A Galaxy of Genius? The Enduring Dream of Controlling Human Heredity

Nathaniel Comfort is Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.  He is the author of The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (2001), editor of The Panda's Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Controversy (2007), and author of The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes became the Heart of American Medicine (2012).

"What a galaxy of genius might we not create!"

• Francis Galton, 1865

"What a galaxy of genius might we not create!" burbled Francis Galton in 1865, exuberant about his conception of a voluntary human breeding program, to be informed by Darwinism. Subpar intelligence, he was convinced, lay at the root of poverty, promiscuity, disease, and antisocial behavior of all kinds. A similar enthusiasm girds contemporary social and behavioral genetics, or “sociogenomics.” In fact, every revolution in our understanding of heredity prompts a new wave of enthused hereditarianism: Darwinism, Mendelism, cytogenetics, molecular biology, genomics. This lecture will examine continuity and change in our enduring impulse to take control of our own evolution, and also the benefits and risks of our perennial drive to understand, and improve, human nature.