Abstract
In the advertising discourse of human genetic database projects, of genetic ancestry tracing companies, and in popular books on anthropological genetics, what I refer to as the anthropological gene and genome appear as documents of human history, by far surpassing the written record and oral history in scope and accuracy as archives of our past. How did macromolecules become “documents of human evolutionary history”? Historically, molecular anthropology, a term introduced by Emile Zuckerkandl in 1962 to characterize the study of primate phylogeny and human evolution on the molecular level, asserted its claim to the privilege of interpretation regarding hominoid, hominid, and human phylogeny and evolution vis-à-vis other historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, physical anthropology, and paleoanthropology. This process will be discussed on the basis of three key conferences on primate classification and evolution that brought together exponents of the respective fields and that were held in approximately ten-years intervals between the early 1960s and the 1980s. I show how the anthropological gene and genome gained their status as the most fundamental, clean, and direct records of historical information, and how the prioritizing of these epistemic objects was part of a complex involving the objectivity of numbers, logic, and mathematics, the objectivity of machines and instruments, and the objectivity seen to reside in the epistemic objects themselves.
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Sommer, M. History in the Gene: Negotiations Between Molecular and Organismal Anthropology. J Hist Biol 41, 473–528 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-008-9150-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-008-9150-3
Keywords
- the history of molecular anthropology
- the molecularization of anthropology
- human population genetics
- human genetic diversity projects
- genetic ancestry tracing
- paleoanthropology
- physical anthropology
- evolutionary biology
- the anthropological gene
- anthropological DNA
- the anthropological genome
- the political and epistemic values of the classical molecular gene
- genetic determinism
- molecular clock
- human phylogeny
- human evolution
- human history
- human origin
- origin stories
- primate phylogeny
- primate evolution
- animal-human boundary
- hyman `races'
- scientific conferences
- Burg Wartenstein symposia
- Emile Zuckerkandl
- Linus Pauling
- Morris Goodman
- Vincent Sarich
- Allan Wilson
- Rebecca Cann
- Mark Stoneking
- Sherwood Washburn
- George Gaylord Simpson
- Theodosius Dobzhansky
- Ernst Mayr
- Milford Wolpoff