island⁹⁴

Okay. You’ve got nature—neurons, brain chemicals, hormones, and of course, at the bottom of the cereal box, genes. And then there’s nurture, all those environmental breezes gusting about. And the biggest cliche in this field is how it is meaningless to talk about nature or nurture, only about their interaction. And somehow, that truism rarely sticks. Instead, somebody’s got to go, and when a new gene is trotted out then when “firing off”, “determines” behavior, environmental influences are inevitably seen as something irrelevant that have to go.

From Robert Sapolsky’s article “A Gene for Nothing” in the book Monkeyluv.

The author also notes that the genome is called “code of codes” and the “holy grail” by un-sciency journalists.

According to Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture legitimacy exchange is…

…a term that refers to the process by which experts in one area draw on the authority of experts in another area to justify their activities.

and it follows interestingly with

As Bowker explains, “An isolated scientific worker making an outlandish claim could gain rhetorical legitimacy by pointing to support from another field–which in turn referenced the first worker’s field to support its claim. The language of cybernetics provided a site where this exchange could occur.”

The other term I took from the book is “network forum” in which individuals from different fields can meet and exchange legitimacy. Turner’s book gives the Whole Earth Catalog as a print example.