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words, conventional map-making ' propagandizes exactitude as if it were the
reason for its existence' (Wood, 2010: 93, emphasis added). Wood, along
with Brian Harley, Matthew Edney, Mark Monmonier and Denis Cosgrove
(among several others), argues that most maps fail to advertise their most
important feature: namely, that they are partial and purposeful attempts to
record the character and position of people, things, flows and boundaries.
They are not neutral with respect to what they purport merely to record
on a miniature globe or the pages of the Times Atlas of the World .Theyare,
in Wood and John Fels's (2008: xv) words, 'neither what they seem nor
proclaim themselves to be'.
To cite Jean Baudrillard's (1994) famously counter-intuitive observation,
the map is the territory - not a window on to the territory. In this light,
we can see the metaphor of genetic mapping for what it arguably is. It's
an attempt, and a rhetorically successful one too, to convince us of some-
thing that's only seemingly true. This is why I placed the term discovery in
scare-quotes a few pages back when describing the aims of molecular genet-
ics. Discovery is an alluring metaphor and closely tied to the growth of
mapping during the successive periods of European exploration and coloni-
sation from the 1500s onwards. It suggests something pre-existent that's
waiting to be seen, recorded objectively and positioned. In the case of genes,
it gives the questionable impression that molecular biologists worldwide
are engaged on a journey into the incompletely charted terrain of chromo-
somes, proteins, polymorphisms and haplotypes - as if the latter are all as
clearly delimited as the shoreline of an island. But is there really such a
thing as a 'gene' or even a whole 'genome' existing as a discrete biological
entity with causal powers? And how many people outside molecular biology
would ever trouble to ask the question?
Numbering the human genome
'Numbers do not make an argument.' So says one statistician (Dorling,
2011: ix). But when used in arguments, or in apparently matter-of-fact
statements, numbers can make a huge difference. There's a strong whiff
of certainty (often absoluteness) with numbers, even when expressed as
probabilities, percentages or estimates. If mapping metaphors have been
widely used in representations of human genes, so too have numbers -
notably, those quantifying our genes relative to the gene count of non-
human species. Indeed, if genes have become important to contemporary
discussions of what it means to be 'human', numbers have, I would argue,
been central to the claim that there's a single, universally shared genome
that exists regardless of gender, 'race', ancestry or geographical origin.
Certainly, the absolute and relative numbers of human genes were
highlighted persistently when the 'draft' and 'final' versions of the two
genome mapping projects were unveiled early in the new millennium. 12
The 2001 special issues of the periodicals Science and Nature were devoted to
 
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