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Reviewed by:
  • Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870
  • Evelyn Fox Keller
Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870. Edited by Staffan Müller-WilleHans-Jörg Rheinberger (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2007) 496 pp. $50.00

Müller-Wille and Rheinberger’s collection of historical essays about the ways in which European physicians and natural scientists thought about hereditary phenomena for four centuries before the modern era is an immensely rich tapestry of scientific, professional, cultural, and political cross-currents. When scientists (and most lay people) speak of heredity today, they take for granted a strictly biological process of inheritance that depends on hereditary elements (we call them genes) residing inside the body, transmitted during conception and completely insulated from an organism’s subsequent experience. We further assume that these elements determine our basic physical and mental constitution. If nothing else, the essays in this volume provide a welcome (and perhaps even timely) reminder of how particular, and how recent, all of these presumptive axioms of biological inheritance are.

But in fact, these essays do a great deal more. Collectively, they offer a broad narrative of the emergence of a modern science of heredity (and indeed, of the practice, new in the nineteenth century, of referring to heredity in nominal form). Against that narrative, however, they also provide a wealth of nuance and detail that repeatedly challenges the possibility of any simple account of this exceedingly complex (at times, almost fractal) history. As the individual authors meticulously demonstrate, scientific perceptions and conceptions of inheritance throughout this period were filtered (as indeed they always are) through a myriad of other concerns (about class, caste, race, property, disease, kinship, generation, evolution, religion, etc.). The net result does not easily lend itself to a straightforward history either of ideas or of discipline. Hence, the editors instead aim to depict “the emergence of a knowledge regime” by focusing on “the emergence of specific practices; the shaping of standards, taxonomies, and arguments; the evolution of architectures of hereditary knowledge; and the conjunctions of these elements in a variety of social arenas” (13).

With the help of an assemblage of conspicuously talented (and mostly young) historians (too numerous to name), the editors have succeeded in their goal; certainly, they have produced a handsome and eminently [End Page 262] readable book that should be of interest to historians and philosophers of biology for a long time to come.

Evelyn Fox Keller
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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