It may be thought that the title of this paper betrays a regrettable lack of sensitivity and good taste; it is as well, therefore, to explain its origin. Lewis Dexter was, I think, the first sociologist to apply a deviance perspective to the high-grade mentally retarded. ‘On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society’ argues that our discriminatory attitudes to the retarded have deep ideological roots; our social institutions tend ‘automatically’ to penalize stupidity; and repugnance often characterizes our (...) face-to-face interactions with the stupid. The pejorative label ‘stupid’ was justified precisely because identifying the stupid is a ‘commonsense’ rather than a scientific process, although commonsense does not have long to wait before it is bolstered by science. (shrink)

With Dangerous Sexualities, Frank Mort takes a look at how our ideas of health and disease are linked to moral and immoral notions of sex.

R. A. Fisher is perhaps best known for his influential theoretical contributions to the ‘Evolutionary Synthesis’ of the 1930s and 1940s in which biometry was reconciled with Mendelism. It is no accident, I believe, that when historians discuss the ‘Synthesis’, the names R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane are nearly always given in that order. Fisher's 1918 paper ‘The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance’ suggested that biometry, which emphasized the distribution of characters (...) based on continuous variation, and Mendelism, which emphasized discontinuous characters, were compatible and could be united to study evolutionary change. If one considered large numbers of discontinuous, Mendelian characters, then statistical biometrical analysis could be conducted. Thus, Fisher argued, biometry and Mendelism need not oppose each other. (shrink)