The
Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture
Debate (Suny Series, Philosophy and Biology)
by Diane B. Paul
ALL the world knows of Adolf Hitler and the
atrocities committed under his leadership during the Nazi era. But were
he and his small band of accomplices alone? Psychiatrists supplied the
flawed theories and ideas of eugenics and biochemistry which provided the
justification for wholesale slaughter of the "inferior". Timely reading
because modern psychiatry is treading down the same path once again - forgetting
about healing and concentrating instead on biology, genetics, and brain
chemistry.
Book Summary
Includes chapters on:
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Eugenics and the Left
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The Rockefeller Foundation and the Origins
of Behavior Genetics
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A Debate That Refuses to Die
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Eugenic Anxieties, Social Realities, and
Political Choices
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Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?
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Eugenic Origins of Medical Genetics
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Genes and Contagious Disease: The Rise and
Fall of a Metaphor.
From The Publisher
This book explores the development
of hybrid corn, the history of eugenics, human genetics, the nature-nurture
debate, the origins of the Marxian concept of proletarian science, the
shift in the meaning of "fitness" in evolutionary theory, the practice
of normal science in Nazi Germany, and the making and selling of science
textbooks. While the topics are diverse, a common theme unites them - each
explores links between biological science, social power, and public policy.
Reviews
From Booknews
Paul (political science, Univ.
of Mass. at Boston) explores the development of hybrid corn, the history
of eugenics, human genetics, the nature-nurture debate, the origins of
the Marxian concept of proletarian society, the shift in the meaning of
"fitness" in evolutionary theory, the practice of normal science in Nazi
Germany, and the making and selling of science textbooks. A common theme
unites the ten diverse essays - the connections between biological science,
social power, and public policy.
The essays collected in The Politics Of
Heredity explore the political factors underlying shifts in thinking
about the role of nature and nurture in shaping human behavior, and about
the desirability and feasibility of controlling human reproduction. They
ask why many assumptions that were simply taken for granted as late the
1950s and '60s came to be considered fundamentally mistaken in the 1970s
and '80s. They also suggest that some apparent shifts in thinking were
not as deep as they may seem, and that changes in rhetoric may obscure
the stability of core underlying beliefs.
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