{"id":335,"date":"2005-03-22T15:25:10","date_gmt":"2005-03-22T15:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.truth.posiweb.net\/notes\/?p=335"},"modified":"2005-03-22T15:25:10","modified_gmt":"2005-03-22T15:25:10","slug":"the-doctrine-of-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2005\/03\/22\/the-doctrine-of-dna\/","title":{"rendered":"The Doctrine of DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And some more from Lewontin&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/archives\/quotes\/biology_as_ideology.html\" title=\"just the quote from the final page from the last post\">The Doctrine of DNA<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>The transfer of causal power from social relations into inanimate agents that then seem to have a power and life of their own is one of the major mystifications of science and its ideologies<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Which is an as readable, and enjoyable, argument against genetic reductionism as you could hope to find. I&#8217;m guessing that many people would say their reductionism is a methodological tactic rather than a ideological commitment, but Lewontin&#8217;s characterisation of popular discourse is accurate enough, i fear, to convince that however tactical genetic reductionism may be when adopted by scientists it becomes far less self-conscious as it migrates into the public sphere.<\/p>\n<p>[note to self: avoid writing sentences that long and convoluted in the future]<\/p>\n<p>Anyway: yes, society is not a reflection of individual level traits. Yes, organisms and environment co-create. Yes, locating causes in a single physical matter (like DNA) allows us to ignore the wider causal context. There&#8217;s lots to nit-pick about Lewontin&#8217;s arguments, but without the anchor of some particular example i think it would get so lost in the rhetorical and connotive terrain that it wouldn&#8217;t be worth it. Highly recommended<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And some more from Lewontin&#8217;s The Doctrine of DNA The transfer of causal power from social relations into inanimate agents that then seem to have a power and life of their own is one of the major mystifications of science and its ideologies Which is an as readable, and enjoyable, argument against genetic reductionism as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-5p","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}