Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
human biology
tout court
, but for individual and group identity in many
contemporary societies. What interests me about this is two things: the first
is that a thing called 'genetic nature' is now widely regarded both as being
real and as existing apart from (or 'below') the realms of cultural symbolism
and social action; the second is that genetic researchers, advisers, techni-
cians and counsellors are widely perceived to be in the business of sharing
(or acting on) factual knowledge with the rest of us. Both beliefs, as I will
now illustrate in three ways, are predicated on an implausible and remark-
ably old-fashioned idea that some representations have the special quality
of revealing ontologically independent 'natural kinds'. Despite the 40-year
project of STS, which, as I mentioned in
Chapter 3
, has sought to dispel a lot
of the public myths about the nature of science, molecular biology's soci-
etal reception arguably demonstrates the enduring power of scientists to be
taken seriously as authoritative spokespersons for a supposedly culture-free
world of (human) nature.
Mapping, quantifying and differentiating genes
Genes appear to be part of our 'essence'. They are intrinsic and non-
negotiable (unless we opt for biomedical procedures that alter our biological
clockwork). In saying this, I don't want to underplay the considerable
genomes are now widely understood to be discrete and elemental pieces
of living nature. Their existence is taken as read and their implications,
which can be interpreted in a wide range of ways, are usually regarded as
being important rather than trivial. In part, this is because of the usual (and
inevitable) simplifications that occur when complicated issues are reported
and interpreted in the realm of everyday life. As Richard Lewontin once
pointedly said, 'Measured claims about the complexity of life and our igno-
rance of its determinants are [just] not show biz' (Lewontin, 1991: vii).
As the following trio of examples show, the (apparent) 'fact' of genomes
and genes dissimulates their constitutive unnaturalness. Genetic discourse
founded on scientific research is as socially conditioned as the individ-
ual and group identities that discourse is now helping to reconstitute in
a biological idiom.
Cartographic metaphors
One of the principal ways in which the 'reality effect' of genetic discourse
has been achieved in recent years is through the
metaphor
of mapping.
9
This metaphor has been used routinely by geneticists, as well as by a panoply
of commentators reporting on and debating their research in various non-
scientific arenas. To offer one example, the writer of popular science topics
Victor McElheny (2010) titles his recent, celebratory history of the HGP
Drawing the map of life
. As Neil Smith and Cindi Katz noted in an essay on
