Abstract
In the history of biology, knowledge about human differences often has been produced through an interaction with politics and values assumed to be external to science. Two recent books—Jonathan Marks’ Is Science Racist? and Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology—shed new light on this interplay. While Marks looks into the field of anthropology, Meloni offers a historiographical view on the soft-hard heredity debate. Based on these new contributions, this essay addresses a number of current ways in which society and science conceptualize human differences through categories like race, gender, and class. Especially, this refers to the separation of what is taken as natural and purportedly fixed, from what is cultural and changeable.
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Notes
In short, the terms “soft heredity” and “hard heredity” were coined during the twentieth century to signal a contrast between genetic inheritance (hard heredity) with other theories that were loosely characterized by supporting the malleability of the transmitted traits, and the inclusion of acquired characteristics.
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Nieves Delgado, A. Science, Politics and the Production of Biological Knowledge: New Trends and Old Challenges. J Gen Philos Sci 49, 467–473 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-018-9406-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-018-9406-3