On the Biological Term “Gene” in the History of Science

Abstract

Contemporary philosophy of science sets the origins of the predominant attributes of the term “gene” in the year 1900 when Gregor Mendel’s work was rediscovered. Yet it was the speculative biology of the second half of the 19th century that opened up the epistemic sphere for a new conception of heredity: heredity as the transmission of particulate, hereditable material units with a tendency for self-preservation. The then young discipline of biology dissociated its terminology from the preconceptions of natural philosophy. In the early 20th century the postulated hereditary particles were associated with the chromosome and at least, in the 1940s, with nucleic acid: being stable and, at the same time, mutable as well as capable of self-reproduction, self-selectivity and memory. DNA epitomizes the perfect biological principle. But the most recent conception of the gene is not free from anthropomorphisms