Davenport's Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics by Jan A. Witkowski, John R. Inglis

From the Publisher

In 1911, the influential geneticist Charles Davenport published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, advancing his ideas of how genetics would improve society in the 20th century. It became a college textbook and a foundation for the widespread eugenics movement in the United States. Nearly 100 years later, many of the issues raised by Davenport are again being debated, in different guises. In this new volume, prominent academics discuss themes from Davenport's book-human genetic variation, mental illness, nature vs. nurture, human evolution-in a contemporary context. Davenport's original book is reprinted along with the essays. This book will be useful to historians of science as well as those interested in the social implications of human genetics research-past, present, and future.

Science

...because of the essays, I am pleased to recommend the volume to the broadest possible audience. Davenport's reprinted text may be thought of as an example of one of Stephen Gould's evolutionary 'spandrels,' that is, a scaffolding of now-useless information on which is built a novel and viable structure. In this case, the current viable and valuable structure is the set of commentaries. These elegantly summarize the state of medical genetics today, touching on aspects such as the Human Genome Project, ex vivo technologies of genetic selection, intentional variation and quick detection by reverse genetics, and the emerging understanding of the vast complexity of RNA-driven gene regulation by non-coding regions that rarely expresses itself as a 'single gene' phenotype. The crucial question remains: in light of the disasters of eugenics, what is the proper use of what we know about human DNA?

The essays (especially those by Maynard Olson and Douglas Wallace, the editors' introduction, and James Watson's personal reflections) provide a firm foundation for answering that question: We are the products of natural selection working on inevitable, unavoidable genetic variation. That variation will never cease. The broadest possible definition of 'normal' is the one closest linked to the realities of natural selection. No one can say which (if any) human genetic variants will survive the anthropocene epoch we have just entered. Therefore eugenics was and remains a dead end, and it cannot be the answer.

What People Are Saying

Robert Pollack
"well worth reading and well worth having for classroom instruction at any level from high school through graduate school, divinity school, medical school, or law school."--(Robert Pollack, Biological Sciences, Columbia University)

Product Details