It was only around 1800 that heredity began to enter debates among
physicians, breeders, and naturalists. Soon thereafter it evolved into
one of the most fundamental concepts of biology. Here Staffan
Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger offer a succinct cultural history
of the scientific concept of heredity. They outline the dramatic changes
the idea has undergone since the early modern period and describe the
political and technological developments that brought about these
changes.
Müller-Wille and Rheinberger begin with an account of premodern theories
of generation, showing that these were concerned with the procreation of
individuals rather than with hereditary transmission. The authors reveal
that when hereditarian thinking first emerged, it did so in a variety of
cultural domains, such as politics and law, medicine, natural history,
breeding, and anthropology. Müller-Wille and Rheinberger then track
theories of heredity from the late nineteenth century--when leading
biologists considered it in light of growing societal concerns with race
and eugenics--through the rise of classical and molecular genetics in
the twentieth century, to today, as researchers apply sophisticated
information technologies to understand heredity. What readers come to
see from this exquisite history is why it took such a long time for
heredity to become a prominent concept in the life sciences and why it
gained such overwhelming importance in those sciences and the broader
culture over the last two centuries.
