Into the Wild: The Radical Ethos of Eugenics

Abstract

The making of the modern (hard) view of heredity ushered in a dramatic conceptual transformation. This meant, in detail, the creation of a space of nature as opposed to nurture, of the stirp as opposed to the ephemeral individual, of the immortal germ-plasm as opposed to the transient reality of the body. These new discourses gave rise to a series of conceptual antitheses — innate/acquired, heredity/development, germ-cells/somatic cells, unchanging hereditary material/transient lifetime experiences, and later genotype/phenotype — that were not there in nineteenth century developmental biology, and would supply the conceptual arsenal on which much of twentieth-century politics and epistemology of the biology/society border was constructed.