Articulating scientific practice: Understanding Dean hamer's "gay gene" study as overlapping material, social and rhetorical registers

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 95, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 435-456

  Lynch, John A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI   (United States)

Author keywords

Articulation; Gay Gene; Material Rhetoric; Representation; Rhetoric of Science

Indexed keywords

EID: 70949107522     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630903296168     Document Type: Article

References (132)

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2. G. Mitchell Reyes, "The Rhetoric in Mathematics: Newton, Leibniz, the Calculus, and the Rhetorical Force of the Infinitesimal," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 163-88.
3. Philip C. Wander, "The Rhetoric of Science," Western Journal of Communication 40 (1976): 226-35.
4. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science," in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 25-85
5. Michael Bokeno, "The Rhetorical Understanding of Science: An Explication and Critical Commentary," Southern Communication Journal 52 (1987): 285-311
6. Gyorgy Markus, "Why Is There No Hermeneutics of Natural Sciences? Some Preliminary Theses," Science in Context 1 (1987): 5-51
7. J. E. McGuire and Trevor Melia, "Some Cautionary Strictures on the Writing of the Rhetoric of Science," Rhetorica 7 (1989): 87-99.
8. The categorization and formulation of these criticisms is borrowed from Leah Ceccarelli, "Rhetorical Criticism and the Rhetoric of Science," Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 314-29.
9. Ceccarelli, "Rhetorical Criticism"
10. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, ed., Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
11. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). The original formulation consisted of material, social, and literary technologies. I have substituted "rhetorical" for "literary" and offer a vision of these as three "registers" of scientific practice below.
12. I have used "gay gene" to describe Dean Hamer's study of sexuality to reflect the understanding of that research in contemporary rhetorical criticism of it. I have put the phrase in scare quotes here because Hamer does not identify a gay gene. No study of genetic bases for homosexuality have identified a specific gene that causes a person to be attracted to the same sex.
13. Celeste Michelle Condit, "The Materiality of Coding: Rhetoric, Genetics and the Matter of Life," in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 326-56
14. Ronald Walter Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21-41
15. Davi Johnson, "Mapping the Meme: A Geographical Approach to Materialist Rhetorical Criticism," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007): 27-50
16. Nathan Stormer, "Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 257-84.
17. Jeffrey Bineham, "The Cartesian Anxiety in Epistemic Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 43-62
18. Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric"
19. Johnson, "Mapping the Meme"
20. Stormer, "Articulation."
21. Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric."
22. Celeste Michelle Condit, "Race and Genetics from a Modal Materialist Perspective," Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 384.
23. Stormer, "Articulation," 261.
24. Condit, "Race and Genetics," 388.
25. Stormer, "Articulation," 261.
26. Stormer, "Articulation," 260-61.
27. The sense that laboratories and experiments produce facts comes from Shapin and Schaffer, and it also has an analogue in Nathan Stormer's discussion of the laboratory as a space for articulating bodies and language. To talk about the "production" of bodies and facts does not imply a radical relativism; rather, the identification of any "body" or "fact" depends on the practices that occur in a specific space. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump; Stormer, "Articulation."
28. Peter Miller and Ted O'Leary, "The Factory as Laboratory," Science in Context 7 (1994): 469-96
29. Maurice Crosland, "Early Laboratories c.1600 c.1800 and the Location of Experimental Science," Annals of Science 62 (2005): 233-53.
30. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 76.
31. David Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3.
32. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 84, 89.
33. Bruno Latour, "One More Turn after the Social Turn," in The Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 272-94.
34. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 36.
35. Cyrus C. M. Mody, "The Sounds of Science: Listening to Laboratory Practice," Science, Technology, and Human Values 30 (2005): 175-98.
36. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 37.
37. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 140-41.
38. Latour, Science in Action, chapter 2.
39. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 72-76.
40. Diane Vaughan, "The Rôle of the Organization in the Production of Techno-Scientific Knowledge," Social Studies of Science 29 (1999): 913-43.
41. Tania Munz, "The Bee Battles: Karl von Frisch, Adrian Wenner and the Honey Bee Dance Language Controversy," Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2005): 535-70.
42. William J. White, "A Communication Model of Conceptual Innovation in Science," Communication Theory 11 (2001): 290-314.
43. White, "Communication Model of Conceptual," 297.
44. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 322.
45. Patrick Carroll, "Science, Power, Bodies: The Mobilization of Nature as State Formation," Journal of Historical Sociology 9 (1996): 139-67.
46. Arthur Daemmrich, "The Evidence Does Not Speak for Itself: Expert Witnesses and the Organization of DNA-Typing Companies," Social Studies of Science 28 (1998): 741-72.
47. David Cash, "'In Order to Aid in Diffusing Useful and Practical Information': Agricultural Extension and Boundary Organizations," Science, Technology, and Human Values 26 (2001): 431-53
48. Ron Curtis, "Narrative Form and Normative Force: Baconian Story-Telling in Popular Science," Social Studies of Science 24 (1994): 419-61
49. David H. Guston, "Boundary Organizations in Environmental Policy and Science: An Introduction," Science, Technology, and Human Values 26 (2001): 399-408
50. Latour, Science in Action
51. Thomas M. Lessl, "The Priestly Voice," Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 183-97.
52. John Lyne, "Bio-Rhetorics: Moralizing the Life Sciences," in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 35-57
53. Rose-Mary Sargent, "The Social Construction of Scientific Evidence," Journal of Constructivist Psychology 10 (1997): 75-96.
54. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
55. Bruno Latour, "The Promises of Constructivism," in Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, ed. Don Ihde and Evan Selinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 27-46.
56. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 60-61. Doyle also critiques this view because it depends on a logic of representation.
57. Doyle, On Beyond Living, 3.
58. Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
59. In addition, see Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
60. Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
61. Jordynn Jack, "A Pedagogy of Sight: Microscopic Vision in Robert Hooke's Micrographia," Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 192-209
62. Laurence D. Smith, Lisa A. Best, D. Alan Stubbs, Andrea Bastiani Archibald, and Roxann Roberson-Nay, "Constructing Knowledge: The Role of Graphs and Tables in Hard and Soft Psychology," American Psychologist 57 (2002): 749-61.
63. Alan Gross, "Rhetoric of Science without Constraints," Rhetorica 9 (1991): 283-99.
64. The description of these theorists as sophistic or Ciceronian comes from Ceccarelli, "Rhetorical Criticism."
65. Alan G. Gross, "On the Shoulders of Giants: Seventeenth-Century Optics as an Argument Field," Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 1-17
66. Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). My emphasis on Gross's theoretical statements rather than his critical practice parallels observations by others.
67. See Gaonkar, "Idea of Rhetoric"
68. and Ceccarelli, "Rhetorical Criticism."
69. Gross, "Shoulders of Giants," 13 (emphasis added).
70. Alan G. Gross, "Renewing Aristotelian Theory: The Cold Fusion Controversy as a Test Case," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 59.
71. White, "Communication Model of Conceptual."
72. Lyne, "Bio-Rhetorics," 50.
73. Ceccarelli, "Rhetorical Criticism," 318.
74. Ceccarelli, "Shaping Science with Rhetoric, " x (emphasis added).
75. Kenneth Burke, "Terministic Screens," in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 44-62.
76. A recent study of allegations of fraud in a breast cancer clinical trial treats the statistical analyses that identified the fraud and subsequent analyses that confirmed the original findings as givens for the cultural debate about the meaning of science. Lisa Keränen, "Mapping Misconduct: Demarcating Legitimate Science from 'Fraud' in the B-06 Lumpectomy Controversy," Argumentation & Advocacy 42 (2005): 94-113.
77. Dean H. Hamer, Stella Hu, Victoria L. Magnuson, Nan Hu, and Angela M. L. Pattatucci, "A Linkage between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation," Science 261 (1993): 321-27.
78. Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994)
79. Vernon A. Rosario, Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002).
80. Stella Hu, Angela M. L. Pattatucci, Chavis Patterson, Lin Li, David W. Fulker, Stacey S. Cherny, Leonid Kruglyak, and Dean H. Hamer, "Linkage between Sexual Orientation and Chromosome Xq28 in Males but Not in Females," Nature Genetics 11 (1995): 248-56
81. George Rice, Carol Anderson, Neil Risch, and George Ebers, "Male Homosexuality: Absence of Linkage to Microsatellite Markers at Xq28," Science 284 (1999): 665-67
82. Rosario, Homosexuality and Science, 196-97.
83. Garland E. Allen, "The Double-Edged Sword of Genetic Determinism: Social and Political Agendas in Genetic Studies of Homosexuality, 1940-1994," in Science and Homosexualities, ed. Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997), 242-70
84. Timothy F. Murphy, Gay Science: The Ethics of Sexual Orientation Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
85. Edward Stein, The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
86. Anne Fausto-Sterling, "How to Build a Man," in Science and Homosexualities, ed. Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997), 219-25.
87. Robert Alan Brookey, "Bio-Rhetoric, Background Beliefs and the Biology of Homosexuality," Argumentation & Advocacy 37 (2001): 171-83
88. Robert Alan Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
89. Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, 66.
90. Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, 66-7.
91. Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, 12.
92. Reinventing the Male Homosexual is not the only place where the "blame the mother" argument appears. See Brookey, "Bio-Rhetoric, Background Beliefs"
93. Alan Petersen, "The Portrayal of Research into Genetic-Based Differences of Sex and Sexual Orientation: A Study of 'Popular' Science Journals, 1980 to 1997," Journal of Communication Inquiry 23 (1999): 170
94. Vernon A. Rosario, "Homosexual Bio-Histories: Genetic Nostalgias and the Quest for Paternity," in Science and Homosexualities, ed. Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997), 20n26.
95. The language of "thin" and "thick" readings comes from Gaonkar, "Idea of Rhetoric."
96. This description of pedigree analysis is derived from Leland H. Hartwell, Leroy Hood, Michael L. Goldberg, Ann E. Reynolds, Lee M. Silver, and Ruth C. Veres, Genetics: From Genes to Genomes (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000)
97. Stacey Blachford, Gale Encyclopedia of Genetic Disorders (Detroit, MI: Gale Group, 2002), s.v. "pedigree analysis."
98. This description focuses solely on the level of the gene. For a description of the gene-organism-environment interaction, see Keller, Century of the Gene, chapter 4.
99. James R. Miller, X-Linked Traits: A Catalog of Loci in Nonhuman Mammals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
100. Jennifer A. Marshall Graves and Ken C. Reed, "Organization, Function and Evolution of Sex Chromosomes," introduction to Sex Chromosomes and Sex-Determining Genes, ed. Ken C. Reed and Jennifer A. Marshall Graves (Langhorne, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), 129-35.
101. Marshall Graves and Reed, "Organization, Function and Evolution," 130
102. Jennifer A. Marshall Graves, "Human Y Chromosome, Sex Determination, and Spermatogenesis-A Feminist View," Biology of Reproduction 63 (2000): 667-76.
103. Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, 63.
104. Hamer and Copeland, Science of Desire, 94.
105. Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual, 67.
106. For more on the "detective story" format of popularization, see Curtis, "Narrative Form and Normative."
107. For a discussion of the shift in emphasis from the practice of science to its object in popularization, see Greg Myers, Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
108. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
109. Murphy, Gay Science
110. Udo Schüklenk, Edward Stein, Jacinta Kerin, and William Byne, "The Ethics of Genetic Research on Sexual Orientation," Hastings Center Report 27 (1997): 6-13.
111. Hamer et al., "Linkage between DNA Markers," 321.
112. For more nuanced view of human sexuality, see Jacqueline Zita, Body Talk: Philosophical Reflections on Sex and Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
113. Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science, 74.
114. Hamer et al., "Linkage between DNA Markers," 321.
115. Hamer et al., "Linkage between DNA Markers," 321.
116. Hamer et al., "Linkage between DNA Markers," 322.
117. Rosario, Homosexuality and Science, 196.
118. Hamer et al., "Linkage between DNA Markers," 326.
119. Hamer et al., "Linkage between DNA Markers," 321.
120. Hamer et al., "Linkage between DNA Markers," 323.
121. Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 76-77. This problem with denying the consequent is the paradox of material implication: an argument can be valid even if the antecedent to the argument is false.
122. See Dorothy Edgington, "Conditionals," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2006), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conditionals/.
123. Sarah A. Wilcox, "Cultural Context and the Conventions of Science Journalism: Drama and the Contradiction in Media Coverage of Biological Ideas about Sexuality," Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 235-36.
124. A study of public perception of genetics and sex by Celeste Condit noted that a small group of people studied believed homosexuality was caused by feminized genes appearing in a male body, but this view was rarely expressed and heavily contested. See Celeste M. Condit, Deirdre M. Condit, Tasha Dubriwny, Enid Sefcovic, Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Sonja Brown-Givens, Cindy Dietz, and Roxanne L. Parrott, "Lay Understandings of Sex/Gender and Genetics: A Methodology that Preserves Polyvocal Coder Input," Sex Roles 49 (2003): 557-70.
125. Hamer and Copeland, Science of Desire, 93.
126. For discussion of the differences between scientific articles and popularizations, see Jeanne Fahnestock, "Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts," in The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Scientific Writing, ed. Murdo William McRae (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 17-36
127. Myers, Writing Biology.
128. This analysis will focus primarily on the material register. Jeanne Fahnestock's chapter on antithesis provides an analysis of how antithesis is articulated across many scientific disciplines, and the work of Evelyn Fox Keller has examined the many facets of genetic determinism existing within the social register of science. See Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures, chapter 2
129. Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
130. Jon Emery, Eila Watson, Peter Rose, and Anne Anderman, "A Systematic Review of the Literature Exploring the Role of Primary Care in Genetic Services," Family Practice 16 (1999): 426-45
131. Harvey J. Murff, Daniel Byrne, and Sapna Syngal, "Cancer Risk Assessment: Quality and Impact of the Family History Interview," American Journal of Preventative Medicine 27 (2004): 239-45
132. Carl V. Tyler Jr. and Clint W. Snyder, "Cancer Risk Assessment: Examining the Family Physician's Role," Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine 19 (2006): 468-77.