An enduring legacy from the heyday of Mendelian genetics is talk of ‘genes for’. Such talk suggests straightforwardly that genes make characters. But for over a century, thoughtful biologists have insisted such an understanding is mistaken. For them, a gene is a chromosomal difference that, when internal and external environments are otherwise equal, makes a phenotypic difference; ‘genes for’ talk is but shorthand for this more complex understanding. This paper examines the remarkable durability of the disowned, deterministic character-making understanding, placing particular emphasis on the role of the traditional, start-with-Mendel curriculum in investing that understanding with a heuristic power which later teaching may never fully displace. The paper also reports on recent experimental work exploring the potential of a reordered curriculum for teaching genetics without bolstering genetic determinism.
BhattacharyaSanjoy.2011. “Smallpox: Eradicating a Disease. ” In Great Discoveries in Medicine , edited by WilliamHelen and Bynum, 168–171. London: Thames & Hudson.
2.
BowlerPeter J.1989. The Mendelian Revolution: The Emergence of Hereditarian Concepts in Modern Science and Society . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
3.
CimpianA., and SalomonE.. 2014. “The Inherence Heuristic: An Intuitive Means of Making Sense of the World, and a Potential Precursor to Psychological Essentialism. ” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37: 461–480. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X13002197
4.
Dar-NimrodIlan, and HeineSteven J.. 2011. “Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA. ” Psychological Bulletin 137: 800–818. doi: 10.1037/a0021860
5.
DawkinsRichard.1982. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6.
GaltonFrancis.1906. “Studies in National Eugenics. ” Sociological Papers 2: 14–17.
7.
GriffithsPaul, and StotzKarola. 2013. Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8.
HackingIan.1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9.
HackingIan.1992. “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences. ” In Science as Practice and Culture , edited by PickeringAndrew, 29–64. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
10.
HackingIan.1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
11.
HeineSteven J.2017. DNA is not Destiny: The Remarkable, Completely Misunderstood Relationship Between You and Your Genes . New York: W. W. Norton.
12.
JamiesonAnnie, and RadickGregory. 2013. “Putting Mendel in his Place: How Curriculum Reform in Genetics and Counterfactual History of Science can Work Together. ” In The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators , edited by KampourakisKostas, 577–595. Dordrecht: Springer.
13.
JamiesonAnnie, and RadickGregory. 2017. “Genetic Determinism in the Genetics Curriculum: An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Mendelian and Weldonian Emphases. ” Science and Education 26: 1261–1290. doi: 10.1007/s11191-017-9900-8
14.
KahnemanDaniel.2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow . London: Penguin.
15.
KampourakisKostas.2017. Making Sense of Genes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
16.
KellerEvelyn Fox.2000. The Century of the Gene . Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press.
17.
KellerEvelyn Fox.2002. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines . Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press.
18.
KellerEvelyn Fox.2010. The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
19.
KohlerRobert E.1994. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
KraghHelge.2002. “The Vortex Atom: A Victorian Theory of Everything. ” Centaurus; International Magazine of the History of Science and Medicine 44: 32–114.
LynchKate E., MorandiniJames S., Dar-NimrodIlan, and GriffithsPaul E. 2018. “Causal Reasoning About Human Behavior Genetics: Synthesis and Future Directions. ” Behavior Genetics 49: 221–234. doi: 10.1007/s10519-018-9909-z
23.
McDonaldJohn H.2011. Myths of Human Genetics . Baltimore: Sparky House.
24.
MendelGregor.1866. “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden.” Verhandlungen des Naturforschenden Vereines in Brünn 4, second part (Abhandlungen): 3–47. An outstanding recent translation with commentary, by Staffan Müller-Wille and Kersten Hall, is freely available from the British Society for the History of Science: https://www.bshs.org.uk/bshs-translations/mendel Accessed 9 June 2020.
25.
MorganT. H., SturtevantA. H., MullerH. J., and BridgesC. B.. 1915. The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity . New York: Henry Holt. Facsimile reprinted with introduction by Garland E. Allen. London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972.
26.
MukherjeeSiddhartha.2016. The Gene: An Intimate History . London: Bodley Head.
27.
NavarroJaume.2018. Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Epistemic Object in the Early Twentieth Century . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
28.
NelkinDorothy, and Susan LindeeM.. 1995. The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon . New York: W. H. Freeman.
29.
OlbyRobert C.1979. “Mendel no Mendelian?
” History of Science 17: 53–72. Reprinted in his Origins of Mendelism, 2nd edition, 234–58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi: 10.1177/007327537901700103
30.
PorterTheodore M.2018. Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity . Princeton: Princeton University Press.
31.
PostHeinz R.1971. “Correspondence, Invariance, and Heuristics: In Praise of Conservative Induction. ” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 2: 213–255. doi: 10.1016/0039-3681(71)90042-2
32.
RadickGregory.2003. “Cultures of Evolutionary Biology. ” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34: 187–200. doi: 10.1016/S1369-8486(02)00075-4
33.
RadickGregory.2012. “Should ‘Heredity’ and ‘Inheritance’ be Biological Terms? William Bateson's Change of Mind as a Historical and Philosophical Problem. ” Philosophy of Science 79: 714–724. doi: 10.1086/667872
34.
RadickGregory.2016a. “The Enemy Within: Simplifying the Vital Story of how Genes Determine Characteristics and Chances of Mortality. ” Times Literary Supplement 5930
(25 Nov.): 3–4.
35.
RadickGregory.2016b. “Presidential Address: Experimenting with the Scientific Past. ” British Journal for the History of Science 49: 153–172. doi: 10.1017/S0007087416000339
36.
RadickGregory.2016c. “Teach Students the Biology of Their Time: An Experiment in Genetics Education Reveals how Mendel's Legacy Holds Back the Teaching of Science. ” Nature 533 (19 May): 293. doi: 10.1038/533293a
SainiAngela.2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science . London: 4th Estate.
39.
SchwartzJames.2008. In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
40.
TeicherAmir.2020. Social Mendelism: Genetics and the Politics of Race in Germany . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
41.
WatersC. Kenneth. 1994. “Why the Antireductionist Consensus Won't Survive the Case of Classical Mendelian Genetics. ” In Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology , 2nd edition, edited by Elliott Sober, 401–417. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Originally published in PSA 1990 1: 125–139.
