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superseded.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.
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