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  • Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics by Maurizio Meloni
  • Riiko Bedford
Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics Maurizio Meloni London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, xi + 284 p., $105.00

Maurizio Meloni's Political Biology is a clear and timely work for those looking to make sense of the contemporary hype surrounding the sociopolitical implications of epigenetics. Meloni, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, examines the relationship between biological science and politics through the lens of the history of human heredity. The book's eight chapters illustrate the deep intertwinement of the political and the biological in the history of heredity. Meloni traces this history from disparate and unsettled notions of heredity in the 19th century, through its consolidation in the modern synthesis in the 20th century, to contemporary (and yet again unsettled) epigenetics research. Crucially, Meloni structures his narrative around three "eras," each characterized by a unique relationship between not only scientific theories and politics, but also epistemology. These are: the radical social engineering ethos of the eugenics era, post-war liberaldemocratic biology, and the current postgenomic era. Thus, taking cue from Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985), Meloni additionally brings considerations of the organization of knowledge to histories that highlight the political aspects of the history of genetics or human heredity. For example, changing ideas about whether heredity was conceived as hard or soft – that is to say, the responsiveness of heredity to environmental influences – affected the boundaries between the life and social sciences, as well as the very meaning of such terms as "race" or "eugenics."

A central argument of Political Biology is that the relationship between science and politics is underdetermined. That is, a variety of scientific views and political positions are compatible, and moreover, they are mutually constitutive. One of the aims of the book is to illustrate that the soft hereditarian ideas suggested by epigenetics must logically have progressive social and political implications. Meloni argues that we must turn to history to understand the diverse and, importantly, contingent ways that particular ideas about human heredity came to be aligned with different political views and goals. To this aim, he examines the range of ways that professional biologists politicized hereditary science in the turbulent first few decades of the 20th century before the association between hard heredity and [End Page 278] right politics crystallized into the dominant, and seemingly natural, view of heredity that we have inherited today. Meloni thus outlines a political "quadrant" that includes not only the familiar right- Mendelians and left-Lamarckians, but also left-Mendelians and right- Lamarckians.

Left-Mendelism, characterized by a commitment to socialist revolution through (hard hereditarian) eugenics, can be seen in the ideas of H. J. Muller and the Soviet eugenics project more broadly. This position saw the germ plasm as a great equalizer that freed disadvantaged groups from the effects of potentially damaging environmental or economic circumstances, and saw in this common hereditary background the basis for humanity's genetic improvement in the ideal socialist society. While left-Lamarckians similarly saw in human heredity the potential for a socialist transformation, their methods of reform were instead based on a view of the malleability and regenerative potential of heredity. Here, for example, we see Paul Kammerer, whose controversial experiments with midwife toads were aimed at the possibility of guided hereditary change and rejuvenation. Equally interesting, and largely ignored by social scientists, were the ideas of right-wing Lamarckians. These biologists emphasized the negative degenerative effects of the environment, and further, believed that certain historically disadvantaged groups (typically races or classes) were irrevocably damaged and thus less worthy. Some, such as Ernest MacBride, saw these acquired negative traits as even "harder" – that is, more fixed – than hard Mendelian traits, and advocated the need for racist eugenic measures on this basis.

Contemporary epigenetic research seems to be eroding the hard boundary between heredity and environment. Meloni shows that the broader implications being drawn from this transition appear to be replicating old ways...

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