Chapter 11, Transposition Rediscovered Summary and Analysis

Molecular biology saved the gene, but only by bringing about an excessive reductionism within genetics. Many began to focus on the question of how genes copied themselves. No one yet knew how cells deriving from a single egg differentiated despite having the same DNA.

McClintock spent time in the 1950s listening to all of these new findings, but she maintained a certain distance. She denied the central dogma of that day, that DNA would explain everything. Her Ds-Ac system of regulation and control could not be fully explained at DNA's level of nature. She argued that the transposition she found in corn could be found elsewhere in nature. The geneticist community had reached an apparent consensus that excluded McClintock's ideas but this was not so in Russia where Lysenko aimed to resurrect Lamarckian evolutionary theory, a contrast...