Abstract
Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics is a wide-ranging history of human biology that considers simultaneously its emergence and transformation as space of epistemic and political possibilities and conflicts. Meloni’s starting point is the considerable excitement that surrounds new attention to epigenetics, the study of possibly inheritable environmental influences on gene expression. Epigenetics is viewed as a possible rapprochement between biology and social science and a doorway to a politically liberal biology that stresses social reform of people’s unhealthy or dysfunctional biobehavioral dispositions. Meloni’s purpose is to analyze these political and epistemological associations by tracing their historical origins and the origins of their “other”—the notion that biology embodies a right-wing politics of fixity, immutability, and inherited inequality.
Meloni’s historical narrative, beginning in Chapter Two, focuses not on particular people, findings, or ideas, but rather the epistemic space of categories, associations, divisions, and logics that has enabled the “long twentieth century” of biology from Galton to the present. What enabled this space to form was not Darwin’s Origin of Species buta rupture with muddled, pre-modern conceptions of “inheritance”—”a flexible and imprecise concept” (p. 37) that connected the hereditary material to environments, bodies, flexibility, and change—and the imposition of “hard heredity,” “the notion that the hereditary material is fixed once and for all at conception and unaffected by changes in the environment or phenotype of the parents” (p. 1). Meloni traces the contributions of Francis Galton, August Weismann, and Wilhelm Johannsen in the construction of the epistemic scaffolding that held open this space.
Chapters Three through Six are the core of the book, and they show the complex and evolving entanglements of politics and epistemology within the twentieth-century space of biology. Hard heredity became the dominant, though never exclusive, pole organizing these debates, and Meloni’s key contribution is to clarify the meaning of these entanglements and to show where the association of hard heredity and right-wing politics came from. This analysis begins with anexplanation of eugenics as an early twentieth-century ethos spanning the political spectrum and theories of heredity that saw human potential as essentially biological (rather than political, cultural, intellectual, etc.), had faith in social engineering and the power of experts, and elevated race over the individual.
Meloni then shows the variety of positions that were available within this ethos until about 1930. While right-wing hard hereditarians like eugenicist Charles Davenport came to dominate the meaning of “political biology,” at the time right- and left-wing Mendelians and Lamarckians vied for influence. For example, marine biologist E. W. MacBride was a right-wing Lamarckian who believed that inherited environmental degradation undermined any possibility of improving the lower classes. And there was a robust tradition of left eugenic hereditarianism both within and outside the Soviet Union that criticized Lamarckian Lysenkoism as having “fascist race and class implications” given the “conditions of malnourishment and disease” of proletarians’ ancestors (p. 124).
Geneticist Hermann Muller saw Mendelism as securing the conditions for producing the Soviet New Man. Even anthropologist Alfred Kroeber saw hereditarianism as emancipatory because the idea of a discretely inherited germ-plasm allowed the social sciences epistemic autonomy and opened up the idea of social reform through cultural change. Hard heredity thus secured the boundary that enabled twentieth-century social science to flourish. But Meloni’s broader argument is that the hegemony of right-wing Mendelism over early twentieth-century political biology has obscured these other possibilities and has made it difficult to see later developments clearly.
In Chapters Five and Six, Meloni traces the postwar reorganization of political biology. Epistemically, molecularization put previously speculative hard hereditarianism on a new experimental footing, while politically, the eugenic ethos began to weaken as biology became reimagined in the universalist and individualist terms of liberal democracy. These trends are traced through analyses of the UNESCO race statements, the classical/balance controversy, and the modern synthesis through which emerged biology’s concern with the functions of genetic diversity and interest in individuals rather than “races” as the crucial biological and evolutionary unit. While remnants of old racist and eugenic thinking persisted, political biology had been fundamentally reorganized around liberal democracy. Indeed, Meloni has a nice analysis showing how sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, while animated by right-wing politics and hard hereditarianism, resisted reviving eugenics or racism (though reveling in sexist gender essentialism) and instead touted inflexible human nature as a bulwark against social engineering and as most compatible with market society and liberal democracy.
In the final two chapters, Meloni’s narrative enters the current era of postgenomics and epigenetics. This is a period when biologists have vast new technological, organizational, and epistemic powers. The epistemic space and the political meaning of biology are becoming unsettled and redefined. Crucially, epigenetics is undermining the certainties of hard heredity and reviving complex and fluid notions of soft heredity. Meloni is appropriately tentative here because the meanings of almost everything important in contemporary biology are contested and the contours of a new epistemic space may not yet even be in formation.
What Meloni shows, however, are theories and research agendas that point to strengthening ideas of “inheritance” that are not limited to DNA transmission and the epistemological breakdown of dichotomies like nature/nurture, soma/germline, and heredity/environment. Politically, this era is even more ambivalent. While much discussion of postgenomic politics is assumed to be the polar opposite of right hereditarianism, Meloni urges caution, reminding us of the complexity of political biology before 1930 but also that the unsettled nature of the current epistemic space makes historical and political analogies difficult.
Meloni’s account is strangely silent on several issues. First, there is no attention to bioethics. On the one hand, that field is entirely structured by the parameters of “democratic biology” Meloni discusses in Chapters Five and Six; but bioethics has also come to occupy so much of the discourse of political biology and also to dissipate action around biology that might have been genuinely “political” into meditation on “ethical implications.”
A second problem is Meloni’s implicit decision to accept the idea that human heredity is the boundary of political biology. Much of the contemporary “postgenomic” moment concerns the blurring of the category of the human, the boundaries of the body, and the borders between nature, culture, brain, and society; so why are its politics delimited in the same terms as the past? Furthermore, so much of the contemporary politics of biology is about the negotiation and regulatory inscription of those boundaries. For example, on what basis do we regulate GM crops—as a novel product that potentially endangers the body; as an information deficit; as a new scientific/industrial process; as a potential contagion that can disrupt nature, agriculture, and markets? It would be unfair to judge Meloni’s substantial achievement for not being a different book, yet a bit of attention to how “political biology” is coping with biology’s dissolving of the human would be welcome.
Specialists in science and technology, social theory, culture, and biosocial science will find this volume to be an illuminating and mind-expanding exploration of issues with which they may have thought themselves familiar. It is unfortunate that the publisher Palgrave has priced the book inaccessibly for teaching purposes because graduate students would benefit greatly from Meloni’s political analysis and his explication of the history of biology.