Are some fields of scientific exploration so incendiary they should be fenced off and labelled “Keep out”?
I’m inclined to think not, both from a commitment to intellectual freedom and for the practical reason that if you put up such notices, trespassers are guaranteed. Still, if any area of research might warrant prohibition it is eugenics – the branch of human genetics used to justify repugnant Nazi ideology and, before that, the enforced sterilisation of “degenerates” around the world.
Yet eugenics was not cordoned off. A mere two decades after the second world war, it was reinvented as behaviour genetics. The story of what happened next is both gripping and salutary – and it is told with wonderful insight by sociologist Aaron Panofsky from the Institute of Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
It is testament to human resilience and optimism that behaviour genetics was born into an atmosphere of academic excitement. Seen as an antidote to behaviourism – the idea that behaviour can be scientifically understood without recourse to anything beyond the observable – the pioneers believed that by turning the spotlight on heredity they could achieve their dream of “unlocking the secrets of human nature and solving social ills like crime, homelessness, and madness”, as Panofsky puts it.
What’s more, they were convinced they could do this without reviving the menacing spectre of eugenics, or its diabolical cousins, racism, social Darwinism and biological determinism. One volume of essays establishing the field reads: “The concept of race is likely to remain of small general interest for behavioral science [because research in this area is] procedurally difficult, politically dangerous, and personally repugnant.” Behaviour geneticists were determined their discoveries would not be misused for social or political ends. As Theodosius Dobzhansky, a hugely respected population geneticist and founder of the field, often said: “Differences aren’t deficits.”
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