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 as 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.

In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, it was widely assumed that society ought to foster the breeding of those who possessed favorable traits and discourage the breeding of those who did not. Controlled human breeding, or "eugenics" as it was called, was a movement with broad support that lasted into the 1930s. In this concise historical account, the author answers the questions of why eugenics, the search for means to propage only "good genes," was so attractive earlier in the the twentieth century, why it then fell into disrepute, and whether it has returned today in the...

This is the second of two volumes published by Cambridge University Press in honor of Richard Lewontin. The first volume, Evolutionary Genetics from Molecules to Morphology, honors Lewontin's more technical contributions to genetics and evolutionary biology. This second volume of essays honors the philosophical, historical, and political dimensions of his work. Given the range of Lewontin's own contributions, it is fitting that the volume covers such a wide range of perspectives on modern biology. He was a very successful practitioner of evolutionary genetics, a rigorous critic of the...