The Emergence of Genetic Rationality (review)

Phillip Thurtle presents an intriguing but ultimately too ambitious examination of biology as Gregor Mendel's "genetics" comes to explain what had been known as "heredity" in the early 20th Century. In a nicely sustained concluding discussion, Thurtle exemplifies this transition by looking at the contrasting yet complementary views of botanist Hugo deVries and naturalist David Starr Jordan on the work of plant breeder Luther Burbank. Jordan had invited deVries to Stanford University where he was president in July 1904. DeVries, one of the rediscoverers of Mendel, admired the scope and industrial scale of Burbank's creation of plant hybrids, while, for Jordan, Burbank's continued to use an older approach of observing phenomena in their varied landscapes. Thurtle's insight is that information processing systems are shifting in this period, reflecting the "two sets of logics developed from two mutually supporting but distinctly different spatial and temporal practices" (307).

Thurtle further develops the idea of this older "panoramic mode" in relation to Spencer Fullerton Baird's organization of natural history expeditions for the Smithsonian Institution when he was its assistant secretary. Creating through specimen collection panoramas, both over a species range and of the variety of species from a locale, Baird was able to make more usable the discoveries of Smithsonian expeditions. Baird took advantage of such technological developments as the Wooten patent desk (he did not, however, use the newly introduced vertical file system before his death in 1887) to organize this information.

Jordan, as a naturalist he was a protege of Baird's, helped build Stanford University as one of the United States' great private universities as its first president. Leland Stanford's wanted to use the major professor system of another of Jordan's mentors, Andrew Dickinson White of Cornell University to create a university that would forge leaders of industry with practical skills. So he hired Jordan from Indiana University with just that aim.

Stanford also figures in Thurtle's first important episode, the development of trotter horse breeding as a hobby for the emerging captains of industry in the late 19th Century. Effectively using Edith Wharton's subtle literary depictions of the social nuances of New York society, Thurtle situates this emerging hobby for the rich as a cultural phenomenon. Heredity, national and regional identity, and industrial practices are all factors giving depth to what seems at first glance be yet another frivolity of the rich.

Thurtle's use of other literary figures—Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, in particular—to reflect key features of his argument is strong and inviting. Frustrating, though, are the long stretches of dry theoretical exposition establishing analytical tools that are not given a sufficient test on a too small handful of historical moments—trotter horse breeding, Smithsonian expeditions, and Luther Burbank—that are meant to capture American culture just as genetics is emerging.

These tools can be useful, but there is more work to be done to explore the emergence of genetic rationality, shaped, as Thurtle suggests, by developments in industry, information, and institutions.