Bearing crosses: a historiography of genetics and embryology

As we construct the fusion of medical embryology and medical genetics, it is important to be aware of how the history of genetics has been written to exclude embryology. This article looks at the rhetoric of genetics and how that rhetoric fits a paradigm of supersessionism. Supersessionism is often seen in the history of religion when one sect claims superiority to the original sect from whence it emerged. Such supersessionism portrays embryology as a failed research program, one that genetics now has saved. In some instances, biblical references have alluded to the failed nature of embryology. Although this article does not criticize the data of genetics, it takes issue with the historiography used by geneticists and seeks to show that the mergers between genetics and embryology are those between two equal partners and not between an inferior and superior member.