The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate / Edition 1

by Diane B. Paul

Overview

The essays collected in The Politics of Heredity explore the political factors underlying shifts in thinking about the role of nature and nurture in shaping human behavior, and about the desirability and feasibility of controlling human reproduction. They ask why many assumptions that were simply taken for granted as late as the 1950s and '60s came to be considered fundamentally mistaken in the 1970s and '80s. They also suggest that some apparent shifts in thinking were not as deep as they may seem, and that changes in rhetoric may obscure the stability of core underlying beliefs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791438220
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	07/23/1998
Series:	SUNY series in Philosophy and Biology
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Diane B. Paul is Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Eugenics and the Left

3. The Nine Lives of Discredited Data

4. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Origins of Behavior Genetics

5. A Debate That Refuses to Die

6. Eugenic Anxieties, Social Realities, and Political Choices

7. Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?

8. Eugenic Origins of Medical Genetics

9. Genes and Contagious Disease: The Rise and Fall of a Metaphor

10. PKU Screening: Competing Agendas, Converging Stories

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

"The essays are concise, intelligent, and well written. A couple are already minor classics among historians of science. What is most remarkable about them is their challenging of conventional wisdom. Most people believe that eugenics was attached only to right-wing Nazi-like causes; Paul shows that there were important left-leaning threads in the movement. Most people believe that 'good science' overcame 'bad eugenics;' Paul shows that many eugenicists were up to snuff on their science, and that political events had far more to do with the eventual discrediting of the movement. I must say that when I first heard her present her paper on 'Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?' the experience was actually thrilling. In a single stroke, Paul demolished one of the most sacred cows of eugenics historiography—and brilliantly." — Robert N. Proctor, Pennsylvania State University

"I like the consistent focus on the relationship between science and politics, and the ties between historical and contemporary debates. Without reducing science to politics, the author shows, through historical examples, the importance of politics and ideology in the field of eugenics and genetics. This is especially interesting in light of the current debates over social constructivism in science studies, and the increased market involvement in science." — Dorothy Nelkin, New York University

From the Publisher

Paul (political science, Univ. of Mass. at Boston) explores the development of hybrid corn, the history of eugenics, human genetics, the nature-nurture debate, the origins of the Marxian concept of proletarian society, the shift in the meaning of "fitness" in evolutionary theory, the practice of normal science in Nazi Germany, and the making and selling of science textbooks. A common theme unites the ten diverse essays<-->the connections between biological science, social power, and public policy. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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