Genetic Essentialism :: Science Scientific Papers

Coming to live in a new country offers the unique opportunity to flavor at life from a profoundly different vantage-point. So, during my first deuce years as a scientist in the United States Ive a lot found myself reflecting on how societies differ in fundamental ways in their basic orientation toward life. Many experiences and impressions during this time have dramatically increase my aw atomic number 18ness how much all bodies of knowledge about the ways the human being works and the way the world, and we ourselves, are need to be understood as local knowledge systems. The concept of local knowledge systems has been developed in post-colonial studies of science, and has been applied in assertions that indigenous, i.e., non- Hesperian, and western ways of knowing are both local in the sense that both are culture-dependent and incomplete has a claim to universality. (1)From that one could conclude that western science at least functions as a more or less monolithic enterprise. However, although western science as a whole is based on a shared methodology and epistemology, distinct preoccupations of the cultures in different regions of the western world exert powerful influences over the construction of scientific discourses. In the United States, there appears to be a strong need in middle class culture to define oneself through ones biology. This biology however does not signify the body itself, save a metaphorical, linguistic construction of the self around which many aspects of present-day(a) life are becoming organized. (2) The central metaphor of ones biology is ones genes, and ones genes are seen as the aggregate of the person. For complex historical, political and cultural reasons, the human genome is increasingly equated with the essence of human-ness. Coming from New Zealand, this definition of identity through a genetically oriented biological discourse is anything only when self-evident, in fact, it seems deeply culturally determined. Withi n the scope of this paper, I will not attempt to disclose what drives the need for this view of the self, but would like to stress the importance of quest answers to this question. It seems to me to be a central concern in any revue of the contemporary gene cult(ure) in American society. The growth of a biotechnological thriftiness and the promotion of matching societal attitudes are obviously contributing to this phenomenon, but they alone do not explain the deep resonance a genetically defined construction of human-ness appears to invoke in peoples psyches.