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

7. Storied Pasts

7 / Storied Pasts H e r e d i t y i s a p a r a d o x : h o w c a n a n i n d i v i d u a l be unique—existing in a distinct moment in time—as well as be part of a dynamic continuity extending deep into the past and far into the future? We live our lives feeling as if we are isolated individuals, yet networks of kinship and shared continuities in development structure this experience. Much of what is interesting about the cultural study of heredity is how different cultures have chosen to explore this paradox. In the late nineteenth century, much of the debate on evolution and heredity was formulated in terms of historical narratives on the origin of species. For instance, evolutionary biologists constructed histories of the progression of species as a way of explaining the course of evolution. Narratives provided continuity for detailed arguments, incorporated historical causation, and fit into the common practice of reading books from cover to cover. Explanations of heredity offered few exceptions to other narratives. In fact, hereditarian thinkers used narrative elements to animate isolated observations on growth and development into a dynamic conception of an evolving world. Evolutionary knowledge is plotted knowledge. It is a form of scientific knowledge built on the construction of stories. As Philip Kitcher has noted: “A straight1 5 3 forward evolutionary story makes sense of what we observe.”1 According to Kitcher, these “Darwinian histories” have definite structures allowing for a form of causality to be traced through the passage of time: “The first step consists in a description of an ancestral population of organisms. The reasoning proceeds by tracing the modification of the population through subsequent generations, showing how characteristics were selected, inherited, and became prevalent.”2 According to novelist and literary theorist E. M. Forster, it is this emphasis on causality that turns a simple chronological account into a plot line:3 Most crucially, perhaps, by marking off distinct moments in time and setting up relations among them, by discovering meaningful designs in temporal series, by establishing an end already partly contained in the beginning and a beginning already partly containing the end, by exhibiting the meaning of time and/or providing it with meaning, narrative deciphers time and indicates how to decipher it. In sum, narrative illuminates temporality and humans as temporal beings.4 All narratives, including narratives of evolution, need “plot” in order to discover “meaningful designs in temporal series.” What we will find in Part Three is that many evolutionary thinkers used the causal dynamics of plot to bring to life panoramic mode chronologies (as covered at the end of Part Two). The meaningful designs that emerged from these narratives appeared to speak eloquently on the similarity of evolutionary, personal , and civil development while enforcing presuppositions about who possessed the right biological makeup to write the next chapter of evolution’s story. Gillian Beer’s groundbreaking work Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Elliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction remains the most important analysis of evolutionary theory as a form of story making. According to Beer, “evolutionary theory has inherent affinities with the problems and process of narrative .”5 Beer portrays Darwin as a storyteller struggling to create new “plots” from the tropes and language he inherited: “He sought to appropriate and to recast inherited mythologies, discourses, and narrative orders. He was telling a new story, against the grain of language available to tell it in.”6 In Beer’s appraisal, what proved new and durable about Darwin’s narratives was that they “emphasize [d] variability rather than development.”7 Despite its promise, Beer’s portrayal of Darwin as “author” of evolutionary narratives has too often been treated as the last word on the subject of evolution 1 5 4 / I I I / H I S T O R Y W R I T I N G and storytelling. This is unfortunate. Published in 1983, Darwin’s Plots should be viewed as part of a large wave of work interested in clarifying the relationship of narrative and writing to human experience. Not benefiting from much important recent work on narrative theory (many key publications in narrative theory were in the early 1980s), Beer’s analysis retrospectively suffers from a lack of precision concerning key analytical distinctions.8 For instance...