Table Of ContentPolitical Biology
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Political Biology
Science and Social Values in Human
Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics
Maurizio Meloni
Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, UK
Palgrave
macmillan
POLITICAL BIOLOGY: SCIENCE AND SOCIAL VALUES IN HUMAN HEREDITY FROM
EUGENICS TO EPIGENETICS
Copyright © Maurizio Meloni, 2016.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-37771-5
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2016 by
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ISBN 978-1-137-37771-5
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137377722
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To Rebecca, Eva and Marika
The transfer of knowledge and of judgment from one field to another is
notoriously difficult, and one need not look far to find men eminent in one
field who have made themselves ridiculous by posing as oracles in another.
The biologist as sociologist, still more as political prophet or propagandist,
runs a similar risk, but we are all necessarily concerned with social evolu-
tion. Whether or not they are really pertinent, biological theories are being
used in this field, and the biologist necessarily has a part in the discussion,
if only as critic .
—G. G. Simpson, 1941
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments – Problematizing Our Epigenetic Present viii
1 Political Biology and the Politics of Epistemology 1
2 Nineteenth Century: From Heredity to Hard Heredity 32
3 Into the Wild: The Radical Ethos of Eugenics 64
4 A Political Quadrant 93
5 Time for a Repositioning: Political Biology after 1945 1 36
6 Four Pillars of Democratic Biology 159
7 Welcome to Postgenomics: Reactive Genomes, Epigenetics,
and the Rebirth of Soft Heredity 188
8 Conclusions: The Quandary of Political Biology in the
Twenty-First Century 210
Notes 224
Bibliography 233
Index 277
vii
Preface and Acknowledgments –
Problematizing Our Epigenetic
Present
There is a palpable excitement around epigenetics. The argument that
we must now look beyond our DNA and toward our environment to get
a sense of who we are, understand disease trajectories, and perhaps find
a way not only to prevent risk but even to improve ourselves is increas-
ingly driving laboratory work and becoming a cliché in the popular
media. Soon policymakers and health experts will likely be on board
as well. And the high priests of DNA-centrism are rapidly reconfiguring
their language to meet the challenge of epigenetics.
To wit, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) and the dean of the Human Genome Project, told a conference in
San Francisco that the expression “junk DNA” is a sign of hubris from
the past: “Most of the genome that we used to think was there for spacer
turns out to be doing stuff and most of that stuff is about regulation
and that’s where the epigenome gets involved, and is teaching us a lot”
(Collins, 2015). “In human diseases,” the journal Nature advises, “the
genome and epigenome operate together. Tackling disease using infor-
mation on the genome alone has been like trying to work with one hand
tied behind the back. The new trove of epigenomic data frees the other
hand. It will not provide all the answers. But it could help researchers
decide which questions to ask” (Nature Editorial, 2015). In February
2015, the journal introduced readers to the Epigenomic Roadmap
(Skipper et al., 2015). And, as the Federation of American Societies for
Experimental Biologies accurately and succinctly puts it, “While the
discovery of the genetic code led researchers to believe that our phys-
ical appearance and susceptibility to certain diseases were ‘hard-wired’
within our DNA, exciting advances in our understanding of the human
genome have shown that this is not the entire story. Scientists now know
that both biological and environmental factors play an important role
in how we develop and age and even in determining our risk of diseases
like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes” (FASEB, 2014).
Finally, NIH is now funding investigation on the link between paternal
nutrition and offspring metabolism.
viii
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
In anticipation of an avalanche of articles, books, hype, and contro-
versy – in which epigenetics will be mobilized to ‘explain’ sexual
orientation or the transgenerational effects of various historical catastro-
phes – this book offers its own roadmap to our epigenetic present. It tells
the story of how the biological notion of heredity became modern by
discarding epigenetic-like hypotheses and constructing, in the late nine-
teenth century, what is known as hard heredity: the idea that there can
be no environmental influence on hereditary material. The twentieth
century was increasingly dominated by hard-hereditarian explanations,
with a range of implications – progressive and regressive, inclusionary
and exclusionary – for politics, public policy, social values, and the
boundary between biology and the social sciences. But in recent decades,
the hegemony of hard heredity has eroded. We are again thinking about
heredity in an extended way by incorporating ancestral behavior and
experience into our stories of generational transfer.
What sort of change can we expect from this new dynamic? What sort
of citizenship, personhood, politics, and governmentality will emerge
from this porous view of the biological body, shaped by today’s experi-
ences and those of past generations? In the pages that follow, I rely on
history to show the broken logic behind the assertion that this alterna-
tive notion of heredity will necessarily have better social policy implica-
tions than has staunch DNA-centrism. To grasp meaning in our present,
we need what many scientists and social scientists working on these
topics like to avoid: history, history, and again history, the neglected
story of how we came to think in certain ways and rule out others. If this
book even partly succeeds in its archeological mission to excavate and
problematize the sources of the present, its goal is achieved.
I am grateful to many people who have helped me to think through
the research and arguments of this book and to find a path through
the nuanced debates on human heredity and its implications for policy,
social values, and knowledge production.
In the United Kingdom, I have benefited from exciting exchanges with
Peter Bowler (Belfast), John Dupré and Staffan Müller-Wille (Exeter),
Des Fitzgerald (Cardiff), Simon Williams (Warwick), Paul Martin and
Vincent Cunliffe (Sheffield), Martyn Pickersgill (Edinburgh), Brigitte
Nerlich and Aleksandra Stelmach (Nottingham), Chris Renwick (York).
In the United States, I had the huge privilege of writing this manuscript
in the course of a yearlong membership at the Institute for Advanced
Study, School of Social Science, Princeton, NJ. My deep thanks to the
Institute for offering me this opportunity. While there, I benefited from
profound intellectual discussions with Danielle Allen (now at Harvard),
