{"id":589,"date":"2016-05-17T14:57:14","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T14:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=589"},"modified":"2016-05-17T14:57:14","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T14:57:14","slug":"the-whig-interpretation-of-the-gene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/589\/the-whig-interpretation-of-the-gene\/","title":{"rendered":"The Whig interpretation of the gene"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have an essay<\/a> in the June issue of The Atlantic, out online now and at your favorite magazine dealer or airport in a week or so.<\/p>\n

It’s an essay review centered around Siddhartha Mukherjee’s newest book, The Gene<\/a>. The book is part history of genetics and part discussion of current genetic science and medicine. Scientists don’t seem to like the latter too well.\u00a0An article, based on the book, that appeared in the New Yorker\u00a0earlier this spring, is receiving a great deal of criticism from the scientific community<\/a>. They say that the piece\u00a0badly misrepresents the mechanisms of epigenetics.<\/p>\n

I take him to task on his history.\u00a0I use the book as the base for a discussion of “Whig history” and why it is so dangerous\u00a0when writing about science.\u00a0Whig history, crudely, is writing about the past from the perspective of history’s winners; it is history as a justification of the present.<\/p>\n

Good, critical history of science is vital to doing good science on a community scale. Only when we understand that\u00a0“the” gene is a human concept that describes a bit of biology in a particularly productive way, can we harness the full power of genetic knowledge for good.<\/p>\n

Take a look!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have an essay in the June issue of The Atlantic, out online now and at your favorite magazine dealer or airport in a week or so. It’s an essay review centered around Siddhartha Mukherjee’s newest book, The Gene. 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From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center\u2019s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort\u2019s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock\u2019s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda\u2019s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. 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Should he expire tomorrow, he would be survived, in decreasing size order, by a son, a wife, a daughter, a dog, a cat, another cat, and still another cat.","sameAs":["http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com"],"url":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/author\/genotopia\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgtNP1-9v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}