Physics matters less than we once thought to the making of Mendel. But it matters more than we tend to recognize to the making of Mendelism. This paper charts the variety of ways in which diverse kinds of physics impinged upon the Galtonian tradition which formed Mendelism’s matrix. The work of three Galtonians in particular is considered: Francis Galton himself, W. F. R. Weldon and William Bateson. One aim is to suggest that tracking influence from physics can bring into focus (...) important but now little-remembered flexibilities in the Galtonian tradition. Another is to show by example why generalizations about what happens when ‘physics’ meets ‘biology’ require caution. Even for a single research tradition in Britain in the decades around 1900, these categories were large, containing multitudes. (shrink)

Câu thành ngữ quen thuộc “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” (Điều không cần cho người này vẫn có thể rất cần cho người khác) hay được dùng để miêu tả sự khác biệt về giá trị của một vật đối với hai người khác nhau. Trong các nghiên cứu văn hóa và xã hội, thuyết ưu sinh là một ví dụ điển hình cho cách diễn đạt ngôn ngữ này.

Karl Pearson is the leading figure of XX century statistics. He and his co-workers crafted the core of the theory, methods and language of frequentist or classical statistics – the prevalent inductive logic of contemporary science. However, before working in statistics, K. Pearson had other interests in life, namely, in this order, philosophy, physics, and biological heredity. Key concepts of his philosophical and epistemological system of anti-Spinozism (a form of transcendental idealism) are carried over to his subsequent works on the (...) logic of scientific discovery. This article’s main goal is to analyze K. Pearson early philosophical and theological ideas and to investigate how the same ideas came to influence contemporary science, either directly or indirectly – by the use of variant theories, methods and dialects of statistics, corresponding to variant statistical inference procedures and their specific belief calculi. (shrink)

What the Nazis called Aktion T4 was a euthanasia program, officially started on August 18th, 1939. The registration operations for individuals with physical or mental handicaps were followed by forced sterilization and transfer to clinics organized to kill. In this article, I try to explain the mechanisms that allowed the memory of Aktion T4 to be preserved and passed from one generation to the next; memories of the “merciful death” of approximately 70,000 “lives unworthy of life,” that find themselves embedded (...) in family records and family history. In the first section, I summarize the discussion that resulted from the theories of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Even if those theories do not in any way allude to the consequences that we have witnessed decades after their publication, they started a debate about the value of life and the legitimacy of human intervention in the selection of hereditary character traits, as well as the concept of race and the different methods and forms of theories and eugenics that were later adopted in Europe and in the United States. In the case of Germany, translated into Rassenhygiene, those concepts flowed into the Nazi project of purification of the German people. Through interviews with families who had a relative interned in one of the program's clinics spread across the Reich territory between 1939 and 1945, I investigate the evolution and passage of memories stored within the family sphere, paying attention to the generational steps and processes of trauma. These stories are born from a complicated process of reconstructing these memories via interviews. Their recollections were full of painful silences and negations, similar to the thought process which led the victims to live in a condition that they could not understand, and separated them from the world before they were each made to face a solitary death, far from any contact with their families. The trauma that I analyze concerns actions that had been carried out by previous generations; in the majority of cases, younger generations were not aware of the destiny of their murdered relatives and therefore tried to rebuild the stories of people who they never had the opportunity to meet. I examine the problematic relationship of those being interviewed with the end-of-life issue and also the sense of guilt which is generated by the awareness of crimes that were committed. Aktion T4 was not a crime committed outside the national borders, nor a crime that extended beyond the private sphere to the “others.” Instead, it existed within the most central and intimate place of Nazi culture: the family. (shrink)

This paper describes some likely semiotic consequences of genetic engineering on what Gregory Bateson has called “the mental ecology” of future humans, consequences that are less often raised in discussions surrounding the safety of GMOs. The effects are as follows: an increased 1) habituation to the presence of GMOs in the environment, 2) normalization of empirically false assumptions grounding genetic reductionism, 3) acceptance that humans are capable and entitled to decide what constitutes an evolutionary improvement for a species, 4) perception (...) that the main source of creativity and problem solving in the biosphere is anthropogenic. Though there are some tensions between them, these effects tend to produce self-validating webs of ideas, actions, and environments, which may reinforce destructive habits of thought. Humans are unlikely to safely develop genetic technologies without confronting these escalating processes directly. Intervening in this mental ecology presents distinct challenges for educators, as will be discussed. (shrink)

ExcerptAnalysis of a possible intellectual affinity between philosopher Michel Foucault and political theorist Hannah Arendt is valuable in its own right, given the insight it offers into the work of these two important thinkers. At the same time, certain aspects of such an affinity are especially important because of what they illustrate about the unique ways in which harm manifests itself within the context of modern societies, and about how the terrain of modernity might be negotiated such that harm is (...) minimized and the practice of freedom is promoted.1 Of particular interest in this regard is the attitude toward modernity…. (shrink)

In addressing the regulation of human genetic futures, scientific standards concerning human kinds are endorsed by philosophical approaches that tend to exclude many people with genetic conditions from the deliberative process. In broadening the axiological, ontological and epistemological framework to include disability perspectives, the focus is shifted from questions of regulation to practical matters of participation, invoking ideals of community equality and enabled choice. In developing practical community engagements to deliberate upon genetic futures, a process that allows dialectical encounter between (...) eugenic and non-eugenic approaches is envisioned so that strong versions of eugenics are avoided. (shrink)

This paper explores the question whether war was regarded as eugenic or dysgenic before, during and after the First World War. The main focus is on the positions of the German military officer and historian Friedrich von Bernhardi, who in Germany and the Next War, first published in 1912, argued for war as eugenic, and Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights, published in 1917, which marks an important work characterizing war as dysgenic. I argue that an international community of biologists and social (...) scientists who debated the hereditary effect of war existed before World War I and trace how the concepts of altruism and group selection contributed to a eugenic or dysgenic interpretation of war. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to examine the formulation and practice of puericulture, within the context of eugenic ideas developed in France between the late 19th century and the middle of the next century. Through a phase of depopulation during this period, coupled with the spread of so-called social plagues, which would lead to a "biological degradation", the French government took a series of measures, known collectively as "social hygiene”. This is the context in which Adolphe Pinard improved (...) the studies devoted to maternal health care, child care, with the aim of encouraging repopulation in quantitative and qualitative terms. (shrink)

The relationship between the British and Nazi eugenics movements has been underexamined, largely because of the more obvious ties between the American and Nazi programs and the lack of a state-sponsored program in Britain. This article revisits this gap to reinsert the British eugenics movement into the historiography of the Nazi program by way of their shared rhetoric. To do this, I employ Foucault’s concepts of biopower and power/knowledge, arguing that biopower exists in rhetorical constructions of power and identity, which (...) the eugenics movements employed at national and individual levels to garner support and participation, particularly from women. The article is not an exhaustive account of the rhetorical overlaps between the two movements, but rather serves as a model of how one might understand eugenics as a rhetoric of biopower. (shrink)

Francis Galton coined the word eugenics in the late nineteenth century in England to characterize the “noble heritage” and the “well-born.” Its statistical approach leads to biometry as the quantitative study of populations. As an organized movement, its main purpose was to apply the available knowledge on inheritance in order to shape the characters of the future generations. Since then, eugenistic studies mingled science with the social values of the ruling classes, distorting scientific practice. The early twentieth century gave rise (...) to human genetics with strong eugenistic roots, assuming the role to prevent the “social degeneration” in modern industrial societies. This negative eugenistic movement developed into mandatory sterilization laws in several European countries and in the United States, and has its most dramatic achievement in the racial cleaning program of National Socialist Germany. (shrink)