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Metascience (2011) 20:347349 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9477-1
BOOK REVIEW
Eugenics: Then and now
Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis (eds.): Davenports dream: 21st century reections on heredity and eugenics. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008, xiii+490pp, $55 HB
Staffan Mller-WillePublished online: 27 October 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
This volume brings together a high-quality reprint of Charles B. Davenports Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911) with contemporary critical assessments from prominent historians, geneticists, psychiatrists and legal scholars. The decision by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press to reissue Davenports classic, but highly problematic, book is a bold one. Davenport was director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor from 1898 to 1924, and his interest in eugenics, highlighted by the installation of the Eugenics Record Ofce at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910, has long been an embarrassment for this renowned scientic institution. In their short preface, the editors quote three reasons that warrant bringing Davenports text to public attention once more. Two are historical, the books signicance as the rst comprehensive, post-Mendelian review of human inheritance, and its role as a manifesto of the American eugenics movement, which after all culminated in the passing of sterilization laws in fteen American states from 1907 to 1917. The third, and most compelling reason, according to Witkowski and Inglis, has to do with contemporary concerns. [T]he problems that [Davenport and many of his contemporaries] sought to ameliorate and the moral and ethical choices highlighted by the eugenics movement, they claim, remain a source of public interest and cautious scientic inquiry, fueled in recent years by the sequencing of the human genome and the consequent revitalization of human genetics (viii).
A contemporary reader of Davenport will most likely be offended by the inclemency with which he called for societal action against the hereditary unt. [S]ociety may take life, may sterilize, may segregate so as to prevent marriage, may restrict liberty in a hundred ways, Davenport pronounced in an oft-quoted passage, that serves as an epigraph for James Watsons introductory essay to the volume (2). Davenport also provided a chilling illustration of where this kind of thinking may lead to, by portraying the decision to shoot a decrepit dog as the
S. Mller-Wille (&)
ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, Byrne House, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4PJ, UK e-mail: [email protected]
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outcome of a struggle between innate will and external stimuli such as affection or sympathy (264). All contributors to Davenports dream make sure to renounce this attitude, the personal and cultural background of which is explored in the two relatively short but informative historical chapters by Jan A. Witkowski and ElofA. Carlsson. Instead, they emphasize that reproductive decisionswhile taking the complexities of genetic transmission and the latest technological capacities of molecular biology into full accountshould remain a matter of individual choice. In some sense, as Maynard V. Olson and Philip R. Reilly quite candidly confess in their contributions, this is Davenports Dream come true, as genetically informed choice will add up to a reduction in the overall prevalence of genetic disease (Olson, 92; cf. Reilly, 165). Quite in line with this, Olson therefore argues that the real debate about eugenics still lies ahead (93). The associated normative challenges are explored in a thoughtful essay by Richard Dworkin, while the remaining chapters are more biological in content and emphasize the complex populational and molecular underpinnings of inheritance, which put a bonus on the preservation, rather than elimination, of genetic diversity.
The twenty-rst century commentators assembled in this volume thus nd themselves in fundamental agreement with Davenport in two respects: Davenport diagnosed real problems and was right to assume that these could only be met with a perpetual expansion of scientic knowledge. What serves as a demarcation criterion to distance contemporary science and ethics from Davenports vision is that the latter got his ethical principles wrong, and subscribed to a crude and muddled notion of genetic determinism (Carlson, 71; Olson, 79). Rereading Davenports Heredity in relation to eugenics, however, casts some serious doubts on this cherished strategy. Eugenics, Davenport made quite clear, does not imply destruction of the unt either before or after birth, but rather trusts that good sense with which the majority are possessed (4). Accordingly, he saw the role of society largely restricted to the provision of knowledge: to make a thorough study of all the families in the state and to know their good and bad traits and to locate antisocial traits such as feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, delusions, melancholia, mental deterioration, craving for narcotics, lack of moral sense and self-control, tendency to wander, to steal, to assault and to commit wanton cruelties upon children and animals (267). If this sounds familiar today, so may some of the things Davenport had to say about inheritance. His methodology of collating large numbers of family pedigrees, to be sure, looks primitive in hindsight, but was after all a major step toward the statistical analysis of inheritance. His notion of inheritance, moreover, encompassed elements of what one would nowadays designate as developmental plasticity and genetic drift. I am, Davenport contended, what the determiners in my two germ plasms have developed into under the culture which they have experienced during their development (265). And no less than two full chapters of Heredity in relation to eugenics are dedicated to the effects of geographic factors, barriers (social, racial, linguistic and religious) as well as migrations, on the genetic composition of human populations.
So if neither evil politics nor sloppy science can provide the ground to reject Davenports legacy, what can? Quite simply the fact that a century later we have ample experience of the often pernicious uses that genetic knowledge has been put to
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in the past. Davenports call that the state should let the bright light of knowledge into all matters of the reproduction of human traits (268) can therefore not pass as a matter of course anymore. It has become a matter of debate. The volume under review clearly represents a particular standpoint in this debate, which will be shared by many professional scientists. As such, however, it forms a valuable contribution to the existing literature on genetics and eugenics.
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Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011