Ask and ye shall receive. In a recent post on eugenics, I claimed that the connection between early 20th century genetics and early 21st century genetic engineering was weak. I asked if anyone thought I was wrong, and in no time I got a comment from Razib at Gene Expression.
The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he’s shown how new plant species emerge from hybrids. When two species of plants form a hybrid, it doesn’t necessarily become a sterile dead end. In fact, hybridization is an important source of entirely new species. Rieseberg does his work mainly on sunflowers, and so whenever I walk past a charming row of them, I think of the weird inter-species mingling that may lurk in their past.
Today Daniel Kevles, a Yale historian, has an interesting review in the New York Times of a new book about eugenics. The book in question is War against the Weak, by Edward Black. It’s a cinderblock of a book, and it’s got a lot of chilling material to offer on how popular eugenics was in the United States in the earlier part of the century. A lot of people sincerely believed that criminals, blind people, sick babies, social misfits, and non-Nordic immigrants had to be stopped from poisoning the American gene pool. We’re not talking about a few racists here and there–we’re talking about leading biologists, doctors, philanthropists, Congressmen, and Supreme Court justices.
As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I’ve often had people say to me, “I just can’t believe that evolved.” Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature–the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of birds in flight. The implication was that these things were so beautiful and intricate that they had to be created for a purpose–a beautiful purpose, obviously.
Discover, September 30, 2003
James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA’s double helix, thinks the world would be a better place if there were fewer stupid people. “If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease,” Watson said on the documentary DNA, which aired in Britain in March. “The lower 10 percent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 percent.”