it was thought that this organism was retracing the evolutionary heritage of its species. Adopting a recapitulationist framework for the stories provided a specific type of structuring logic; a logic of self-reference wherein the association of parts was thought to be explained by...