Origins of the Classical Gene Concept, 1900–1950: Genetics, Mechanistic, Philosophy, and the Capitalization of Agriculture [Book Review]

As many of the papers in this Special Symposium Issue discuss, by the 21st century we have moved well beyond the notion of a gene as a single particulate unit coding for a given protein, or especially a single phenotypic trait. Yet notions of genes as some kind of single, particulate entity still persist, especially in textbooks and writings about genetics for the general public. To understand this disjunct between the professional geneticist’s view of genes and their complex interactions, and the more widespread public understanding of genes as distinct entities, I thought it might be useful to look back 150 years or more to the origins of the gene concept, to the origins of Mendelian genetics itself ..