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the convergence of these two events is like a headlong
“writing” of genes (the phrase gene cloning encompasses
out over the flat landscape of farms and meadowlands
Just as] no material part comes from the carpenter to the wood in which he works,” Aristotle wrote, “but the shape and the form are imparted from him to the material by means of the motion he sets up. . . . In like manner, Nature uses the semen as a tool.”
The transmission of heredity, as Aristotle perceived it, was essentially the transmission of information.
In fact, rather than Pythagoras’s triangle, there was a circle, or a cycle, at work: form begat information, and then information begat form.
Who encrypted the code, and who translated it, to create a child?
But medieval Christians were quick to realize that this line of inquiry could only lead to unsavory theories.
The essence of Darwin’s disruptive genius was his ability to think about nature not as fact—but as process, as progression, as history.
How does “nature” come into being? Mendel’s question was microscopic: How does a single organism transmit information to its offspring over a single generation?
Lyell had argued (radically, for his time) that complex geological formations, such as boulders and mountains, had been created over vast stretches of time, not by the hand of God but by slow natural processes such as erosion, sedimentation, and deposition.
God had shaped the earth not through singular cataclysms but through a million paper cuts.
What if all the finches had arisen from a common ancestral finch?
On one page, he drew a diagram that would return to haunt his thoughts: rather than all species radiating out from the central hub of divine creation, perhaps they arose like branches of a “tree,” or like rivulets from a river, with an ancestral stem that divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller branches toward dozens of modern descendants.
But—with God shoved aside—what was the driving force behind the origin of species?
The deft combination of variation and artificial selection, Darwin knew, could produce extraordinary results.
A population’s inherent inclination to expand would be severely counterbalanced by the limitations of resources; its natural wont met by natural want.
This struggle for survival was the shaping hand. Death was nature’s culler, its grim shaper.
The freak became the norm.
Freaks became norms, and norms became extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced.
“The answer was clearly . . . [that] the best fitted [variants] live. . . . In this way every part of an animal’s organization could be modified exactly as required.”
The crucial driver of evolution, Darwin understood, was not nature’s sense of purpose, but her sense of humor).
In Lamarck’s view, hereditary traits were passed from parents to offspring in the same manner that a message, or story, might be passed—i.e., by instruction.
In some of these third-generation crosses, shortness reappeared—perfectly intact—after having disappeared for a generation.
When a hybrid was created, both traits existed intact—although only one asserted its existence.
Nature had spontaneously thrown up rare freaks—precisely the mechanism that Darwin had proposed as evolution’s first step.
(contrary to Lamarck, these mutants were not generated purposefully, but by random chance).
In principle, a scientist should be able to change
the “composition of individuals,” and of nations, and leave a permanent mark on human identity.
But his anxieties about class and status were so deep that he could not bear the thought that his own “intelligence” might merely be the by-product of privilege and opportunity.
He proposed that every feature in a human—height, weight, intelligence, beauty—was a composite function generated by a conserved pattern of ancestral inheritance. The parents of a child provided, on average, half the content of that feature; the grand-parents, a quarter; the great-grandparents, an eighth—and so forth, all the way back to the most distant ancestor. The sum of all contributions could be described by the series—½ + ¼ + ⅛ . . .—all of which conveniently added to 1. Galton called this the Ancestral Law of Heredity.
Beautiful laws were often killed by ugly facts
If Aristotle had described a current of information moving across generations, then Mendel had found its currency.
“We have only touched the edge of that new country which is stretching out before us. . . . The experimental study of heredity . . . is second to no branch of science in the magnitude of the results it offers.”
The word atom, used in the modern sense, first entered scientific vocabulary in John Dalton’s paper in 1808.
A gene was defined by what a gene does: it was a carrier of hereditary information.
The Time Machine, published in 1895, Wells had imagined a future race of humans that, having selected innocence and virtue as desirable traits, had inbred to the point of effeteness—degenerating into an etiolated, childlike race devoid of any curiosity or passion.
If the eugenicist learned these laws and then figured out how to hack them—à la Plato—he would acquire unprecedented power; by manipulating genes, he could manipulate the future.
The “sterilization of failures”—the weeding and culling of the human genetic garden—haunted him with its many implicit moral hazards.
Kantsaywhere, about a future utopia in which roughly half the population was marked as “unfit” and severely restricted in its ability to reproduce.
Davenport’s 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was the movement’s bible;
I am the family face: Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion. —Thomas Hardy, “Heredity”
I asked my father what he thought about Moni, Rajesh, and Jagu. “Abheder dosh,” he said. A flaw in identity; a genetic illness; a blemish that cannot be separated from the self—the same phrase served all meanings. He had made peace with its indivisibility.
Had the full genetic sequence of the skeleton been analyzed, the investigators might have found the culprit gene for hemophilia B—the mutation that had crossed one continent and four generations and insinuated itself into a defining political moment of the twentieth century.
