Article ID: CBB016897194

The wild type as concept and in experimental practice: A history of its role in classical genetics and evolutionary theory (2017)

unapi

Wild types in genetics are specialised strains of laboratory experimental organism which principally serve as standards against which variation is measured. As selectively inbred lineages highly isolated from ancestral wild populations, there appears to be little wild or typical about them. I will nonetheless argue that they have historically been successfully used as stand-ins for nature, allowing knowledge produced in the laboratory to be extrapolated to the natural world. In this paper, I will explore the 19th century origins of the wild type concept, the theoretical and experimental innovations which allowed concepts and organisms to move from wild nature to laboratory domestication c. 1900 (resulting in the production of standardised lab strains), and the conflict among early geneticists between interactionist and atomist accounts of wild type, which would eventually lead to the conceptual disintegration of wild types and the triumph of genocentrism and population genetics. I conclude by discussing how the strategy of using wild type strains to represent nature in the lab has nonetheless survived the downfall of the wild type concept and continues to provide, significant limitations acknowledged, an epistemically productive means of investigating heredity and evolutionary variation.

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Authors & Contributors
Ruse, Michael
Leonelli, Sabina
Ankeny, Rachel A.
Davies, Gail
Mohr, Stephanie Elizabeth
Minelli, Alessandro
Concepts
Biology
Philosophy of biology
Experimental organisms
Evolution
Genetics
Laboratory techniques and procedures
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
19th century
18th century
Places
United States
United Kingdom
France
Europe
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