The wild type as concept and in experimental practice: A history of its role in classical genetics and evolutionary theory

Abstract

Wild types in genetics are specialised strains of laboratory experimental organism which principally serve as standards against which variation is measured. As selectively inbred lineages highly isolated from ancestral wild populations, there appears to be little wild or typical about them. I will nonetheless argue that they have historically been successfully used as stand-ins for nature, allowing knowledge produced in the laboratory to be extrapolated to the natural world. In this paper, I will explore the 19th century origins of the wild type concept, the theoretical and experimental innovations which allowed concepts and organisms to move from wild nature to laboratory domestication c. 1900 (resulting in the production of standardised lab strains), and the conflict among early geneticists between interactionist and atomist accounts of wild type, which would eventually lead to the conceptual disintegration of wild types and the triumph of genocentrism and population genetics. I conclude by discussing how the strategy of using wild type strains to represent nature in the lab has nonetheless survived the downfall of the wild type concept and continues to provide, significant limitations acknowledged, an epistemically productive means of investigating heredity and evolutionary variation.

Model Pembelajaran Living History Berbasis PjBL Untuk Meningkatkan Keterampilan Histografi Mahasiswa

“…Respon terhadap kemampuan peserta didik dalam mengumpulkan setiap bukti Sejarah secara langsung akan meningkatkan kemampuan historgrafi peserta didik untuk berpikir secara analitik (berpikir metafora) untuk melihat kesesuaian objek kajian dan materi pembelajaran Sejarah secara holistik (Focacci & Perez, 2022;Holmes, 2017) dan dilakukan secara berkesinambungan. Setiap proses pendekatan yang dilakukan peserta didik akan mencerminkan kemampuan peserta didik dalam melakukan proses pemecahan masalah yang akan memberikan stimulus untuk meningkatkan rasa ingin tahu peserta didik terhadap setiap objek kajian materi pembelajaran Sejarah (Dingemans & Möhring, 2019;Zulkarnain et al, 2021).…”

Genetics without genes? The centrality of genetic markers in livestock genetics and genomics

“…This required the elucidation of the mechanics of chromosomes and cell division to help them to account for anomalies they observed; it has been argued that the Morgan laboratory's experimental programme was aimed at using the problem of mapping as an investigative strategy for tackling wider biological problems such as this(Waters 2003).5 On the articulation of 'quantitative genetics' as distinct from 'population genetics', seeDerry (2015, pp. 112-114).6 On the concept of the 'wild type', and its history, seeHolmes (2017).…”