The Wellborn Science

The four contributors to this volume examine the eugenics movements in Germany, France, Brazil, and the Soviet Union, and describe how geneticists and physicians participated in the development of policies concerning the improvement of hereditary qualities in humans. They examine the scientific components of those programs and discuss the involvement of social, religious, and political forces that significantly altered the original scientific goals. The book opens up new and comparative perspectives on the history of eugenics and the social uses of science in general.

The four contributors to this volume examine the eugenics movements in Germany, France, Brazil, and the Soviet Union, and describe how geneticists and physicians participated in the development of policies concerning the improvement of hereditary qualities in humans. They examine the scientific components of those programs and discuss the involvement of social, religious, and political forces that significantly altered the original scientific goals. The book opens up new and comparative perspectives on the history of eugenics and the social uses of science in general.

This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human society via biological knowledge; the repositioning, after 1945, of biological thinking into a liberal-democratic, human rights framework; and the present postgenomic crisis in which the genome can no longer be understood as insulated from environmental signals. In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigenetics we may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.

This dissertation is a historical investigation of the relationship between science and society through the comparative study of eugenics movements as they developed in both Japan and China from the 1890's to the 1940's.

Race and Empire tells the story of a short-lived but vehement eugenics movement that emerged among a group of Europeans in Kenya in the 1930s, unleashing a set of writings on racial differences in intelligence more extreme than that emanating from any other British colony in the twentieth century. The Kenyan eugenics movement of the 1930s adapted British ideas to the colonial environment: in all its extremity, Kenyan eugenics was not simply a bizarre and embarrassing colonial mutation, as it was later dismissed, but a logical extension of British eugenics in a colonial context. By tracing the history of eugenic thought in Kenya, the books shows how the movement took on a distinctive colonial character, driven by settler political preoccupations and reacting to increasingly outspoken African demands for better, and more independent, education. The economic fragility of Kenya in the early 1930s made the eugenicists particularly dependent on British financial support. Ultimately, the suspicious response of the Colonial Office and the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, backed up by a growing expert concern about race in science, led to the failure of Kenyan eugenics to gain the necessary British backing. Despite this lack of concrete success, eugenic theories on race and intelligence were widely supported by the medical profession in Kenya, as well as powerful members of the official and non-official European settler population. The long-term failures of the eugenics movement should not blind us to its influence among the social and administrative elite of colonial Kenya. Through a close examination of attitudes towards race and intelligence in a British colony, Race and Empire reveals how eugenics was central to colonial racial theories before World War Two.

The 19th century produced scientific and cultural revolutions that forever transformed modern European life. Richard Olson provides an integrated account of the history of science and its impact on intellectual and social trends of the day.

This intiguing book examines in fascinating detail the relationship between people and domesticated cattle, a resource that has been vital to civilization but long taken for granted.