The emergence of genetic rationality : space, time, & information in American biological science, 1870-1920 / Phillip Thurtle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thurtle, Phillip.

Series:

In vivo (Seattle, Wash.)

Samuel and Althea Stroum book

In vivo

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Genetics--United States--History.

Genetics.

Genetics--Social aspects--United States.

Genetics--Economic aspects--United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (396 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The emergence of genetic science has profoundly shaped how we think about biology. Indeed, it is difficult now to consider nearly any facet of human experience without first considering the gene. But this mode of understanding life is not, of course, transhistorical. Phillip Thurtle takes us back to the moment just before the emergence of genetic rationality at the turn of the twentieth century to explicate the technological, economic, cultural, and even narrative transformations necessary to make genetic thinking possible. The rise of managerial capitalism brought with it an array of homologous practices, all of which transformed the social fabric. With transformations in political economy and new technologies came new conceptions of biology, and it is in the relationships of social class to breeding practices, of middle managers to biological information processing, and of transportation to experiences of space and time, that we can begin to locate the conditions that made genetic thinking possible, desirable, and seemingly natural. In describing this historical moment, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality is panoramic in scope, addressing primary texts that range from horse breeding manuals to eugenics treatises, natural history tables to railway surveys, and novels to personal diaries. It draws on the work of figures as diverse as Thorstein Veblen, Jack London, Edith Wharton, William James, and Luther Burbank. The central figure, David Starr Jordan - naturalist, poet, eugenicist, educator - provides the book with a touchstone for deciphering the mode of rationality that genetics superseded. Building on continental philosophy, media studies, systems theory, and theories of narrative, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality provides an inter-disciplinary contribution to intellectual and scientific history, science studies, and cultural studies. It offers a truly encyclopedic cultural history that challenges our own ways of organizing knowledge even as it explicates those of an earlier era. In a time in which genetic rationality has become our own common sense, this discussion of its emergence reminds us of the interdependence of the tools we use to process information and the conceptions of life they animate.

Contents:

Middle class mores : Beaufort's bastards

Breeding true : processing a new elite

The political economy of natural history

Homologous networks of exchange : the intersubjective infrastructure of scientific exchange

Categorizing experience : space and time in nineteenth-century natural history

The Pacific Railway survey : the subject in the panoramic mode

Storied pasts

The plot thickens : the political economic dimensions of biological stories

Wandering and narrative

Wandering and inheritance in light of the sensory-motor complex

Writing, goods, and memory

Industrial perspectives : Luther Burbank

Record keeping : a post-hermeneutic means for charting the space of flows.

Notes:

"A Samuel & Althea Stroum book."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 345-366) and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9780295990347

0295990341

OCLC:

704348246