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EVELYN FOX KELLER, The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 186. ISBN 0-674-00372-1. L15.95 (hardback).
Evelyn Fox Keller's The Century of the Gene is a clear, concise and challenging contribution to our understanding of the history of genetics and of modern biology more generally.
There can be no doubt that Keller's analysis of `gene talk' (p. 10), that is, her analysis of the variety of contexts and ways in which biologists have deployed the word 'gene', is more than timely. Anyone who has paid any attention to the rhetoric that surrounds the decoding of the human genome will know how much confusion there is over the meaning of the word 'gene', that deceptive `little word' coined by Wilhelm Johannsen at the very beginning of the century just passed. On the one hand, the decoding of the human genome is supposed finally to tell us who we are. The motto of the International Human Genome Project might as well have been `genes are us'. On the other hand, it turns out that, genetically, we are barely different from Caenorhabditis elegans, the lowly worm whose genome was decoded as a first step towards the decoding of our own genome. This said, Keller's little book about a century of `gene talk' should also be read very carefully because, like Johannsen's `little word', it articulates a number of quite provocative claims, some more explicitly than others.
Keller argues that genetics is a reductive way of thinking insofar as it attempts to explain the bewildering complexity of biological phenomena in terms of discrete 'genes' and the 'information' they encode in their material structure. As she notes in the second chapter of The Century of the Gene, Erwin Schrodinger laid out the parameters of this extraordinary enterprise when he famously asked `what is life?', and it is not then surprising that the human genome should often be compared to the `book of life'. Today, however, it has become quite obvious that this way of thinking is completely inadequate to understand the complexity of biological phenomena, for we are surely very different from C. elegans. Thus far, Keller's argument is far from novel. In fact, it is well rehearsed in earlier critiques of 'sociobiology', such...