The Phenotype/Genotype Distinction and the Disappearance of the Body

Bibliographic Data

ID4456460
AuthorsGabriel Gudding (corresponding author)
Year1996
Volume57
Issue3
Pages525
Publication date1996-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1353/jhi.1996.0025
PMID11613359
OpenAlexW2086128261
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited1

The Phenotype/Genotype Distinction and the Disappearance of the Body Gabriel Gudding The discipline of genetics has long been a rhetorical and heuristic locus for social and political issues. As such, the science has influenced culture through the avenues of law, medicine, warfare, social work, and even, since 1972 in California, the education of kindergarten students. It has affected how we view the body, morality, romance, biography, and agency—not to mention procreation and death. In many ways the delamination of genotype from phenotype was the first cut, so to speak, in this new cosmetics of life. The distinction between structure and expression arose from an interdisciplinary struggle for authority in the biological sciences at the turn of the century. This preceptual split in the organism between structure and expression came over time to fundamentally alter the percepts of the body, in terms of how the body is juridically, medicinally, and otherwise, generally perceived and understood. More importantly and interestingly, this delamination within the organism between its genotype and phenotype eventually led to a sense of the body’s fragility and its eventual “disappearance” as a seat of agency, morality, and identity; and in turn these three groundings of modernity have been redistributed to the gene, the genotype, and the genome. In one sense, then, this paper traces not so much the birth of a new view of the body (the genetic) but the drama of its disappearance, in which the body melts to a silhouette and is replaced by the genotype and its expression, the phenotype. In 1911 Wilhelm Johannsen of the University of Copenhagen published “The Genotype Conception of Heredity,” 1 which introduced to geneticists the ideas of “phenotype” and “genotype.” Johannsen coined these terms in objection to what he considered to be an erroneous conception of heredity, [End Page 525] which he called the “transmission view”: the idea that “personal qualities” (such as honesty or good looks) could themselves be or otherwise influence “the true heritable elements or traits” passed on from one generation to another. He called this transmission view “apparent heredity” and claimed that this idea relied upon an economic-juridical model of the transmission of property—and thereby provided no disciplined or profound understanding of true heredity. He asserted that in fact the transmission-conception of heredity represents exactly the reverse of the real facts, just as the famous Stahlian theory of “phlogiston” was an expression diametrically opposite to the chemical reality. The personal qualities of any individual organism do not at all cause the qualities of its offspring; but the qualities of both ancestor and descendent are in quite the same manner determined by the nature of the “sexual substances”—i.e., the gametes—from which they have developed. Personal qualities are then the reactions of the gametes joining to form a zygote; but the nature of the gametes is not determined by the personal qualities of the parents or ancestors in question. This is the modern view of heredity. 2 This was indeed a profoundly new view of heredity: Johannsen quite boldly and deliberately intended his genotype-phenotype distinction to stand as a watershed between the old science of heredity—exemplified by Mendel, Galton, Weismann, and others—and the new science of genetics. He said, “The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implementation in chemical research.” 3 And he was right: genetics was indeed in a transition period, primarily due to the theoretically accommodating qualities of this new distinction. The science of genetics became radically simplified: the confusion which arose from the attempts to correlate characteristics to their corresponding units of hereditarian influence diminished. Viewing personal qualities and characteristics, in all their variation, as expressions of underlying structures instead of mutual correlates to them drastically simplified the theoretical and experimental aspects of heredity. Not only did this distinction revolutionize the science of heredity, it helped insinuate the new science of genetics into a position of autonomy and authority with respect to the other life sciences. Historians of science, such as Jan Sapp, have suggested that the genotype-phenotype distinction played a

Biology · Epistemology · Expression (computer science) · Gene · Genotype · Genotype-phenotype distinction · Morality · Phenotype · Sociology · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Genetics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Philosophy · Science Education and Perceptions

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