Political Biology

Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics

M. Meloni

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137377722
• Thema: Scienze sociali
• Thema: Studi sullo sviluppo globale

This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human society via biological knowledge; the repositioning, after 1945, of biological thinking into a liberal-democratic, human rights framework; and the present postgenomic crisis in which the genome can no longer be understood as insulated from environmental signals.
In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigeneticswe may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.

1

Political Biology and the Politics of Epistemology

The historical context: the long twentieth century of the gene and beyond

This book is an exploration of the diverse transformations that have occurred in the space between biology and politics during the twentieth century, when the modern view of heredity, epitomized by genetics, took shape, was consolidated, and finally was challenged again.

Although the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel and his work bears the felicitous date of 1900, so that the last century really is definable as “the century of the gene” (Keller, 2000), one must look beyond both its beginning and end to assess thoroughly the social significance of the genetic view of heredity. It was, in this sense, a long twentieth century.

First, one must go back farther to understand the epistemic conditions that made Mendel’s rediscovery intelligible at all (Bowler, 1989). I refer in particular to the elaboration of hard heredity by Francis Galton and August Weismann in the last decades of the nineteenth century, an effort that would be completed by Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen in the early twentieth century. 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 (Bonduriansky, 2012), can be seen as the key conceptual move that created the epistemic space within which the Mendelian notion of a particulate and stable hereditary material (later christened the gene) could be situated.

The move toward hard heredity was a radical break with the popular and scientific views of heredity that dominated the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, especially in medical writings.

These views, which we can call for simplicity soft hereditarian (actually a much later and somehow questionable terminology)¹, converged on the idea of a direct and formative influence of the environment on the hereditary material. Heredity in the soft version is affected by the parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime experiences, not fixed at conception (Bonduriansky, 2012). The hereditary material can be modified “either by direct induction by the environment, or by use and disuse, or by an intrinsic failure of constancy.” The modified genetic material would then be transmittable to offspring (Mayr, 1980: 4).

The widespread belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Zirkle, 1946) was historically identified with Lamarckism (though largely preceded it) or, after 1880, Neo-Lamarckism. In 1909, two French biologists, Yves Delage and Marie Goldsmith put it this way:

Whatever theory emphasizes the influence of the environment and the direct adaptation of individuals to their environment, whatever theory gives to actual factors the precedence over predetermination can be designated as Lamarckism. (translation, 1912)

Much could be passed from parents to offspring before hard heredity became the accepted view. For instance, according to the theory of telegony, even the characteristics of a previous mate were believed transmittable from a mother to her offspring. Some animal breeders held fast to this model as late as the early twentieth century.

After 1900 hard heredity crystallized as the main and, eventually, only possible view of heredity. This was truly a revolution, setting in motion vast changes in the general understanding of the relationship between human beings and their biological substance. But its impact went beyond even this, reaching also into politics and the organization of knowledge. As we will see, hard heredity fostered new demarcations between the ontological domains of the biological and the social, nature and nurture, the life and the social sciences.

Although hard heredity was ascendant for decades, its domination has lately been challenged. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have brought major conceptual challenges to the once-firm concept of the gene. These challenges are gathered today under the broad umbrella of the postgenomic age. Today scientists are exploring a number of gaps in our knowledge of genes, unforeseen complexities surrounding the hereditary material. These studies have revised the view of the genome in a seemingly backward direction: no longer fixed from birth but instead deeply affected by environmental signals, from cell to society.

The genome of the twenty-first appears to be, as Barbara McClintock anticipated, “a highly sensitive organ” (1984; see Keller, 1983). It has become a “developing genome” (Moore, 2015), subject to time and space, biography and milieu (Lappé and Landecker, 2015). A “reactive genome” (Gilbert, 2003; Keller, 2011, 2014; Griffiths and Stotz, 2013) or a “postgenomic genome” is “an exquisitely sensitive reaction (or response) mechanism” (Keller, 2015), powerfully influenced by all sorts of biological, but also “sociocultural” pressures, originating in the individual body or society at large: toxins, work stress, nutrition, socio-economic status, maternal care, and grandparental lifestyle. This new understanding is a paradoxical product of scientific advances that were expected to deepen and confirm preexisting theories of the fixed gene, but as Evelyn Fox Keller noted even fifteen years ago, “contrary to all expectations, instead of lending support to the familiar notions of genetic determinism” advances in genetics have posed “critical challenges to such notions” (2000: 5).

One has simply to look at the huge explosion of the literature on epigenetics to see how entrenched this reactive view of the gene has become in a relatively short time. Epigenetics concerns environmental regulation of gene expression. Rather than just a present mania, it would be better to understand epigenetics as the last chapter of an often neglected but very honorable story of going “beyond the gene,” (Sapp, 1987) looking at various “layers of non-Mendelian inheritance” (Richards, 2006; Jablonka and Lamb, 2014). Although epigenetics is often employed in a broad and nebulous sense – and its capacity to infiltrate language, and therefore its success, partly depends on this vagueness (Meloni and Testa, 2014) – a significant part of research on epigenetic mechanisms implies possible transgenerational effects (Jablonka and Raz, 2009). Thus biologists are suddenly discussing again “soft inheritance” (Richards, 2006; Gilbert and Epel, 2009; Bonduriansky, 2012) or “inheritance of acquired characters” (Smythies, Edelstein and Ramachandran, 2014) or even the “dirty word,” as Ernst Mayr called it, of Lamarckism (Jablonka and Lamb, 1995, 2005, 2008; Vargas, 2009; Gissis and Jablonka, 2011; Baiter, 2000; see also Burkhardt, 2013).

This turn to soft heredity has not remained confined to biological debates. An array of sociological, anthropological, and epidemiological studies now focuses on the idea that early-life developmental factors can have an influence not only on adult life but also, potentially, on the next generation(s). Claims that experiences of past generations can be transferred to later generations via epigenetic processes and influence, for instance, individuals’ vulnerability to disease, are growing at a rapid pace. Ancestral obesity or malnutrition, prepubescent paternal smoking, the shock of 9/11 and the Holocaust, the 1918 pandemic influenza, and American slavery have all been considered as contemporary sources of ill health or the cause of some sort of present epigenetic difference, if not abnormality.² “Soft inheritance has now been reborn,” say Mark Hanson and Peter Gluckman (Hanson, Low, and Gluckman, 2011), leading promoters of the idea of in utero programming of adult vulnerability to disease.

It is important to clarify, however, that epigenetics and the wider notion of the reactive genome does not return us to soft heredity in the sense that prevailed before Weismann (although interestingly there are claims that even some apparently bizarre ideas such as telegony have been “rediscovered”, see Crean, Kopps, and Bonduriansky, 2014). History is a not a pendulum that swings back and forth between otherwise immutable positions. It makes more sense to speak of a transformation of Lamarckism (Gissis and Jablonka, 2011) or a modification of the soft vs. hard heredity debate (Moore, 2015). What circulates among today’s researchers and authors is an appeal for a richer and more “pluralistic model of heredity” capable of combining “genetic and nongenetic mechanisms of inheritance” and of recognizing “the reality of both hard and soft inheritance, and the potential for a range of intermediate phenomena” (Bonduriansky, 2012).

Nonetheless, it cannot be underestimated how traumatic this view can be for the sort of progressive story told by the fathers of the modern evolutionary synthesis (Mayr, 1982), in which a one-way march from soft to hard heredity (from darkness to light!) was the only possible direction of history.

This historical arc, from Weismann to epigenetics, from the making to the unmaking of hard heredity, from the narrowing of heredity to its present broadening, from its modernist reification (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, 2012) and purification to postmodernist dispersion and complexification, in sum the transition from Heredity 1.0 to Heredity 2.0 (Meloni, 2015a) is the intellectual background and conceptual battlefield where I look at the political implications of human heredity.

Biology and social values

There are many fruitful directions from which to consider the connection between biology and social values. One can engage contests over human origins, the politics of sex and gender in biology, the doctrine of the cell state, animal social behavior, and the use of immunological and organic metaphors in human society. However, investigating the connection between biology and social values from the viewpoint of soft-versus-hard heredity, as I do, is a particularly productive choice for several reasons.

First, as I have noted, this is a timely choice given the new influence of epigenetics and the controversial evolutionary question that arises thereby: whether this openness of the genome to external influences indicates a return to rejected views of soft heredity. Thanks to the present ascendancy of epigenetics, we are now able to look at the story of hard heredity that started with Galton and Weismann genealogically, in all its precariousness and even finitude. Without the present destabilization of hard heredity, the founding events of the modern view of biological inheritance would seem more fixed and taken-for-granted, less open to an “excavation” (Daston, 2004) that consigns these events to their contingency. We are in a position to wake them from what Michel Foucault called “silent monuments” (Foucault, 1972).

This book is therefore an archaeology of the past – going back to the making and consolidation of hard heredity and exploring its epistemic and political implications for the social sciences and wider society – made possible by a tension in the present, namely current challenges to hard heredity and their implications for evolutionary theory, the social sciences, and society at large. And this archaeology allows claims about a possible future in which the rift between biology and society – which marked the twentieth century as a consequence of a certain view of heredity, the gene, and biology in general – is bridged.

Second, I choose this soft-versus-hard debate because it is a good point of entry point into wider contests over epistemic values and knowledge production, in particular the barriers between the life and social sciences. Whether the experiences of one generation pass on to the next is a conceptual and logical watershed in defining the boundary between the biological and the social. In a soft-heredity view, the social is always on the brink of becoming biological, habits are turned into instincts, and life experiences of a previous generation are embedded in the biology of a successive one. Lamarckism or soft heredity is the condition for a fully biosocial or biohistorical investigation, for a continuous exchange of the biological and the social. Not by chance, when Lamarckism was the dominant view amongst social scientists, from Spencer to early 1900, the autonomy of the sociocultural was just a mirage.

By contrast, hard heredity maintains separation between the social and the biological. Genes are passed on, but the lifetime experience of each generation is canceled in the next, and each generation has the chance to start anew, as Weismann noticed. No significant sociocultural experience can leave a mark upon the hereditary materials (not necessarily bad news, as Alfred Russel Wallace noticed, considering how often significant life experiences have been for human society negative and even catastrophic ones, from famine to war). None less than the pioneering anthropologist Alfred Kroeber embraced hard heredity to build an idea of the sociocultural as super-organic and independent of biological influences (Kroeber, 1915, 1916a, 1916b, 1917; see Kronfeldner, 2009; Meloni, 2016). Twentieth-century anthropology, like twentieth-century evolutionary thought, had to cut the Lamarckian knot – to be rid of the “confusion” between the social and the biological in order to establish clear epistemic boundaries between disciplines.

Finally, few debates have been so politicized in the history of biology as the application of soft and hard heredity to human affairs. I have always considered it very telling that in 1928 Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar for education, decided to screen the tragic story of Austrian zoologist Paul Kammerer, whose suicide, two years before, marked in a sense the end of the “golden age” of Lamarckism (Gliboff, 2011), at least in Europe. Lunacharsky saw in Kammerer’s story a source of politicization. He and some fellow Bolsheviks understood the struggle for the scientific legitimacy of the inheritance of acquired features as a contribution to a more progressive, socialist view. However, not everyone in the Soviet Union agreed with Lunacharsky’s ideas about the meaning of soft inheritance for the socialist revolution, leading to intense debate that I will discuss in the chapters that follow. For this other group, people like Yuri Filipchenko, soft inheritance just meant that social inequality could be passed on from society to the genes of poor people, who were then doubly disadvantaged: socially and biologically. In some respects, this debate is still with us, now that the ascendancy of epigenetics has restored soft inheritance to a place of concern in the realms of public policy and public health.

An exercise in political epistemology: setting up a research program

Conjoining what is disjoined

This book explores the entanglement of two apparently distinct subjects: first, the political translation into the public sphere of certain debates in biology (such as hard versus soft heredity) and their polysemic association with sociopolitical values; second, the reconfiguration of the border between life and social sciences following the rise and fall of certain scientific views of human heredity.

Prima facie, the two problems seem distant from each other. No matter the efforts of various traditions, from Foucauldians to science and technology scholars, to write a conjoined history of politics, science, and the social sciences (Jasanoff, 2004), the academic departmentalization of our intellectual life has proved so far sufficiently leak-proof to situate the first theme under the label of “politics” and the second as a matter of history or sociology of science. However, real history doesn’t follow such boundaries. One of the arguments of this book is precisely that, in the history of human heredity, there exists a dangerous and inextricable, irreducible affinity between epistemic³ and political factors, the organization of knowledge and political events. This entwinement between knowledge and politics has been undertheorized so far, but it is at the core of the events I describe. For instance, Galton, as everyone repeats, was the founder of both the nature/nurture dichotomy (ordering of knowledge as a consequence of his politics) and the eugenics movement (ordering of society as a consequence of his scientific view). This coincidence is well-noted, of course, by several scholars (firstly, Cowan, 1972a, b; 1977). However, has the interplay between knowledge production and political intervention, between Galton the dichotomous ideologue of nature-nurture and Galton the eugenicist been sufficiently appreciated?

It seems to me that scholars, with very few exceptions, have been successful enough in neutralizing this entwinement between “knowledge of heredity” and “formative power” (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, 2012) that establishes itself at the very beginning of the story narrated in this book. As a consequence of this neutralization, histories of eugenics as a chapter in political science are rarely, if ever, genealogies of the social sciences as a way of organizing a distinctive form of knowledge. Meanwhile, histories of the social sciences as autonomous disciplines rarely look at the broader political context in which social scientists interacted with biologists, eugenicists, and views of heredity. These histories offer little perspective on the questions I ask: Why did neo-Lamarckians recoil in horror at the prospect of hard heredity? Why did Kroeber embrace it enthusiastically? Why, after World War II, did anthropologist Ashley Montagu and geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky evangelize the uniqueness of man and the irreducibility of culture? What was all the fuss when sociobiologists denied this uniqueness three decades later? Finally, why, with today’s postgenomic genome and...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Political Biology and the Politics of Epistemology
• 2  Nineteenth Century: From Heredity to Hard Heredity
• 3  Into the Wild: The Radical Ethos of Eugenics
• 4  A Political Quadrant
• 5  Time for a Repositioning: Political Biology after 1945
• 6  Four Pillars of Democratic Biology
• 7  Welcome to Postgenomics: Reactive Genomes, Epigenetics, and the Rebirth of Soft Heredity
• 8  Conclusions: The Quandary of Political Biology in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index