Scholars and readers who have followed the Cultural History of Heredity project workshops conducted at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Economic and Social Research Council Research Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis) at the University of Exeter will be pleased to learn of the latest book to emerge from it, covering research on heredity and its implications in the public domain from 1850 to 1930. It is a collection of seventeen essays which, as a quick glance at the table of contents will tell you, offers a variety of very different perspectives on the subject. In doing so the volume admirably demonstrates what editors Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt propose in their introductory essay: ‘that a history of heredity includes more than the history of genetics, and that knowledge of heredity was always more than the knowledge formulated as Mendelism’ (p. 3).

In the interests of achieving this goal the essays take the reader through five very different – and not necessarily obvious – landscapes in which newly emerging ideas about heredity played an important role during the period covered in the book. As always, when reviewing a volume of essays by several authors, it is impossible to do justice to all contributions. I have thus highlighted aspects that caught my attention for one reason or another, and attempted to impart some sense of the value of such a volume for a very large readership of historians, philosophers and sociologists, and indeed any scholar interested in how our understanding of heredity unfolded and was applied in various sectors of human endeavour.

Genealogy, kinship and population form the general category of the first four essays, which talk about heredity in relation to topics as widely and wildly varied as bachelorhood in literature, eugenics, psychiatry via the lens of ‘asylums’ and Jewish identity construction through genealogies. If readers, conditioned by modern television programming, go to an essay titled “The bachelor” (pp. 29–47) expecting an account of courtship rituals and the implications of the knowledge of heredity upon mate choice, they might be disappointed. But, not for long, I trust, because Ulrike Vedder offers instead a fascinating account – rendered through an analysis of the literary writing of the period – of the paradox of the eponymous bachelor as a figure that was simultaneously considered to be a failure and yet key to various debates on family, genealogy and heredity during the late nineteenth century. With the exception of the last, in which Veronika Lipphardt takes the reader all the way to the rise of Nazism (pp. 111–139), the essays in this section deal with the ways in which human heredity was thought about in the period before Mendel's discovery and ideas had spread. But even as this fact underscores the wider point the editors wished to make, about heredity being more than Mendelism, the temporal divide between this section and the others serves equally to demonstrate the indelible mark that Mendel's finding and theories left on his contemporaries and anyone who came after. This point is highlighted again in the section on medical contexts, where at least two essays use Mendelism in their arguments, if for no other reason than to show why certain groups of researchers found it useful not to be Mendelian (pp. 311–335), and yet again at the end of the book when we encounter three essays on the origins of genetics as a discipline, studies of mutations and variation – namely heredity at levels above and below the gene unit – and about genetic research on protozoan models, grouped under the heading of ‘Mendelism’.

Genetics, evolution and reproduction as contexts for thinking about heredity are covered in a trio of essays, the first of which considers groups with stakes in understanding heredity before genetics became a formal discipline. Evolutionary theory and, somewhat surprisingly in what otherwise seems to be a fairly conventional umbrella for discussing heredity, the way in which gender concepts have in the past shaped – and will continue to shape – the formation of genetics as a discipline (Helga Satzinger, pp. 189–209) round out this section. The inclusion of J. Andrew Mendelsohn's essay on vaccines (pp. 243–263) in the agro-industrial rather than medical context was slightly disorienting for a moment. But from the overall theme and tone of the author's argument about what the industrial production of vaccines did for understanding the nature of heredity, it is evident that it fits in more comfortably with discussions of other industrial contexts for heredity than the medical contexts discussed. The reprinting of this article, and Christophe Bonneuil's piece on industrial simulacra (pp. 213–242) with Alain Pottage's work on patenting clones, also brought home the value of rereading articles in different contexts and settings. The new settings for these articles steer us towards thinking about the work itself in new ways, although of course such a reading only works if there is a judicious mix of the old and the new, as is certainly the case in this volume.

The issue of context also brings to mind an observation made by the philosopher Michael Ruse in his review of this book for the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, that this book is a demonstration of how the history of biology is almost completely ‘externalist’ nowadays, i.e. ‘we no longer spend time looking at the naked science and quickly move to factors such as discipline building and government interference and sexual tensions and so forth’. While I – identifying as an ‘internalist’ myself – agree with him about the tenor of the book, I do not take this feature to be a sign that one side has decisively won over the other; indeed, I am not certain that there is, or really ever was, a war. As far as I'm concerned, with a book like Heredity Explored in hand there are no losers. Both sides have much to win by reading it.