From genetic to postgenomic determinisms: The role of the environment reconsidered : Introduction to the collection 'Postgenomic determinisms: Environmental narratives after the century of the gene'.
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
In the past twenty years, conceptual and technological shifts in the life sciences have unseated the causal primacy of the gene. The picture emerging from 'postgenomic' science is one that emphasises multifactorial dependencies between the environment, development, and the genome, and blurs boundaries between biological individuals, and between the body and the environment. Despite the rejection of genetic determinism within postgenomics, forms of determinism nevertheless persist. The environment is often conceptualised in postgenomic research in a narrow and constrained way, affording an outsized causal role to certain environmental factors while neglecting the influence of others. This carries ethical and social implications, including for understandings of race and motherhood. This topical collection interrogates the environmental determinisms developing within postgenomic science, through investigation of their conceptual foundations, histories, and social contexts across a range of postgenomic fields.
期刊介绍:
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences is an interdisciplinary journal committed to providing an integrative approach to understanding the life sciences. It welcomes submissions from historians, philosophers, biologists, physicians, ethicists and scholars in the social studies of science. Contributors are expected to offer broad and interdisciplinary perspectives on the development of biology, biomedicine and related fields, especially as these perspectives illuminate the foundations, development, and/or implications of scientific practices and related developments. Submissions which are collaborative and feature different disciplinary approaches are especially encouraged, as are submissions written by senior and junior scholars (including graduate students).