Darwinian Disease Archaeology: Genomic Variants and the Eugenic Debate

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONNotwithstanding his provisional hypothesis of pangenesis, Darwin never developed a plausible or reliable theory of the mechanism of inheritance. ' In 1 87 1 in The descent of man Darwin argued against the polygenic scientific racism of the nascent discipline of Victorian anthropology which asserted that different human races were separately created species.2 He argued alternatively for a common descent of humans from a monogenic ancestry and that differentiating characteristics such as skin, eye or hair colour were, like customs, knowledge and beliefs, the result of social rather than forces of change. He also argued that mental states such as sympathy, empathy and altruism were the result of evolution and were not exclusively human.3 Darwin's arguments about the evolutionary forces underlying human development created an opportunity for the emergence of Social Darwinism which embraced Herbert Spencer's theory of progressive social evolution depending upon the 'survival of the fittest'.4 Social Darwinism proposed that charitable preservation of the vulnerable would allow the 'unfit' to procreate leading to inevitable human decline. Darwin disagreed with the premises of Social Darwinism arguing that preservation of the 'unfit' demonstrated the evolutionary development of mental emotions such as compassion.5The influence of breeding and heredity upon human evolution and survival was analyzed using statistical correlation by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who called his discipline Eugenics. Galton argued that Eugenics studied human heredity in order to manipulate human breeding to influence evolutionary 'progress'.6 Darwin admired the achievements of his cousin but his own theory of evolutionary natural selection contained no teleological progressive purpose.7Throughout the twentieth century eugenic interpretation of social change as the rationale for socio-biological engineering has stimulated a tide of philosophical, sociological and political critique.8 Current critics of evolutionary explanations of human consciousness and social organization argue that reductionist models of determinism and the politics of social and engineering are simply the most recent expression of eugenics in the twenty-first century.9 This critique contends that developments in genomic science will give rise to a society in which social discrimination will be determined by genetic heritage leading to new forms of social hierarchy dominated by artificially selected and genetically enhanced elites.10Contemporary human geneticists who hunt down the molecular ancestry of pathogenic disposition are twenty-first-century Darwinians using the theory of natural selection to understand variation in human disease susceptibility and drug metabolism. This paper will historicize the contemporary Darwinian disease chase in order to interrogate the radical debate it has stimulated about what the sociologist, Troy Duster, has called the potential for an unwitting biological reinscription of racist conceptualizations of race.11From the time that the nineteenth-century eugenist, E. J. Lidbetter, developed his method of genealogical-tree construction to investigate inherited 'traits',12 neither Darwinian ancestry hunting nor its radical critics have stood still. Throughout the twentieth century explanations of the relationship between human organic and social evolution have generated dynamic hegemonic conflict. An historical overview of twentieth-century eugenic debates is initially provided here to outline the context in which discourses on ancestry and race have shifted gears and directions in the last two decades.ANCESTRY OF EUGENICS AND BIOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISMFrancis Galton was born in the same year as the Augustinian monk from Moravia, Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-84), who produced the famous study of the inheritance of characteristics in sweet-peas which founded the science of genetics. …