Hopeful Monsters: A Queer Hope of Evolutionary Difference

This article explores how contemporary literary and visual texts create a scientific imaginary haunted by the work of the discredited evolutionary biologist Richard Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt's theory of the hopeful monster placed that which is different, changing and monstrous at the heart of evolution. The aim of this article is therefore to examine how macromutation (also known as saltational theory) makes manifest an anxiety, but also an exciting potentiality, about the human's interrelational existence with plant, animal, inanimate and technological life. It moves between Goldschmidt's theories of evolution and cultural representations that resonate with his work to suggest that the hopeful monster questions the dehumanisation of and violence towards different others by bringing monstrous difference to the centre of species' survival. The focus here is how Goldschmidt's ideas reverberate in contemporary culture, particularly how these resonances invite a questioning of the supposed threat of difference to imagined individual and national security and unity. Engaging with the Hollywood film series X-Men and Hiromi Goto's collection of short stories Hopeful Monsters, this article explores how these texts make manifest the ontological anxieties of facing (our) monsters, and thus the environmental and socio-political consequences and potentialities of being of, with and next to difference.

William Bateson, Richard Goldschmidt, and Non-Genic Modes of Speciation

Sometimes a cross between two individuals that appear to belong to the same species produces a sterile offspring (i.e., their hybrid is sterile). Thus, the two individuals appear reproductively isolated from each other. If each could find a compatible mate, then new species might emerge. At issue is whether the form of hybrid sterility that precedes sympatric differentiation into species is, in the general case, of genic or non-genic origin. Several recent papers lend the authority of William Bateson to the genic hypothesis, referring to the "Bateson–Dobzhansky–Muller hypothesis". All these papers cite a 1996 paper that, in turn, cites a 1909 paper of Bateson. However, from 1902 until 1926 the latter espoused a non-genic hypothesis that today would be classified as "chromosomal". Analysis of Bateson's 1909 text reveals no recantation. Bateson's non-genic view was similar to that advanced by Richard Goldschmidt in the 1940s. However, Bateson proposed a contribution from parents of abstract factors that, together in their hybrids, complement to bring about a negative effect (hybrid sterility). In contrast, Goldschmidt proposed that normally parents contribute complementary factors making parental chromosomes compatible at meiosis in their hybrids, which hence are fertile (i.e., the parental factors work together to produce a positive effect). When the factors are not sufficiently complementary the parental chromosomes are incompatible in their hybrids, which hence are sterile. The non-genic Batesonian–Goldschmidtian abstractions are now being fleshed-out chemically in terms of DNA base-composition differences.

Epigenetics and the renaissance of heresy

Classic neo-Darwinian theory is predicated on the notion that all heritable phenotypic change is mediated by alterations of the DNA sequence in genomes. However, evidence is accumulating that stably heritable phenotypes can also have an epigenetic basis, lending support to the long-discarded notion of inheritance of acquired traits. As many of the examples of epigenetic inheritance are mediated by position effects, the possibility exists that chromosome rearrangements may be one of the driving forces behind evolutionary change by exerting position effect alterations in gene activity, an idea articulated by Richard Goldschmidt. The emerging evidence suggests that Goldschmidt's controversial hypothesis deserves a serious reevaluation.Key words: epigenetics, position effects, inheritance of acquired traits.