Humanities Without Boundaries: Evelyn Fox Keller

In this talk, Evelyn Fox Keller focuses on the idea that the causes of trait development can be parsed into two categories: nature and nurture. She argues that this fundamentally incoherent notion, which still persists in both the popular and technical imagination, was the innovation of Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). It was spurred in part by his particulate theories of inheritance and has been sustained, again in part, by chronic slippages in the language of genetics.