Abstract
The author draws out the existential implications of how we think about heredity. Many relational dynamics hinge upon such thinking: how we place ourselves in time, especially in relation to ancestral figures; how we make sense of our own degrees of freedom; how we relate to ourselves as selves. The first part of the chapter begins with a story about Kierkegaard’s own reflections about the import of heredity on himself, his choices and his familial relation. The second part examines the post-genomic turn in science and evolutionary theory, following the completion of the Human Genome Project. It focuses on epigenetics as an area of biological research that exemplifies key shifts in scientific approaches to inheritance. Epigenetic research holds great potential for undermining persistent determinist accounts of “race” and biological difference. It also, however, dramatizes the limitations of iconoclastic methods of critique. The author’s conclusion explores this twofold significance of epigenetics.
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Notes
- 1.
In his journal on May 5, 1847, Kierkegaard wrote, “how strange that I have turned thirty-four. It is utterly inconceivable to me. I was so sure that I would die before or on this birthday that I could actually be tempted to suppose that the date of my birth has been erroneously recorded and that I will still die on my thirty-fourth.” According to Garff’s biography, Kierkegaard followed up on this temptation and visited the parish records (2005, 137).
- 2.
There are many theories about the thorn in Kierkegaard’s flesh. One that I find compelling links a story that his niece Henriette tells about Kierkegaard falling from a tree as a young boy with subsequent sexual impotency and other sex-related frustrations that, according to Arild Christensen’s 1949 article, reflected hypochondria. This particular theory seems to invite reflection on the nocebos and placebos that sparked meaning, both epistemic and somatic, in Kierkegaard’s own life.
- 3.
Another vexing connection between paternity and sexuality for Kierkegaard, seemingly, is the nature of his father and mother’s own sexual relationship, which began before they were married, when his mother Ane was still the household servant.
- 4.
Reading one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous stories as an autobiographical confession, Arendt muses that Kierkegaard presumably visited a brothel. Afterwards, he could not know if he had fathered a child: this impossibility manifested in the thorn in his flesh, echoing his father’s curse. This short story is one of six narratives that punctuate Quidam’s diary in Stages in Life’s Way (1988). In reference to the “thorn in his side,” Arendt cites Thomas Hacker’s German books on Kierkegaard from 1913 and 1922.
- 5.
Darwin made this comment in an addition to the third edition of On the Origin of Species (2009, 81).
- 6.
Myra Hird defines neo-Darwinism as pivoting on “the proposition that genes produce small variations through random mutation over long periods of time” (2009, 64). She points out that development, according to neo-Darwinist framing, is additive: through natural selection and the cumulative selection of naturally occurring and small random mutations, change occurs incrementally over an extended period of time; on these terms, the “unit of selection” is the gene. This differs significantly from accounts by biologists like Lynn Margulis who points to symbiogenesis (not natural selection) as the primary creative force in evolution: on this account, the “unit of selection” is the symbiont (the co-evolving associates), and relatively large changes occur—through symbiogenesis—over short periods of time, generating complexity relatively quickly (Hird 2009, 65). On these terms, we ourselves are communities, not “individuals” as such.
- 7.
See Müller-Wille and Rheinberger (2007, 3–25).
- 8.
Lewontin employed quantitative data to dismantle arguments that posited discrete, geographically localized racial populations. As Marks explains, this 1972 publication dismantled the race-as-population equation: “there was about sixfold more within-group variation than between-group variation detectable in the human gene pool” (2008, 24).
- 9.
Merold Westphal makes the convincing case that when Silentio refers to “the ethical” in Fear and Trembling, it is Hegel’s ethical that he has in mind (1992). This is an important point because our interpretations of Fear and Trembling lead to very different places if we recognize Kant, for example, instead of Hegel as the implicit reference of Silentio’s “ethical.” See Jaarsma (2010) for more on this point.
- 10.
- 11.
Citing Scott Gilbert, Lock writes that, according to these scientific insights, “‘our self’ becomes a permeable self. We are each a complex community, indeed, a collection of ecosystems” (2005, 52).
- 12.
- 13.
On the reactive genome, see Griffiths and Stotz (2013).
- 14.
Craig Venter, head of Celera Genomics and chief private scientist involved with the HGP, announced in a press release that the Project proved that there was no genetic or scientific basis to the concept of race (Venter 2000). As a Celera press release announced, race “has no basis in science. The biologic concept of race is now believed to be untenable. The power of science can be used to eliminate public perceptions of racial superiority and inferiority, which are the basis of racism itself. In this way, the mapping of the human genome could be pivotal in promoting the concept of one race, the human race” (Culliton 2001).
- 15.
In the 1990s, the Human Diversity Project sought support for a large-scale program to collect and analyze the DNA of indigenous persons; but it failed to secure federal funding. Marks points out that the project positioned the DNA of indigenous communities as another natural resource to be targeted for exploitation and to profit others (2013, 256). See Kim Tallbear (2013).
- 16.
Habermas protests against these reductionist methods as well. Pointing to an unintentionally comical German book title, he writes, “‘From the Perspective of the Brain,’ there is nothing whatsoever to be perceived, since the term ‘brain’ stands for nothing more than slices of observable events” (2007, 34).
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
See Kelsoe et al. (1989) for an example of a retraction of such research; in this case, the genetic link for manic depression was deemed statistically unfounded.
- 20.
Thousands of such datasets are available in public databases. GWAS also provide the knowledge base on which consumer genetic profiling services draw.
- 21.
The question of the degree to which epigenetics and post-genomics more generally constitutes a paradigm shift remains an open one. Stevens notes, for example, that many biologists are committed to the centrality of DNA as well as to the importance of networks: “these are not mutually exclusive views of the biological world” (2015, 106). Florian Maderspacher makes the case for an understanding of epigenetics as continuous with genomic research, rather than evolutionary (2010), and likewise Jörg Niewöhner points to “post”-genomic methods as continuous with, rather than sharply transforming, genomic methods. In contrast, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb identify a significant conceptual and methodological shift in the move from genomics to post-genomics (2006).
- 22.
C. H. Waddington, recognized as the founder of systems biology, described what he called the “epigenetic landscape” in 1940, referring to the ecological and temporal context in which life emerges.
- 23.
“Epigenetics” refers to several lines of scientific inquiry. For some, it describes research into phenotypic variation (why monozygotic twins do not always manifest the same diseases or manifest at the same times). Such research, for example, focuses on mapping the “methylome,” examining methylation patterns in order to understand long-term functional change in gene expression; researchers also study histone acetylation as a way to track gene activation, as well as non-coding RNAs. For others, epigenetics refers to interventions associated with developmental systems theory , in which epigenetic phenomena are recognized as having independence from the activity of genes (Jablonka and Lamb 2006). “Selves” are permeable, on this model, as we ourselves can be seen as a collection of ecosystems. As Lock and Nguyen put it, genes are not stable, they do not have clearly demarcated beginnings or ends, and they only rarely determine individual phenotypes or the biological make-up of future generations (2010, 336). There is no program, in other words, no animating script by which we inherit traits or trajectories. What there is, according to molecular biologists like Richard Strohman, is a regulatory system, a “dynamic-epigenetic network,” with rules that do not emerge from DNA (cited 2010, 336). For an explanation of the tensions between these two lines of inquiry, see Niewöhner (2011, 282). I explore this in more detail in Jaarsma (forthcoming).
- 24.
- 25.
Epigenetic research prompts some scientists to rethink prevailing assumptions of genomics, including the very nature of DNA. As Dupré explains, methylation involves the conversion of one nucleotide (cytosine) into another (5-methylcytosine): the genomic abstraction of the four-letter sequence meets its limits here, in other words (2015, 57). What all this really shows, Dupré writes, is that “the standard four-letter representation of genomic sequence is an abstraction” (2015, 66).
- 26.
Epigenetics also confounds commonsensical assumptions about the unidirectional nature of time. We might experience effects of retroviruses like HIV, composed of RNA, which can “reverse transcribe” their genetic material into DNA to infect the host’s genome. Epigenetic research, in other words, blocks our reliance upon individuated and unidirectional timelines. “Compared with the genome, the epigenome—the epigenetic state of a cell at a particular moment—is highly dynamic and in constant flux” (Ramirez-Goicoechea 2013, 66).
- 27.
- 28.
See for example the study of two groups of suicide victims, one with a history of abuse and the other with a non-abused control; McGowan et al. (2009).
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Jaarsma, A.S. (2017). The Existential Stakes of Epigenetics. In: Kierkegaard After the Genome. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57981-8_3
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