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THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK
OF BIOLOGY AND SOCIETY
Edited by Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby,
Des Fitzgerald, Stephanie Lloyd
The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society
Maurizio Meloni • John Cromby
Des Fitzgerald • Stephanie Lloyd
Editors
The Palgrave
Handbook of Biology
and Society
Editors
Maurizio Meloni John Cromby
Department of Sociological Studies School of Management
University of Sheffield University of Leicester
Sheffield, UK Leicester, UK
Des Fitzgerald Stephanie Lloyd

Cardiff University Department of Anthropology
Cardiff, UK Laval University
Québec, Canada
ISBN 978-1-137-52878-0 ISBN 978-1-137-52879-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52879-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953061
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Chapter 38 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter.
The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are
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Cover Illustration: Ralf Hiemisch/gettyimages.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
Contents
1 Introducing the New Biosocial Landscape 1

Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby, Des Fitzgerald, and Stephanie
Lloyd
Part I History of the Biology/Society Relationship 23
2 Models, Metaphors, Lamarckisms and the Emergence of

‘Scientific Sociology’ 25
Snait B. Gissis
3 The Transcendence of the Social: Durkheim, Weismann

and the Purification of Sociology 49
Maurizio Meloni
4 Biology, Social Science, and Population in Late Nineteenth-

and Early Twentieth-Century Britain 77
Chris Renwick
5 The Concept of Plasticity in the History of the

Nature-Nurture Debate in the Early Twentieth Century 97
Antonine Nicoglou
v
vi Contents
6 An Evolving, Evolutionary Science of Human Differences 123

Jonathan Marks
7 Experimenting in the Biosocial: The Strange Case of

Twin Research 143
William Viney
8 Histories and Meanings of Epigenetics 167

Tatjana Buklijas
Part II Genomics, Postgenomics, Epigenetics and Society 189
9 Scrutinizing the Epigenetics Revolution 191

Maurizio Meloni and Giuseppe Testa
10 Social and Behavioral Epigenetics: Evolving Perspectives

on Nature-Nurture Interplay, Plasticity, and Inheritance 227
Frances A. Champagne
11 Molecular Multicultures 251
Amy Hinterberger
12 The First Thousand Days: Epigenetics in the Age of

Global Health 269
Michelle Pentecost
13 Genetics, Epigenetics and Social Justice in Education:

Learning as a Complex Biosocial Phenomenon 295
Deborah Youdell
14 Assembling Biomedical Big Data 317

Sabina Leonelli
Part III Neuroscience: Brain, Culture and Social Relations 339

Contents
vii
15 Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience 341

Jan Slaby and Suparna Choudhury
16 On the Neurodisciplines of Culture 371

Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega
17 Affective Neuroscience as Sociological Inquiry? 391

Christian von Scheve
18 “Bio-looping” and the Psychophysiological in Religious

Belief and Practice: Mechanisms of Embodiment in
Candomblé Trance and Possession 417
Rebecca Seligman
19 Experimental Entanglements: Social Science and

Neuroscience Beyond Interdisciplinarity 441
Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard
20 Developing Schizophrenia 473
John Cromby
21 Epigenetics and the Suicidal Brain: Reconsidering Context

in an Emergent Style of Reasoning 491
Stephanie Lloyd and Eugene Raikhel
Part IV Social Epidemiology 517
22 The Embodiment Dynamic over the Life Course: A Case

for Examining Cancer Aetiology 519
Michelle Kelly-Irving and Cyrille Delpierre
23 Epigenetic Signatures of Socioeconomic Status Across

the Lifecourse 541
Silvia Stringhini and Paolo Vineis
viii Contents
24 An Inter-generational Perspective on Social Inequality in

Health and Life Opportunities: The Maternal Capital
Model 561
Jonathan C. K. Wells and Akanksha A. Marphatia
25 Quantifying Social Influences Throughout the Life

Course: Action, Structure and ‘Omics’ 587
Michael P. Kelly and Rachel S. Kelly
26 Health Inequalities and the Interplay of Socioeconomic

Factors and Health in the Life Course 611
Rasmus Hoffmann, Hannes Kröger, and Eduwin Pakpahan
Part V Medicine and Society 639
27 Universal Biology, Local Society? Notes from Anthropology 641

Patrick Bieler and Jörg Niewöhner
28 Big Data and Biomedicine 663

Nadine Levin
29 Personalised and Precision Medicine: What Kind of

Society Does It Take? 683
Barbara Prainsack
30 Emergent Postgenomic Bodies and Their (Non)Scalable

Environments 703
Megan Warin and Aryn Martin
31 The Vitality of Disease 727

Ayo Wahlberg
32 Bioethnography: A How-To Guide for the Twenty-First

Century 749
Elizabeth F. S. Roberts and Camilo Sanz
Contents
ix
Part VI Contested Sites/Future Perspectives 777
33 The Postgenomic Politics of Race 779

Catherine Bliss
34 Of Rats and Women: Narratives of Motherhood in

Environmental Epigenetics 799
Martha Kenney and Ruth Müller
35 Ancestors and Identities: DNA, Genealogy, and Stories 831

Jessica Bardill
36 Species of Biocapital, 2008, and Speciating Biocapital, 2017 851

Stefan Helmreich and Nicole Labruto
37 Human Tendencies 877
Ed Cohen
38 Ten Theses on the Subject of Biology and Politics:

Conceptual, Methodological, and Biopolitical
Considerations 897
Samantha Frost
Index 925
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Table from Galton’s book English men of science: their nature
and nurture, showing the innate tastes for sciences (Galton
1874, 192) 101
Fig. 5.2 Side views of two pure lines of Daphnia by Woltereck (1909,
114). The head-height is measured along the vertical axis
between the uppermost horizontal line and the horizontal
centerline. The “relative head-height” is the height of the
head divided by the distance between the bottom horizontal
line and the top one (and multiplied by 100 to be expressed
as a percentage) 108
Fig. 5.3 Phenotypic curves of three females of pure lines of Daphnia by
Woltereck (1909, Fig 12, 139) X-axis: nutrient levels; Y-axis:
relative head-height. The curves show a non-uniform variation
between pure lines. The “Reaktionsnorm” or the “genotypus,”
for Woltereck, is the sum of all possible curves for a given line
(e.g., A+A’+A”+A”’…) 109
Fig. 5.4 Polygonum amphibium. (a) Water form and (b) Terrestrial form.
By Johann Georg Sturm (painter: Jacob Sturm) from book
Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen at (http://www.biolib.de,
public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.
php?curid=750700.jpg)112
Fig. 5.5 Representation of different male stag-beetles, illustrating how the
variation in the environment of the insect (linked to the need
to defend) can lead to various forms within the same species
(From Lloyd Morgan 1891, 180) 114
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 10.1 Illustration of the complex interplay between genotype and

social environment in predicting phenotype within and across
generations. Epigenetic variation is a mechanism through which
divergent phenotypes can arise through interactions of genotype
with different environmental conditions across development.
This epigenetic variation can be transmitted across generations
leading to the inheritance of phenotypic variation 231
Fig. 22.1 Plausible biological pathways involved in exposure to stressors
and cancer development (based on Kelly-Irving et al. 2013a) 529
Fig. 23.1 Distribution of the methylation level according to time since
smoking cessation (on horizontal axis). Stronger hypomethylation
(vertical axis) is closer to smoking cessation. Increasing
methylation levels approach those of never smokers several
years after smoking cessation. After many years the number of
signals levels-off, suggesting the existence of sites whose
methylation status remains altered even more than 35 years
after smoking cessation. Courtesy of Florence Guida 547
Fig. 24.1 Schematic diagram showing an inter-generational cycle between
the level of maternal capital and the acquisition of somatic and
educational capital in the offspring. Those receiving poor nutrition
and less education in early life embody these traits in adulthood
and transmit them to the next generation. Those receiving high
investment can transfer more to their own offspring 567
Fig. 24.2 Association of birth weight and infant weight gain with family
income, assessed in ‘minimum wages’, in the 1982 Birth Cohort
from Pelotas, Brazil. Data from Victora et al. (1987) 569
Fig. 24.3 Associations of maternal investment (proxied by birth size) with
maturation rate and adult phenotype in young healthy South Asian
women living in the UK. (a) Birth weight is inversely associated
with age at menarche. (b) Earlier menarche is associated with
lower adult stature. (c) Earlier menarche is associated with higher
adult subscapular skinfold. (d) Subscapular skinfold is positively
associated with systolic blood pressure. Reproduced with
permission from Wells et al. (2016) 571
Fig. 24.4 Odds ratios for the risk of Nepali children completing less than
3 years education by ~8.5 years, for a variety of parental or family
risk factors, or conditional growth of the children themselves.
Based on data of Marphatia et al. (2016b) 574
Fig. 24.5 Associations of the Gender Inequality Index (GII) and the
prevalence of (a) low birth weight (LBW), (b) stunting, (c)
wasting and (d) child mortality rate in 96 countries (2 missing
data points for LBW). Reproduced with permission from
Marphatia et al. (2016a) 576
List of Figures
xiii
Fig. 26.1 Conceptional model for bi-directed relationships between SES

and health in the life course. Notes: CH childhood, SES
socioeconomic status 615
Fig. 26.2 Structural equation model for bi-directed relationships between
SES and health in the life course with results for all countries
combined. Notes: countries Austria, Germany, the Netherlands,
France, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Spain,
Italy, C childhood (0–15), A adulthood (30–50), O old age
(50–90), M/F men/women; for indicators of the latent variables,
see data section; bold numbers statistically significant (p<0.05)621
Fig. 26.3 Comparison of the strength of causation and selection, by
life-course phase, gender and European region. Notes: Causation
causality from SES to health, Selection causality from health to
SES, West Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland,
Belgium, North Sweden, Denmark, South Spain, Italy, Phase 1
transition from childhood to adult age, Phase 2 transition from
adulthood to old age, bold numbers statistically significant
(p<0.05), p-values in the graph are from a direct Wald-test for
difference between the coefficient for causation and the
coefficient for selection 625
Fig. 35.1 With apologies to Charles Darwin, a diagram of the divergence
and convergence of taxa of biocapital. Rendered by Michael Rossi 860
List of Tables
Table 25.1 Omic technologies comprising the ‘Interactome’ 595

Table 26.1 Description of the data (indicators, variables, categories,
distributions)618
Table 26.2 Results from structural equation models on the interplay
between SES and health during the life course 623
xv
1
Introducing the New Biosocial Landscape
Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby, Des Fitzgerald,
and Stephanie Lloyd
For many decades, the study of society and the study of biology have been
estranged from one another. There are complex reasons for this estrangement.
Those reasons are rooted partly in the ways that, for a long time, biologists con-
figured the relationship between their epistemic objects (particularly genes) and
those objects’ environmental influences; they are also partly rooted in the way
that social scientists insisted, for an equally long period, on a strict division of
labour between the sciences of society and the sciences of life. Yet many social
scientists have now shown that a neat demarcation between the social and the
biological has been largely illusory given the intense proliferation of objects,
practices, and cultures that have persisted along a supposedly rigid biology/
society border (Haraway 1991; Kroenfeldner 2009; Meloni 2016, reprinted
here as Chap. 3). Nevertheless, the distinction between the biological and the
social has become part of our everyday conceptual fabric—an inescapable meta-
physics to which, to various degrees, all of us have more or less succumbed.
M. Meloni (*)
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
J. Cromby
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
D. Fitzgerald
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
S. Lloyd
Department of Anthropology, Laval University, Québec, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018 1

M. Meloni et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52879-7_1
2 M. Meloni et al.
When considered from an historical perspective, the estrangement between

knowledge of biological life and knowledge of social processes has arguably
been a necessary step. Richard Lewontin famously pointed out that Darwin
had to propose an impoverished model of the relationship between organism
and environment in order to overcome ‘an obscurantist holism that merged
the organic and the inorganic into an unanalyzable whole’ (2000, 47).
However, as Lewontin further noticed, often the epistemological presump-
tions ‘that are necessary for progress at one stage in history become bars to
further progress at another’ (ibid.). The model suggested by Darwin is in fact
nowadays enriched by models (for instance, niche-construction, Odling-Smee
et al. 2003) that point to a more complex relationship between organism and
milieu.
A similar development has occurred in the relationship between knowledge
of life processes and knowledge of society, where an initial estrangement may
have been, inter alia, a productive process. If we compare the holism of
nineteenth-century sociologists like Herbert Spencer, for whom there is no
social advancement without corresponding biological growth, to the rejection
of biological explanations proposed by turn-of-the-century social scientists
such as Émile Durkheim or Alfred Kroeber, it is arguable that this rejection
was an important step on the way to a more potent understanding of social
life. Today, however, that well-known self-sufficient entity, the social fact, has
become an obstacle for a broader comprehension of the world in which we
live, in all its inextricably biosocial or biocultural dimensions. This Handbook
is an attempt to wedge us across that obstacle. It is motivated by an intuition
(and it is hardly alone in this) that the time has come to reposition this histori-
cal legacy and to move beyond the acrimonious controversies that have char-
acterized twentieth-century thought as it traversed the biology/society
border.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of the extent to
which, and how quickly, we are moving beyond the charged debates that
characterized much ‘biosocial’ thought in the twentieth century. Bringing
together a compelling array of truly interdisciplinary contributions, the
Handbook shows how nuanced attention to both the biological sciences and
the social sciences opens up novel perspectives on some of the most significant
sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and biological questions of our
era. Our central assertion is that the life sciences, broadly conceived, are cur-
rently moving toward a more social view of biological processes, just as the
social sciences are beginning to reincorporate notions of the biological body
into their investigations.
We are perfectly aware that others have mapped this terrain before us (Fox
Keller 2011; Lock 2015; Rose 1997, 2013). Nonetheless, there is work to be
done to bring together the burgeoning but too often fragmented work that
has powerfully emerged within that terrain. That work, in turn, has rested on
some striking developments across a range of intellectual domains. We think
here of work in social neuroscience, which shows not simply that the capacity
for interaction is instantiated in the brain, but that brain structure and func-
tion are themselves part-produced through particular sets of environmental
and social relations (see e.g., Cacioppo 2002); we think also of the discovery
of adult neurogenesis in humans, the realization that parts of the adult brain
continue to produce new cells through the lifetime, that these cells may have
functional significance, and that they may be affected by developmental and
environmental impacts (see e.g., Gould et al. 1999); and we think of the
renewed emphasis on neuroplasticity, which suggests that the brain continues
to change and develop as a person ages and lives (see e.g., Draganski et al.
2004). Similar developments occur in what, in molecular biology, is called
the postgenomic moment—the increasing awareness of a profound mallea-
bility of genomic functioning and a recognition of its dependence on time
and place, biography and milieu, social institutions and experiences, with
profound implications for the notion of biological heredity that we have
received from the century of the gene (Lappé and Landecker 2015; Stallins
et al. 2016; Meloni 2016). Today, we know that DNA expression is influ-
enced by factors including toxins, work stress, nutrition, socio-economic sta-
tus, early childhood care, perhaps even the lifestyle of one’s mother, father, or
grandparents—all factors that at least partially exceed the traditionally bio-
logical. This new understanding, with DNA always ready to respond to envi-
ronmental cues, is, somewhat paradoxically, a product of scientific advances
that were expected to deepen and confirm pre-existing theories of the fixed
gene.
These developments have come at a propitious time for the social sciences,
and especially for social theory. As Nikolas Rose points out, ‘over the last
decade a number of social theorists and feminist philosophers have come to
realize that it is not reactionary to recognize the reality of our fleshly nature,
and to examine the possibilities and constraints that flow from it’ (2007, 4).
We have thus seen, in feminist theory especially, in related trends such as the
‘affective turn’ and, more recently, in a body of work going under the sign of
a ‘new materialism’ (Coole and Frost 2010), a growing and often contested
assemblage of turns to materialities, affects, ontologies, and bodies—all of
which have contributed to a corpus of theoretical work that no longer accounts
for itself in terms of its distance from biology—and, indeed, sometimes moves
4 M. Meloni et al.
in quite the opposite direction (Wilson 2004, 2015; see Pedwell and
Whitehead 2012, for an important overview of some of these developments).
Scholars such as Donna Haraway (1997) and Karen Barad (2007), for exam-
ple, have edged social scientists away from taking the natural sciences in gen-
eral, and the biological sciences in particular, as mere objects or resources—as
only practises that might be looked at, rather than with. At the risk of flatten-
ing out important distinctions between diverse perspectives, these trends
undo binary oppositions between biological influences and social forces, and
so have begun to legitimate social research that unpicks the separation between
natural and social science.
Given the forms of erasure often built into claims to novelty (see Ahmed
2008), we are reluctant to hail only the newness of such developments.
Nevertheless, it does seem, today, that there are many opportunities to do
deeply consequential sociological and anthropological work with, and
through, bioscientific knowledge and practice. And perhaps this should not
be surprising. No matter the hyperspecialization of contemporary scholar-
ship, with its sharp policing of disciplinary boundaries (an actuality partly
concealed by rhetorics of ‘interdisciplinarity’), human life remains stubbornly
biosocial through and through. Whether it is the disproportionate distribu-
tion of certain diseases in lower socio-economic groups (Marmot 2010), or
the visceral reactions that hate speech may provoke (Zembylas 2007); whether
it is the way in which socio-economic and scientific activity modifies bacterial
life (Landecker 2016) or gets physically recorded into the outer environment,
or in genomic expression; whether it is the way in which normative views of
gender, class, and race imbue the materiality of scientific findings with mean-
ing and thereby transform them (Haraway 1989); or the way in which politi-
cal forms and institutions affect how bacterial diseases take form and circulate
(Nading 2012), few central objects of either the social or biological sciences
today can be understood other than with complex biosocial, biocultural, or
biohistorical rubrics.
The aims of this Handbook are twofold. First, to demarcate an epistemic
space in the relationship between the life sciences and the social sciences. This
space stands orthogonally to previous sociobiology-biosociety debates, espe-
cially those that took shape in the last quarter of the last century. Thus, we
were exhorted either to pit the biological against and before the social (socio-
biology, evolutionary psychology), or to promote the social against and above
the biological. This Handbook aims to undermine this symmetrical hostility.
In so doing, we don’t want to oversimplify the complex and disparate (if inter-
dependent) matrices of method, theory, and knowledge at stake on both sides
of these divides—nor indeed to gloss the dense networks of power and status
in which they are enmeshed. While perhaps these contributions are only first
steps, the biosocial that emerges from this assemblage of 38 chapters, at least,
no longer depends upon an original separation of biological and social forces,
organism and environment, agent and milieu, that have then to be awkwardly
recomposed in a secondary, additional moment (see Fitzgerald and Callard
2015, reprinted here as Chap. 19).
This has clear implications for knowledge production. In part, this is
because the entanglements our contributors identify challenge the neat sepa-
ration between content and context that favours ‘entrenched ways of conceiv-
ing causation and agency’ (Alder 2013, 97) wherein humans are conceived
largely independently of their circumstances. But it is also because these
entanglements go well beyond now-established social constructionist claims
that biological knowledge is shaped by meaning, power, and norms. Rather,
biological matter itself, be it genomes, brains, diseases, or viruses, is simulta-
neously irremediably social, not only in its form but also in its content. And
vice versa: the very fabric of sociality is always enabled, mediated, and modu-
lated by fleshy substrates—be they genetic or epigenetic, nutritional, meta-
bolic, hormonal, behavioral, or toxicological. At all levels, the biological and
the social are in one another.
Our second aim is to avoid dissipating this knowledge through the too-
many rivers and trickles of the contemporary academy. The very gesture of
bringing together research that is otherwise largely fragmented and isolated is
part of a performative gesture of creating new spaces. In so doing, this
Handbook offers a relatively stable research platform, and functions as a teach-
ing tool to help foster a new generation of scholars who are more capable of
thinking in complex, critical ways: about the nuances of our irreducibly
hybrid, entangled, biosocial world, and about the benefits and costs of the
prevailing metaphysics that drives a wedge between biology and society, and
which still primordially structures much academic work.
Overview of the Chapters

Handbooks, we suggest, are epistemic things of a sort—they are contingent,
hard-to-grasp, generative objects; they are set out into the world, and worked
upon; they unfold, under examination, in multiple ways; and if they never
achieve their final definition, still it is only later we come to realize that the
always-in-process work of defining, and of being defined, is where the epis-
temic and ontological magic happens (Rheinberger 2010). Perhaps it would
be better to say that handbooking is an epistemic practice (Knorr Cetina
6 M. Meloni et al.
2001)—which is to say that it is a dynamic activity of nudging, moving, and

sometimes disrupting the objects and practices of knowledge that it comes
into contact with. This volume, perhaps more than most, is generated, assem-
bled, worked on, and distributed as a dynamic intervention into an emerging
space: the six sections are conceived precisely in the spirit of intervening in
key hotspots of the biology/society debate. Two additional notes before we
describe the chapters: (1) While this volume is for (indeed, founds its contri-
bution on) a certain kind of comprehensiveness, such a goal always, and of
necessity, remains in the distance; we would not have it otherwise, and do not
wish to exert any totalizing force here. Nonetheless, more prosaically, there are
gaps in what follows, some of which we are aware of (although we will not
compound the error by naming them!); other gaps will have to wait for our
readers to gently point them out. Such gaps can be variously attributed to the
exigencies of time and space, bad fortune, or the blindnesses and prejudices of
the editors. Without wishing to disavow responsibility for our own omissions,
we truly hope to see, in future years, other volumes, from other authors and
editors, making good where we have erred. (2) There are authors who write
both from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ different practices in what follows. Which is
to say: there are those describing some elements (either in hope or in concern)
of their own practice here, and there are those (both encouragingly and criti-
cally) accounting for the practice of some other. (And there are more, probably
the majority, awkwardly straddling such logics of inside and outside.) In any
event, we have chosen not to mark these distinctions; where disciplinary and
other divisions are bureaucratically real enough already, we have no desire to
make them more so. If this strategy will occasionally confuse the reader, we
are nonetheless convinced that the convivial intentions of the volume are not
well served by marking, in advance, who wishes to be in and who out.
A final note: in this time of ascendant protectionist nationalisms and rac-
isms, we also wish to highlight the Handbook’s pluralism, not only of
approaches and disciplines but also of places. With nearly 50 contributors
representing a wide diversity of cultures and geographical regions, from Israel
to Brazil, from Australia to Europe, from South Africa to North America, the
Handbook is an invitation to think biology and society always in the plural, as
biologies and societies (and perhaps this should have been a more appropriate
title for this endeavour). After all, among the strongest legacies of the social
studies of science is the reminder that ‘all scientific knowledge-claims have a
provenance: they originate at some place, and come from there’ (Gieryn
2002). This Handbook, albeit in its own minor way, is deeply committed to
caring for scenes that foster a plurality of ways of being-there, of coming-
from-there, of going-there.
Outline of the Handbook
We start with a historical section (‘History of the Biology/Society Relationship’),

since we believe that history (if not historicism) is an obligatory passage point
for anyone who wants to take seriously the notion that the estrangement
between the social and the biological is less a fact of nature, and more a sedi-
mented effect of long-term strategies and decisions involving various disci-
plinary bodies, authors, institutional settings, and other agencies. In the two
first chapters, Snait Gissis and Maurizio Meloni cover a similar historical
period, examining the transactions between biology and sociology in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century, including the impact of those transactions
in terms of debate on fixedness and plasticity, individuals and social groups,
heredity and wider notions of inheritance and tradition. These two chapters,
while sharing an historical period, focus on different reverberations of biologi-
cal knowledge on the making of a modern social science. Gissis looks at the
significance of a Lamarckian framework in the work of Spencer and Durkheim,
whereas Meloni points to the subtle influence of the German founder of the
modern hard view of heredity—August Weismann—on Durkheim’s writings
in the 1890s as a foundational step toward erecting a neat separation between
the social and the biological.
In the next chapter, Chris Renwick focuses on one of the key terms at the
crossroads of the social and biological—population. The chapter explains how
the emergence of population thinking in biology and social science in late-
nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Britain were related, with
research at the intersection of the two fields helping to construct shared ideas
and practices. As the chapter shows, eugenics played a major part in this story
‘featuring a space that some researchers considered to be a genuine third
sphere between biological and social science’. In the fifth chapter, Antonine
Nicoglou focuses on another of the key concepts in twenty-first-century biol-
ogy—plasticity. She provides an historical account of the role of this concept
as a key means of navigating the space between nature and nurture. Nicoglou
argues that a comprehensive understanding of the concept of plasticity will
assist us in divesting ourselves of this dichotomous opposition.
In Chap. 6, Jonathan Marks traces the transformation of the field of bio-
logical anthropology from a science of race to a science of human spatio-
temporal variation. He focuses on two major misconceptions in anthropology,
each with a long historical legacy: that the human species is composed of
zoologically meaningful taxonomic entities, and that human groups think
differently in ways that are significantly innate. As Marks writes: ‘both of
these propositions have been falsified about as thoroughly as young-earth
8 M. Meloni et al.
creationism, but their political value is sufficient to continually resurrect

them’. Marks then investigates the complex moral and political dimension
associated with these epistemic questions and the inescapable moral side of
debates on race and racism. In the next chapter, Will Viney focuses these
debates into one epistemic object: the culture of twinning as it emerged
between history, biology, and literature. As a sort of ‘natural experiment’, twin
research has been used to think through the divisions between biology and
environment, and its history has lessons for our understanding of how human
groups interact with scientific endeavours. Viney outlines a history of the
conceptualization of twins in an account that is concerned less with the valid-
ity of findings generated by twin studies, and more with the ways that this
research exemplifies the interweaving of different assumptions (medical, soci-
ological, psychological, ideological, methodological) vis-à-vis the possibility
of neatly separating genes from environment. This, argues Viney, is what cap-
tures the imaginations of medical researchers and the general public alike in
relating to twin studies.
Finally in this section, in Chap. 8, Tatjana Buklijas sketches one of the very
first histories of the rise to public prominence of epigenetics, which is among
the most rapidly expanding fields in the life sciences, and increasingly seen by
many as a potential bridge between the social and the natural sciences. Buklijas
looks at competing interpretations of epigenetics as paradigm-shifting, or as
just a scientific-cultural trend reinforcing genetics, contrasting views that, she
claims, ‘go along with opposing historical narratives and understandings of
future promise of epigenetics’.
The second section ‘Genetics, Postgenomics, Epigenetics, and Society’
focuses on some key changes in contemporary molecular biology that have
shifted our view of the gene as an autonomous master of development to the
‘reactive genome’ of molecular epigenetics—now unfolding in specific social
and historical milieux (Gilbert 2003; Griffiths and Stotz 2013; Keller 2011,
2014). In their chapter, Maurizio Meloni and Giuseppe Testa critically anal-
yse the ‘epigenetics revolution’, with its claims to herald a new epoch both for
gene-based epistemology and for the wider discourse on life that pervades
knowledge-intensive societies of the ‘molecular age’. Meloni and Testa scruti-
nize the fundamentals of this revolution, highlighting in particular how the
very contours of what counts as ‘epigenetic’ are often blurred, something that
crucially contributes to its success.
In the next chapter, Frances Champagne focuses on the potential of envi-
ronmental epigenetics research for understanding risk of health and illness, as
well as its role in documenting the effects of life experiences. As an epigenetics
researcher, Champagne provides insight into how ‘hard’ scientists might be
both concerned and eager to see how environmental epigenetics research—

including Champagne’s own—will be translated into new understandings of
animals (including humans) and their environments, and eventually into new
clinical approaches and interventions. Amy Hinterberger, in her chapter on
“Molecular Multicultures”, examines what has happened to the politics of
multiculturalism in light of the molecularization of biology. Hinterberger
argues that a conceptual framework of ‘molecular multicultures’ may be help-
ful to highlight how the cultural politics of heredity in bioscience draws
together the classificatory practices of the nation-state, the naming practices
of identity-based social movements, and the segmenting techniques of genome
science.
In her chapter on ‘The First Thousand Days’, Michelle Pentecost provides
an introduction to a movement that is taking an increasingly important space
within public health, namely, studies of the first thousand days of life.
Pentecost documents this understanding of child development, from concep-
tion to two years of age, which suggests that experiences during this period of
life set children on paths for the rest of their lives. Using a South African case
study of the global ‘first thousand days’ initiative, Pentecost examines how the
DOHaD (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease) paradigm and epi-
genetic knowledge, as ‘biosocial’ objects of enquiry, are embedded in global
discourses that come to bear on the everyday.
In the next chapter, which takes an educational focus, Deborah Youdell
proposes a biosocial understanding that conceives of learning as the folding
together of multiple intra-acting forces and processes within which possibili-
ties for social justice are mediated biologically, physiologically, and neurally, as
well as affectively, intellectually, and interpersonally. To make this argument,
the chapter foregrounds developments in epigenetics and the entanglement of
the social and the biological, and Youdell makes a case for thinking about
socially just education in a biosocial way. Through an engagement with
research in education and the biosciences, she argues that biosocial education
research can bring into view ‘molecular, neuronal, metabolic, biochemical,
social, cultural, affective, psychic, and relational processes operating across
multiple scales and temporalities’. Any contemporary ambition for socially
just education, Youdell claims, must now attend to this complexity and to its
biosocial character.
Finally, in her chapter on the challenge of assembling biomedical big data,
Sabina Leonelli examines the issues involved in disseminating, integrating,
and analysing large datasets collected on human subjects and non-human
experimental organisms, and within both clinical and research settings.
Leonelli highlights some of the technical, ethical, and epistemic concerns
10 M. Meloni et al.
underlying current attempts to portray and use ‘Big Data’ as a revolutionary

tool for producing biomedical knowledge and related interventions. When
bringing together data collected on human subjects with data collected from
other organisms, significant differences in the experimental cultures of biolo-
gists and clinicians emerge which, if left unnoticed, risk compromising the
quality and validity of large-scale, cross-species data integration. Leonelli
highlights the complex conjunctions of biological and clinical practice, model
organisms and human subjects, and material and virtual sources of evidence,
emphasizing the fragmented, localized, and inherently translational nature of
biomedical research.
The third section, ‘Neuroscience: Brain, Culture, and Social Relations’, is
devoted to neuroscience, including the intersections of the diverse practices
that term now implies with/in psychiatry and psychology. If we were pro-
ducing a handbook on relations between the biological and social sciences as
little as 15 or 20 years ago, it is difficult to imagine there being much to be
said about the neurosciences. Today, the situation is quite different: for
many now working in the neurosciences, what makes this area so appealing
is precisely the fact that so much of the social and cultural world in which
our brains develop cannot be reduced to bare neurological material. Authors
in this section explore that realization and seek new ways to develop it. But
the section leads with two chapters that urge continuing caution about naïve
celebration.
We begin with Jan Slaby and Suparna Choudhury’s ‘Proposal for a Critical
Neuroscience’—one of a suite of papers published in the mid-2000s, in which
these authors, with their colleagues and interlocutors, set out a compelling
vision for how new relations between the neurosciences and critical social sci-
ences might take shape. In this programmatic contribution, Slaby and
Choudhury account for their own attempt to ‘respond to the impressive and
at times troublesome surge of the neurosciences, without either celebrating
them uncritically or condemning them wholesale’. The chapter seeks to show
what, precisely, an ethos of ‘critique’ can offer to the neurosciences and how it
can help to open out the range of practices and intuitions through which
neuroscientific facts are made.
In a complementary chapter, Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega zero in
on the neuroscience of culture, where they argue that ‘in spite of an emphasis
on the two-way processes that turn brain into culture and culture into brain,
a common feature of the neurodisciplines of culture is their belief in the onto-
logical primacy of the brain’. Working through some of the key techniques
and approaches through which neuroscientists have tried to get at culture,
Ortega and Vidal show how the field relies on quite traditional neuroscientific
methods and tropes. The chapter pays special attention to the way that cul-
tures of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’ are conjured in this field, and how
the image of culture that emerges around it, for all the methodological nov-
elty, turns on a surprisingly conventional image of discrete and bounded ‘cul-
tural’ entities.
The chapter that follows is in quite a different mode. Here, Christian von
Scheve takes seriously the notion of a ‘neurosociology’, proposing that ‘many
neuroscience studies and paradigms as well as their hypotheses and results are
directly adaptable to and relevant for the processes and mechanisms tradition-
ally studied by sociologists’. To consider this potential, von Scheve focuses on
the paradigmatic case of affective neuroscience, a field that concerns itself
with the processing of emotions. Offering a thick account of how neuroscien-
tific work might then help to hook emotional processes into social situations,
von Scheve proposes that a neurobiological perspective on emotion could
help sociologists to move away from accounts of instrumental reason when
they consider moments of decision-making and thus help us to understand,
in a much more fine-grained way, the deeply embodied nature of such social
scenes.
The next chapter, by anthropologist Rebecca Seligman, joins that of von
Scheve in her intuition that there is something important to be gained from
running neurobiological and social scientific problems through one another.
This time, the argument focuses on the relationship between physiological
and cultural states, through a study of religious devotion in Brazil. Focusing
on the phenomena of spirit possession in Brazilian Candomblé, Seligman uses
ethnographic and psychophysiological interventions to explore this religious
practice, and to show how religious states recruit particular forms of psycho-
physiological regulation. Drawing on the concept of bio-looping, Seligman’s
chapter ‘draw[s] attention to the ways in which embodied processes, includ-
ing biological ones, are implicated in the continuous and mutually reinforc-
ing relationships among meaning, practice, and experience’. For Seligman,
such an attention has the capacity to tell us something very new about the
concept of embodiment—and allows us to get a grasp of moments in which
psychological, cultural, and physical states seem strikingly inseparable from
one another.
The next chapter, by Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, tries to take a meta-
perspective on the space between neuroscience and social science. Fitzgerald
and Callard argue that there is much scope, now, for reanimating collaborative
relationships between the social sciences and neurosciences, but that this
potential is squandered by arguments (both for and against such a develop-
ment) that significantly misunderstand what is at stake. Setting themselves
12 M. Meloni et al.
against what they call ‘the regime of the inter-’, a space of thought that insists
on understanding neuroscience and social science as very different kinds of
thing, whether in service of ‘integrating’ them or keeping them apart, Fitzgerald
and Callard instead call for thicker attention to, and situation of researchers in,
experiments, as sites of novel exchange and practice.
The final two chapters in this section expand these debates through atten-
tion to two very specific sites. First, in his chapter on neuroscience and schizo-
phrenia, John Cromby uses the development of the diagnostic category of
schizophrenia to show, in its past, present, and future, how schizophrenia has
been developed through symbiotic relationships to the brain and neurosci-
ence. Beginning with the foundational work of Kraepelin and Bleuler, and
tracing this work into contemporary neuroscience, Cromby shows how ‘con-
ceptualisations of mental health and illness, concepts and images of brains,
their parts and their functions, practices of treatment and intervention, and
the somewhat disparate interests of multiple professions … are continuously
circulated and exchanged, and mutually, dynamically and contingently
related’. Sketching out a range of possible futures for the scientific study of
schizophrenia, the chapter shows, for example, a renewed interest in social
and relational approaches; through this and related attentions, argues Cromby,
committed and serious neuroscientific work need not be wedded to the tradi-
tional rubrics of biological psychiatry.
In the final chapter in this section, Stephanie Lloyd and Eugene Raikhel
examine the emergence of a style of thought that connects work in environ-
mental epigenetics to the ‘suicidal brain’. Lloyd and Raikhel propose that
epigenetics be analysed as a ‘style of reasoning’, a particular mode of biologi-
cally construing both the environment and time in a way that, for some, has
‘led to a new vision of the relationship between society and biology, while for
others they have bolstered long-held ideas about biosocial complexity’. They
draw on epigenetic research on suicide as a way of showing how, in this space,
social contexts can get molecularized, drawing connections, for example,
between early social and environmental experience and suicide risk. The
(often explicitly) political ramifications of such a thought-style become appar-
ent in the case of aboriginal suicide in Canada, where a blanket insistence on
‘early adversity’ often occludes the complexities of structural violence, as well
as ‘highly specific social, political and economic contexts’. Perhaps returning
us, then, to where we began this section, Lloyd and Raikhel conclude that
mere ‘engagement’ cannot simply override the deep epistemological differ-
ences between social scientists and neuroscientists.
Section IV is devoted to social epidemiology, a discipline that began to
emerge in the 1960s, and which has, since then, gained considerable stature
and reach generating evidence for, and interest in, the social causation of ill-
ness and health. Social epidemiology’s concern with the societal determinants
of patterns of disease points to a quintessentially biosocial dimension.
Nevertheless, the mere existence of a subdiscipline called social epidemiology
is already suggestive of the various epistemic tensions along the biology/soci-
ety border. As Nancy Krieger (e.g. 2011) in particular has repeatedly high-
lighted, what is at stake in the separate constitution of social epidemiology is
the tendency of epidemiology to fall prey to a taken-for-granted ‘just biologi-
cal’ presumption, according to which attempts to identify social determinants
of illness and health tend to be seen as somewhat additional, optional, adjunc-
tive, or marginal. From different angles, the five contributions in this section
all challenge this established way of thinking.
First, Michelle Kelly-Irving and Cyrille Delpierre consider embodiment in
relation to social epidemiology, focusing on the incidence of cancer. Their
chapter traces some of the intertwined conceptual and methodological issues
with which coherent empirical research into embodiment and epidemiology
must contend. A life course approach is suggested whereby DNA mutations
in cancer are at least partially initiated by immune and inflammatory system
processes, processes, that are in turn open to social influence. Finally, evidence
is presented from a prospective study suggesting that, at least among women,
an accumulation of ‘ACEs’—adverse childhood experiences—is associated
with a subsequently increased incidence of cancer.
In the next chapter, Silvia Stringhini and Paolo Vineis outline some of the
evidence regarding the connections between socio-economic status (SES) and
health, before presenting candidate processes, most notably epigenetic ones,
that might mediate these connections. Stringhini and Vineis describe a con-
ceptual framework within which epigenetic processes in relation to health and
SES might be understood, summarize some of their own research exploring
the connections between epigenetic changes and SES, and then draw out
some policy implications of their studies (including those that flow from the
potential reversibility of some epigenetic changes).
From a different angle, Jonathan Wells and Akanksha Marphatia consider
how maternal capital could mediate the associations between health and social
inequality. Drawing on evidence for both plasticity and critical periods in
development (periods during which environmental influences might have
more marked or enduring consequences), the concept of ‘maternal capital’
describes how offspring are differentially enabled to thrive during develop-
ment by (largely unintentional) variations in the somatic or behavioral ‘invest-
ments’ of mothers. While maternal interventions designed to benefit offspring
might seem to treat mothers as little more than passive vehicles, Wells and
14 M. Meloni et al.
Marphatia suggest that this problem might be avoided if the chosen interven-
tions are ones that also benefit mothers themselves.
In Chap. 25, Mike Kelly and Rachel Kelly provide a narrative overview of
the character of, and synergies between, the new ‘omic’ biological subfields.
They suggest that these projects can be integrated with sociological accounts
of the dynamism that characterizes structure–agency relationships, in order to
more precisely answer questions about the relationships between disease and
environmental stressors. Kelly and Kelly draw on Giddens’s structuration the-
ory to understand how the repetitive, recursive character of much human
activity gets realized within socioculturally normative practices with both
social and biological aspects. Hence, practices constituting activities such as
eating, drinking, loving, working, and child-rearing have societal origins and,
simultaneously, ‘drive’ the human interactome.
Finally, in the last chapter of this section, some of the intricate associations
between socio-economic variables and health inequalities are explored empiri-
cally by Rasmus Hoffmann, Hannes Kröger, and Eduwin Pakpahan. Life
expectancy differentials of 5–10 years between the most and the least wealthy
(and differences in healthy life expectancy of up to 20 years) starkly illustrate
the force of social influence, as do related differentials associated with gender
and ethnicity. Nevertheless, as this analysis demonstrates, empirical studies
that compare social causation models of these inequalities with social selec-
tion models (i.e. models presuming that health inequalities drive socioeco-
nomic status) produce a more complex picture where different influences
predominate at different stages of the life course.
In the fifth section of the book, ‘Medicine and Society’, attention turns to
the institutions and people affected by, and shaping, emerging knowledge and
practices in the postgenomic era, as life, risk, and vitality are measured and
interpreted in new ways. Conceptually, these movements attempt to reach
into and beyond individual bodies, producing data that aims to quantify indi-
vidual profiles whilst also situating bodies in specific environments. These
practices embed specific goals and values in emerging forms of surveillance in
the ongoing reconception of human bodies and biosocial spaces. Assumptions
are made about what forms of data can be compared, and what forms of data
count—with ‘the environment’, interior or exterior to the body, often reduced
to one or two key factors, commonly measured with brief questionnaires or
checklists to be linked to biomarkers. This represents what social scientists
have referred to as ‘pragmatic’ or ‘methodological reductionism’, conceptual-
izing environments as a set of molecular inputs. This logic requires the abstrac-
tion of inputs, with distinctions in content or derivation flattened and
rendered incidental. Amongst other concerns, observers worry that the
r eduction and flattening of environmental contexts to molecular mechanisms

will make it more likely that potential interventions are solely conceived on
this scale.
Opportunities for collaborations between bio-scientists and social scientists
are opened by these conceptualizations of humans, environments, health, and
disease, yet questions remain over how multiple forms of data might be
brought into conversation with one another. Potential studies raise questions
about how research might be carried out in such a way that it avoids begin-
ning with ‘the social’, ‘the psychological’, and ‘the biological’ as distinct
domains. Beyond largely rhetorical invocations of ‘the’ biopsychosocial model
(which in fact was never developed coherently as such) lies a clear need instead
to view these processes, and the data produced about them, as symmetrical,
with no branch of evidence considered more ‘real’ or foundational than
another.
In Chap. 27, Patrick Bieler and Jörg Niewöhner provide a portrait of the
ways in which the relationships between the human material body and social
practices are currently being explored. In their account, Bieler and Niewöhner
argue that the epistemological space opened by these interests and molecular
understandings of humans provides an opportunity for social scientists to
engage with social differentiation as a complex biosocial phenomenon, rather
than as measurable variables. They propose a study of the ‘body-in-action’ as
a boundary object in emerging research in both biological and social sciences.
This body-in-action ‘implies that it must be ethnographically accounted for in
its complex entanglements with the assembled environment instead of trying
to measure clearly defined, decontextualized variables’. An understanding of
context nevertheless remains a significant challenge in studies of individual
biomedical and molecular profiles, and Nadine Levin explores this challenge
in Chap. 28. Levin explicates some of the issues raised by making, and mak-
ing sense of, ‘big data’ in biomedicine, as scientists attempt to construct
molecularized, personalized accounts of situated risk. Proposing an ‘anthro-
pology of data’, Levin aims to question the norms, politics, and values that get
wrapped up in data.
In Chap. 29, Barbara Prainsack provides an historical overview of personal-
ized medicine, tracing it from its original focus on matching drug therapies to
patients’ specific genetic profiles, to its current instantiation which is con-
cerned more broadly with a consideration of patients’ profiles—molecular
and otherwise—in order to improve medical care and research. Within this
historical shift, Prainsack focuses most particularly on the implications of one
of the central goals of this research in its current form of ‘precision medi-
cine’—comprehensive individual data capture. This data capture seeks to
16 M. Meloni et al.
roduce the most detailed profile possible of individuals’ lives, bodies, and
p
environments in order to reach ‘personalization’, a point that would puta-
tively permit improved patient care as well as continue to inform biomedical
researchers’ future interventions. Yet, as has often been the case in the history
of medical research, patients who contribute information, time, and self-
monitoring ultimately have little influence on how their bodies and lives are
represented and ‘datafied’ in this process.
In Chap. 30, Megan Warin and Aryn Martin explore the construction of
the uterus as a social space in epigenetics research. Warin and Martin situate
this process within the broader reconsideration of the environment within
epigenetics. Through case studies of reproduction (fetal origins and microchi-
merism), they explore the rearticulation of environments, not only in terms of
the limits of binaries (nature/nurture; self/other; time and space) but also in
terms of postgenomic capacities to reduce the environment to individual risk
in gendered and sexed bodies—rather than open research agendas to a consid-
eration of the complexity of biosocial spaces. In Chap. 31, Ayo Wahlberg then
considers the growth of interest in biomedical research in the study and man-
agement of morbid living. Through this research, ‘quality of life’ becomes the
focus of data collection as disease-specific clinical trials are carried out, and
patients and caregivers are taught to ‘live with’ sickness as optimally as possi-
ble. The result is a ‘novel analytics’ of what Wahlberg refers to as the ‘vitality
of disease’.
In Chap. 32, Elizabeth F. S. Roberts and Camilo Sanz provide a method-
ological intervention, describing their efforts to develop a new research plat-
form that combines ethnographic and biological data—‘bioethnography’.
Bioethnography is a response to the criticisms of big data, in which the poten-
tial wealth of ‘comprehensive profiles’ is often lost in reductive forms of data
collection, management, and analysis. By contrast, bioethnography aims to
‘arrive at a better understanding of the larger histories and life circumstances
that shape health and inequality’. These authors’ approach emerged from col-
laborations with environmental health scientists involved in a longitudinal
pregnancy birth cohort and chemical exposure study in Mexico City. Now in
a phase of analysis, Roberts and Sanz reflect on the process that entails the
‘epistemic, temporal, and logistical coordination of disparate, and differently
positioned intellectual research ecologies’, in order to provide a preliminary
guide for social scientists engaged in biosocial collaborations.
The Handbook ends with a section on ‘Contested Sites/Future Perspectives’,
of which there are many that the emerging biosocial world is likely to provoke
or is already provoking. Of the many dangers to be circumvented in a volume
like this, perhaps most urgent is to avoid covering over the many pressing
political, conceptual, methodological, and evidential objections (each inter-

twined with, and sometimes masquerading as, the other) that have dogged the
history of ‘biosocial’ approaches. We think here not only of critiques launched
at such crass endeavours as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, but also
more recent critical approaches taken to social neuroscience, socio-genomics,
epigenetics, and so on. We take very seriously the responsibility of a handbook
of biology and society to not only ‘memorialize’ these contests, but to contrib-
ute in whatever minor way it can to keeping them in view—to insist, indeed,
that it will have no truck with any ‘biosocial’ space wherein this history of
contestation around biosocial approaches is rendered invisible. While the deep
historical and political debates that have structured the division between the
biological and the social are present, in some way, in all of the contributions
in this section, we nonetheless here explicitly foreground discussions of how
the biosocial intercedes—and not always in welcome or happy ways—at the
intersections of race, gender, class, science, and justice (Reardon 2013).
We begin with a chapter from Catherine Bliss that, drawing on interviews
with leading figures in genomic science, foregrounds discussions on racial
politics in the postgenomic age. The chapter shows how ‘struggles over the
characterization of race, and the amelioration of racial inequality, have come
to be drivers of large-scale global research programs’. Bliss focuses in particu-
lar on the relationship between ‘science activism’ and ‘mass activism’, to high-
light how some genomic scientists actually take on the mantle of racial
activism. While this mobilization has similarities to the kinds of mobilization
we are more familiar with in the political mainstream, it ultimately fails to
support a politics of mass movement around racial inequality. In the postgen-
omic age, Bliss argues, the political mobilizations of scientists in fact results in
a reinforcement of a deterministic understanding of race.
In the following chapter, Kenney and Müller turn their attention to envi-
ronmental epigenetics research on maternal care, arguing that while, on the
one hand, this research is exciting and offers possible opportunities for col-
laboration between molecular biology and the social sciences, it is also neces-
sary to consider its political dimensions. Through their research, they
underscore how common-sense assumptions about sex, gender, sexuality, and
class are present in the design, interpretation, and dissemination of experi-
ments on the epigenetic effects of maternal care. As these experiments come
to support claims about human motherhood through a dense speculative
cross-traffic between epigenetic studies in rodents and psychological and epi-
demiological studies in humans, Kenney and Müller argue that current
research trends work to illustrate, rather than interrogate, existing stereotypes
about maternal agency and responsibility. Through their work they aim to
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Fine young gentlemen, said Edward, you will soon be able to wheel
a vinegar barrel. Very well, cousin, answered Charles, laughing, then
if my vinegar barrel was to fall, I should be very thankful to any
person who would help me up with it. Laugh as you will, continued
Edward, but what would your father say, if he was told what you have
done? He would commend Charles, said Emilia, my father is good,
he would have done just the same himself. And I, said Edward, am
ashamed of this affair; what had we to do with that poor boy? Oh!
replied Charles, we must not only be serviceable to others who have
need of assistance because it is our duty; but we must do it to gratify
humane feelings, which, my father says, are in every good heart. I
should not have enjoyed the treat we are going to have, if I had left
the boy vainly attempting to replace his barrel. Besides, that very boy
might have it in his power, some time or other, to assist us; but this
is not a motive, a good action is its own reward.
We had not been many minutes in the farm-house before Edward
proposed sailing in a small boat on a little river near the house.
Charles and Emilia refused, saying, that he knew very well that their
father and Dr. Bartlett had forbid them. But they will not know any
thing about it, replied Edward. Yes, returned Charles, I might
conceal it without telling a positive lie; but I could not meet their
eyes in the evening, nor say my prayers if I had deceived them.
Well then, answered Edward, if you will not go on the water, I will
return home; for I do not find any amusement here.
We all thought he meant to do so; but would you believe it, he
went into the boat without our perceiving it.—In about half an hour
we heard some one crying out for help. We ran to the place, with the
farmer and his son.—But what a terrible sight! We quickly saw it was
Edward who had fallen into the river; and there was in the water
with him a boy, who was vainly endeavouring to draw him to the
bank. The farmer hastened to their assistance, and dragged them
both out of the water; but Edward was insensible. Emilia wept aloud,
and I was so surprised and terrified I could not speak: Charles only
had presence of mind. He ordered that they should carry his cousin
to the mansion-house; and entreated his sister to try to compose
herself; your tears, said he, will frighten our parents: we must hasten
to inform them in the gentlest manner of this misfortune. We soon
reached the house. Lady Grandison turned pale, and could scarcely
follow Sir Charles, who ran to meet the motionless body which the
farmer and his son supported.
At last, dear mother, Edward came to himself; but he is still in bed,
for he caught a very violent cold. Perhaps this accident may do him
good, I wish it may! Farewel, dear mother, I shall write soon again.
WILLIAM.
LETTER X.
William to his Mother.
Lady Grandison is better, and Edward almost recovered: and he is

grown much wiser. I mentioned in my last letter, a young boy who
had jumped into the water to save Edward: now this was the same
boy whom we assisted, when Edward laughed at us. I thought of the
fable of the Lion and the Mouse for certainly he would have been
drowned if this courageous boy had not been there. But I must tell
you part of a conversation which we had concerning this matter,
when we sat in the sick chamber.
EDWARD.
You are very kind, Charles and William, to come to sit with me;
this fine evening you could have had more pleasure below than with
me.
CHARLES.
It would be mean to seek pleasure only for ourselves. If I was sick,
you would, I am sure, come to visit me.
WILLIAM.
It is sufficient for us, to see you so well, it might have had a worse
issue.
EDWARD.
That is very true. If I had continued a moment longer in the water,
I had been gone; and without that boy who sells vinegar, I should not
have been able to have made you hear.
CHARLES.
See then, in this instance, the brotherly love which, I said, we
ought to cultivate: we should do good to every fellow-creature; love
all as men, but choose our friends.
EDWARD.
I have lamented, indeed I have, that I did not help the poor boy
who ventured his life to save mine.
CHARLES.
You are very right to acknowledge your fault; and after such an
acknowledgement, only the ill-natured will remember it to your
disadvantage. And for the service you may have an opportunity of
recompensing the boy, and do not forget to do it, you are indebted to
him for life. He has been the instrument, in the hands of providence,
of your preservation; and, perhaps, God allowed him to save you, to
impress on your mind a useful lesson, to root out your foolish pride.
What would a young gentleman have done on such an occasion? He
would, most probably, have called out for help; but this hardy boy,
more accustomed to difficulties, and having less fear, plunged in
without thinking of the danger he ran into. Let us, then, love all our
fellow-creatures; those in the lowest condition may be as useful, nay,
more so, than those who fill the highest station. One common nature
equally ties us to both; are we not all children of the same father?
I had tears in my eyes, dear mother, when I heard Charles deliver
these sentiments; his own shone; he is a good creature. I recollected I
have often seen labouring men very compassionate. God takes care
of the meanest insect, Dr. Bartlett says.
Farewell. I forgot to tell you that we are to go to-morrow to dine
with a sister of Sir Charles’s, whose house is some miles distant from
hence; and as we are to rise earlier than usual, I am going to bed,
that I may not keep them a moment in the morning waiting for me.
Edward cannot go with us, he is very sorry, and I pity him, he will be
so dull alone; but I will lend him a book full of stories. Once more
farewell.
WILLIAM.
LETTER XI.
We have been very happy at Lord L——’s; I wish you had seen how
well my friend Charles behaves himself in company. Not like young
Dulis, I assure you. He has so much affectation and formality: he
does nothing but bow, and make compliments, with a half-ashamed
face, as if he had done wrong, and was afraid to look the person he
spoke to in the face. Charles, on the contrary, is polite with a noble
freedom; he walks with ease and grace; he listens with attention, and
speaks little; but when the discourse is directed to him, he returns a
modest answer.
I will give you an instance of his attention. We were in the garden
with the whole party: one of the young ladies had left her hat in the
house and complained of the heat of the sun; Charles heard her, and
ran immediately for it. Then, with his usual mirth, he asked
permission to put it on the lady’s head.
Oh, could I be like him how happy I should be! I will try to be as
attentive and complaisant. Most people only come into company to
eat and drink. I know, for you have told me, that children should not
converse much; but they must not appear tired and stupidly dumb. Is
it not true, dear mother?
Lady L—— has two daughters, they are both very pleasing; the
eldest, Charlotte, sings admirably: Emilia is very fond of her, and
they have promised to write to each other.
—But I must not forget to tell you what happened to us in our way
home. Sir Charles and Lady Grandison, Emilia and another Lady
rode in one carriage on before; we were with Dr. Bartlett in the
chaise. We had not travelled above three miles, when we saw a poor
blind old man sitting very sorrowful under a tree. Charles stopped
the carriage. Pray, dear sir, said he, look at that man, he appears
blind and wretched; he has nobody with him, pray let me speak to
him. He quickly received permission, and jumped out of the carriage.
Who are you, my honest friend? said he; who has left you alone in
such a solitary place? Alas! answered the blind man, I am very poor, I
came out this morning to beg in the neighbouring village, and my
leader, a cruel boy, has left me to myself, because I had not collected
enough to pay him as usual. Ah! replied Charles, the sun is already
set, it will soon be dark; and what will you then do? I must perish, if
God, who is my only refuge, does not send some one to help me. No,
answered Charles, you shall not perish; God has sent me to help you.
—Dear Dr. Bartlett, let me be so happy as to save an unfortunate
blind man left alone, and who might have been lost, if we had not
met with him! The night comes on apace, where would this
distressed fellow-creature go without a guide? We cannot be far from
his house, do take him into the chaise, I will ride behind, that you
may not be incommoded. Dr. Bartlett would not allow him to do so,
but made room for the poor man. Any other but Charles would,
probably, instead of offering to ride behind, have been ashamed of
being seen with a man in such ragged clothes; but he, on the
contrary, seemed to find pleasure in his company. In short, we only
went a mile out of our way; and when we left him at his cottage door,
I saw Charles slip some money into his hand, while he modestly
received the old man’s blessing.
Dr. Bartlett highly commended this act of humanity when we
reached home. But, said Emilia, the man in rags must have appeared
an odd figure in such a fine carriage. I never thought of that, sister,
answered Charles, I was so glad to seize an opportunity of doing
good—and felt myself so warmly interested about the old man’s
preservation. Nobly done, my son, said Sir Charles. Observe, Emilia,
your brother has made a triumphal car of his carriage, which, has
done him more honour than those the victorious Romans, whose
history you are all reading, made for their heroes; he has saved the
life of his brother—a poor wanderer in the dark; yet, forlorn as he
appeared, that God who allows us to enjoy the cheerful light of day,
cares for him, and Jesus Christ would have felt compassion for him;
in his eyes the good only were great. Come to my arms, my son, you
rejoice your father’s heart. We were all silent for a few moments, and
tears stood in our eyes—and I prayed that I might glad my mother’s
heart. Farewel, my dearest mother, love your
WILLIAM.
LETTER XII.
Miss Emilia Grandison to Miss Charlotte L
——.
I send you a small landscape which I have drawn myself, my dear

cousin. It is not very valuable I know; but I hope to improve as I grow
older, and then I will send you one done in a superior style; but pray
hang this in your chamber, and then you will often think of me.
I wish now to ask your advice; next Thursday is mama’s birth-day,
can you not transcribe for me some verses out of that pretty book you
have, which I would present to my mother to express my respect and
good wishes, and to shew her—No,—I believe it would not be right—
No, do not do it; I will try to express my wishes in my own words.—
Why should mama have stolen verses? I love her dearly, and I think I
can easily say what gratitude and love inspires; and should my
foolish tongue falter, surely she will be able to read in every turn of
my face, the sincere affection which warms my heart. I will then
think of what this good mother has done for me, what misfortunes
she preserved me from; next to God, my thanks are due to her.
Indeed I do love her, and I will endeavour to shew my gratitude by
my attention to her most trivial commands or wishes; and I hope, I
shall never through thoughtlessness occasion her a moment’s
uneasiness: I I should hate myself if I did.
For the future, dear cousin, I will earnestly pray to God to spare
my father and mother, the dearest earthly blessings I enjoy. The
thought of losing them depresses my spirits:—O may God long
preserve them! Yes, yes, with these sentiments, I shall know very well
how to wish mama many returns of the day we are to celebrate. I
have net her a purse, during our play hours; I mean to surprise her—
she will see that Emilia thinks of her.
Adieu, dear Charlotte, love your affectionate cousin
EMILIA.
LETTER XIII.
Mrs. D—— to William.
You learn natural philosophy, my son; consider it as the road to

the most sublime knowledge, that of tracing the Creator in his works.
His wisdom is conspicuous in the most minute of his productions; all
are done well. Observing this uncommon harmony, you will every
day love God—love goodness more and more. Sentiments of respect
will be implanted in your heart, an awful reverential affection for the
great Ruler of the universe; which affection, if it is active, virtue will
flow from, founded on just principles.
Continue to send me an account of your conversations and your
observations; they afford me pleasure, and impress the important
instructions you receive on your own mind. Be ever thankful to your
benefactors, my William; and remember, your diligent attention to
your exercises, will be the surest proof of your gratitude. Neglect not
a moment; it is the only way to answer the noble purposes you were
created to pursue. What agreeable conversations we shall have
together when you return; you have—and will in future gladden your
mother’s heart. God will bless you for it.
Your little sister begins to write very tolerably. Mama, said she to
me, the other day, I see it is good to learn to write, for else my
brother and you could not tell any thing to each other; it is the same
as if he was with you. I hope to be able to write to him myself soon;
and then he will answer my letter, and I shall have a letter. I love you
very much, mama, for teaching me; I will be always good, because
you are so good. What must I do, to shew you how thankful I am?
Learn well, Annette, replied I. How, answered she, that is for my own
good! I should be unhappy, I could never write to my brother, if I did
not. She joins with me in love. Adieu.
D.
LETTER XIV.
I thank you, dear mother, for your kind letter; it is so long since
you wrote to me, I was almost afraid you were displeased with me.
Hear what I do, I always carry your last letter in my bosom, then I
can read it often, and remember the lessons you give me. I love
dearly my little sister Annette, she is so good, and so dutiful to you.
Miss Emilia sends her a fine doll, I am sure it will please her.
Yesterday was the birth-day of Lady Grandison. Charles was up an
hour earlier than usual, and when I awoke I found him, for we sleep
together, busy, praying to God for his dear mother; we read some
chapters in the New Testament, and then Charles dressed himself in
his new clothes. You perhaps may wonder at this; but I will tell you
how it was. About a month ago Charles and Edward had each a new
summer suit, and were allowed to choose the colour themselves.
Edward wore his as soon as it came home; but Charles said that he
would keep his till some holiday, and this was the holiday he fixed
on. He was soon dressed, and we joined Emilia, who stood ready at
our chamber door waiting for us.
We hastened to the breakfast parlour. Charles was the first to
congratulate his mother on this occasion; Emilia followed him, and
gave her a purse, she had privately net: Charles, I forgot to mention,
had plucked a nosegay of his finest flowers. I in like manner
discharged my duty as well as I could, at least with a sincere heart,
for I love my benefactors. Edward came into the room soon after; but
he approached Lady Grandison in a careless manner, and seemed to
be thinking of something else.
We all received some presents—mine was a microscope, the thing
of all others I wished for; how kind it was of Lady Grandison to think
of my wishes. You will be pleased with it, and I will instruct Annette,
she shall see the wonders I have admired.
WILLIAM.
LETTER XV.
I have here new pleasures every day, dear mother; your William is
now become a gardener. Will you help me, said Charles, the day
before yesterday? and if you like it, I will lay out my garden in
another manner. It is now full of flowers; but it affords me not
sufficient employment: I would wish to change a part of it at least
into a kitchen-garden. My answer was ready. We accordingly went
each with a small spade to work, and quickly dug up the whole
garden. The next day we made a small bed for the flowers, and
ranged them in due order. We rose very early to work, before the sun
was intolerably warm; the gardener gave us some seeds which are
proper to sow this month. Now we only desire to see them come up,
and intend carefully to weed them. How pleasant it will be, to see the
plants shoot out of the ground!
I have seen many wonderful things every day of my life without
observing them; but Dr. Bartlett and Charles have taught me to see
God in a tree, a flower, a worm; we converse about them. I will relate
a conversation we had yesterday. Charles has an aviary, he is very
fond of his birds; we had done our work in the garden, and took a
walk with Emilia.
CHARLES.
Excuse me, I must leave you a moment; I recollect that I have not
taken care of my birds. We both desired to accompany him.
WILLIAM.
Pretty creatures, they seem as if they belonged to you.
CHARLES.
That they do certainly, because they are accustomed to eat out of
my hand.
WILLIAM.
They appear to know you, but how do they distinguish betwixt you
and me?
CHARLES.
It is certain that they have the power to discern, for I have often
seen, when I come with my hat on they fly away; and I conclude from
that circumstance, this faculty of discernment, which I am sure they
possess, is very weak, or they would always know me.
EMILIA.
You are very good to your birds, brother; but Edward let his linnet
die with hunger. If I was to do so, I should never forgive myself.
CHARLES.
It would be cruel, indeed, to confine the poor creatures, where they
cannot get any thing to eat; and then to neglect them.
EMILIA.
But may I ask you something, Charles? Would it not be more noble
if you was to give them their liberty? They sit there like prisoners; we
only confine bad people, and these poor birds have not done wrong.
CHARLES.
No, they are not unhappy in their confinement; God has created
them for our pleasure, though we displease him when we treat them
with cruelty.
EMILIA.
They must yet, I think, be uneasy, when they see others flying in
the open air, and themselves shut up.—We should not be satisfied.
CHARLES.
They cannot reason as we can. If we were shut up, we should say to
ourselves, how disagreeable it is to be confined; and how precious is
liberty. But birds have not any idea of this difference. If we give them
plenty to eat and drink they are content, without wishing for what
they have not. That linnet of Edward’s, you just now mentioned, as
long as he had something, he eat it up, without any anxiety for the
future. A sign, that he had not the power of reflecting. A man, on the
contrary, would be afraid of want, if his provisions began to fail; and
then he would eat sparingly; but a bird has not any conception of
wanting food—much less his liberty.
I will only add, that I am your affectionate son,
WILLIAM.
LETTER XVI.
Sir Charles and his Lady went yesterday to pay a visit, and took
Emilia and Edward with them. Charles and I remained at home with
Dr. Bartlett. After our lessons were finished, we requested him to
walk with us; the evening was very fine, the sun was setting. Dr.
Bartlett proposed ascending a neighbouring hill, that we might see
the sun set—for, said he, it is a fine sight.
CHARLES.
You have often told me, Sir, that the sun did not move, but the
earth on which we live goes round the sun. If so, why do you say, the
sun sets?
DR. BARTLETT.
That is a manner of speaking which has been taken from the
earliest times, and the term is generally used, though the same sense
is not annexed to it. They thought formerly that the sun moved
round the earth, which it seems to do; but we now know better, after
further enquiries, and various observations.
CHARLES.
Should we then say that the sun moves?
DR. BARTLETT.
If you were in a boat, you would say with as much propriety, that
the land and the trees moved, by which you failed; and yet they do
not move.
CHARLES.
That is true, I have often observed it; but how comes it, that we do
not feel the motion of the earth?
DR. BARTLETT.
Because you are accustomed to it from your birth, and the motion
of so vast a body cannot be felt by so small a creature as man is, in
proportion. The sun is much larger than the earth; thus it is most
reasonable to conceive, arguing from what we know of the wisdom of
the great Mover, that the earth goes round the sun, than that the sun
moves round the earth.
WILLIAM.
And is the sun, Sir, so very large?
DR. BARTLETT.
It is well known to astronomers, that the sun is above a million of
times bigger than the earth: judge then how large it must be.
WILLIAM.
But how do you know all this?
DR. BARTLETT.
By careful investigation; and as you are fond of reading, you may
yourself be convinced of it; Charles will lend you the Spectacle de la
Nature[1]. In that excellent book you will find instruction delivered in
an easy manner.
1. On this subject a more useful book has been lately published, entitled, An
Introduction to Astronomy.
CHARLES.
But I must yet ask you, Sir, how can the sun, which you say is
about ninety-five millions of miles from us, give us so much warmth
and light?
DR. BARTLETT.
That is truly a great miracle of almighty Power.
WILLIAM.
I am glad I know that the sun is so large. Many think it is not
larger than it appears to us.
DR. BARTLETT.
The further any thing is from us, the smaller it appears; as that kite
for instance, it will appear much less in the air, than it does on the
ground.
CHARLES.
Certainly; and this is also a proof, that the sun must be amazingly
great, because that it is at such an immense distance from us. The
moon, by the same rule, must be very large.
DR. BARTLETT.
The moon is large; but much less than the earth. There are stars
which are of a much superior magnitude.
WILLIAM.
We should not think so.
DR. BARTLETT.
That arises from the stars being still further from us than the
moon.
WILLIAM.
And is the moon also a globe of fire?
DR. BARTLETT.
No. The moon is a dark body, it receives its light from the sun.
CHARLES.
All the stars which we see, have their names I suppose?
DR. BARTLETT.
Not all; we have given names to some of them, that we may better
distinguish them.
CHARLES.
I feel a great desire to be an astronomer; it must be a very pleasing
study.
DR. BARTLETT.
That desire should be encouraged; you will by this science learn
rightly to know the great power of your Creator. View the setting sun
—what a glorious scene! We should without it be very miserable. All
would lie in dreadful darkness. It affords us light, and it brings an
agreeable warmth to the earth; it makes the fruit and grass grow: the
earth could not bring forth without the sun’s influence.
CHARLES.
There, the sun is set.—How comes it that it is not now immediately
dark?
DR. BARTLETT.
That arises from the flexibility of its beams, which we will enquire
into another time; your laudable curiosity pleases me. Let us now
reflect what great benefit we receive from God’s allowing the
darkness to come on so gradually. Would it not be dreadful if we
came in a moment from clear light into thick darkness?
CHARLES.
Very true, Sir; it would damp our spirits, and the night would then
always surprise us before we were aware of it.
DR. BARTLETT.
It is indeed happy for us that the night comes and goes away
imperceptibly. If we passed out of darkness into light in a moment,
our eyes would be blinded by the sudden glare; and the surprise
would discompose our minds. The wisdom of the Almighty Creator
appears thus in every thing.
CHARLES.
I never yet thought of that benefit, when I have seen the sun set. I
am glad, Sir, that you have pointed it out to me, for it will make me
more thankful for the divine goodness.
DR. BARTLETT.
I will send for my telescope, and then you will have a nearer view
of the moon. And to-morrow morning I will call you very early, and
we will see the sun rise—you will find it equally beautiful.

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ISBN 978-1-137-52878-0 ISBN 978-1-137-52879-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953061

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover Illustration: Ralf Hiemisch/gettyimages.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introducing the New Biosocial Landscape 1

Part I History of the Biology/Society Relationship 23

2 Models, Metaphors, Lamarckisms and the Emergence of

3 The Transcendence of the Social: Durkheim, Weismann

4 Biology, Social Science, and Population in Late Nineteenth-

5 The Concept of Plasticity in the History of the

6 An Evolving, Evolutionary Science of Human Differences 123

7 Experimenting in the Biosocial: The Strange Case of

8 Histories and Meanings of Epigenetics 167

Part II Genomics, Postgenomics, Epigenetics and Society 189

9 Scrutinizing the Epigenetics Revolution 191

10 Social and Behavioral Epigenetics: Evolving Perspectives

12 The First Thousand Days: Epigenetics in the Age of

13 Genetics, Epigenetics and Social Justice in Education:

14 Assembling Biomedical Big Data 317

Part III Neuroscience: Brain, Culture and Social Relations 339

15 Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience 341

16 On the Neurodisciplines of Culture 371

17 Affective Neuroscience as Sociological Inquiry? 391

18 “Bio-looping” and the Psychophysiological in Religious

19 Experimental Entanglements: Social Science and

21 Epigenetics and the Suicidal Brain: Reconsidering Context

Part IV Social Epidemiology 517

22 The Embodiment Dynamic over the Life Course: A Case

23 Epigenetic Signatures of Socioeconomic Status Across

24 An Inter-generational Perspective on Social Inequality in

25 Quantifying Social Influences Throughout the Life

26 Health Inequalities and the Interplay of Socioeconomic

Part V Medicine and Society 639

27 Universal Biology, Local Society? Notes from Anthropology 641

28 Big Data and Biomedicine 663

29 Personalised and Precision Medicine: What Kind of

30 Emergent Postgenomic Bodies and Their (Non)Scalable

31 The Vitality of Disease 727

32 Bioethnography: A How-To Guide for the Twenty-First

Part VI Contested Sites/Future Perspectives 777

33 The Postgenomic Politics of Race 779

34 Of Rats and Women: Narratives of Motherhood in

35 Ancestors and Identities: DNA, Genealogy, and Stories 831

36 Species of Biocapital, 2008, and Speciating Biocapital, 2017 851

38 Ten Theses on the Subject of Biology and Politics:

Fig. 10.1 Illustration of the complex interplay between genotype and

Fig. 26.1 Conceptional model for bi-directed relationships between SES

Table 25.1 Omic technologies comprising the ‘Interactome’ 595

© The Author(s) 2018 1

When considered from an historical perspective, the estrangement between

Overview of the Chapters

1 Introducing the New Biosocial Landscape 1

Part I History of the Biology/Society Relationship 23

2 Models, Metaphors, Lamarckisms and the Emergence of

3 The Transcendence of the Social: Durkheim, Weismann

4 Biology, Social Science, and Population in Late Nineteenth-

5 The Concept of Plasticity in the History of the

6 An Evolving, Evolutionary Science of Human Differences 123

7 Experimenting in the Biosocial: The Strange Case of

8 Histories and Meanings of Epigenetics 167

Part II Genomics, Postgenomics, Epigenetics and Society 189

9 Scrutinizing the Epigenetics Revolution 191

10 Social and Behavioral Epigenetics: Evolving Perspectives

12 The First Thousand Days: Epigenetics in the Age of

13 Genetics, Epigenetics and Social Justice in Education:

14 Assembling Biomedical Big Data 317

Part III Neuroscience: Brain, Culture and Social Relations 339

15 Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience 341

16 On the Neurodisciplines of Culture 371

17 Affective Neuroscience as Sociological Inquiry? 391

18 “Bio-looping” and the Psychophysiological in Religious

19 Experimental Entanglements: Social Science and

21 Epigenetics and the Suicidal Brain: Reconsidering Context

Part IV Social Epidemiology 517

22 The Embodiment Dynamic over the Life Course: A Case

23 Epigenetic Signatures of Socioeconomic Status Across

24 An Inter-generational Perspective on Social Inequality in

25 Quantifying Social Influences Throughout the Life

26 Health Inequalities and the Interplay of Socioeconomic

Part V Medicine and Society 639

27 Universal Biology, Local Society? Notes from Anthropology 641

28 Big Data and Biomedicine 663

29 Personalised and Precision Medicine: What Kind of

30 Emergent Postgenomic Bodies and Their (Non)Scalable

31 The Vitality of Disease 727

32 Bioethnography: A How-To Guide for the Twenty-First

Part VI Contested Sites/Future Perspectives 777

33 The Postgenomic Politics of Race 779

34 Of Rats and Women: Narratives of Motherhood in

35 Ancestors and Identities: DNA, Genealogy, and Stories 831

36 Species of Biocapital, 2008, and Speciating Biocapital, 2017 851

38 Ten Theses on the Subject of Biology and Politics:

Table 25.1 Omic technologies comprising the ‘Interactome’ 595

Overview of the Chapters

Outline of the Handbook

r eduction and flattening of environmental contexts to molecular mechanisms