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Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber, eds. Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)
This timely and important collection brings together a group of prominent geneticists, biologists, medical researchers, psychologists, philosophers, and historians to engage in what Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man referred to as “debunking as positive science”: “sound debunking must do more than replace one prejudice with another. It must use more adequate biology to drive out fallacious ideas”[1]. In the words of coeditor Sheldon Krimsky, “The chapters in this volume provide a counterargument to exaggerated, erroneous, or overly simplified claims about the role that DNA plays in cells, organisms, evolution, human behavior, and culture” (13). Such claims have spread far beyond the pages of academic journals. A reductionist, deterministic conception of DNA has imbued a molecule with almost supernatural power and transformed it into what Ruth Hubbard calls “a central icon of our time”: “[T]he gene is simultaneously a material object and an ideology, full of political, economic, spiritual, individual, and social content” (25). What is this ideology?
It can be summed...