Explores the political forces underlying shifts in thinking about the respective influence of heredity and environment in shaping human behavior, and the feasibility and morality of eugenics.

By the 1950s, eugenics had lost its scientific status; it now belonged to the context rather than to the content of science. Interest in the subject was also at low ebb. But that situation would soon change dramatically. Indeed, in an essay-review published in 1993, Philip Pauly commented that a “eugenics industry” had come to rival the “Darwin industry” in importance, although the former seemed less integrated than the latter. Since then, the pace of publication on eugenics, including American eugenics, (...) has only accelerated, while the field has become even more fractured, moving in multiple and even contradictory directions. This essay explores the trajectory of work on the history of American eugenics since interest in the subject revived in the 1960s, noting trends and also fractures. The latter are seen to result partly from the fact that professional historians no longer own the subject, which has attracted the interest of scholars in several other disciplines as well as scientists, political activists, and journalists, and also from the fact that the history of eugenics has almost always been policy-oriented. Historians’ desire to be policy-relevant and at the same time attentive to context, complexity, and contingency has generated tensions at several levels: within individuals, among historians, and between professional historians and others who also engage with the history of eugenics. That these tensions are resolved differently by different authors and even by the same authors at different times helps explain why the fragmentation that Pauly noted is not likely to be overcome anytime soon. (shrink)

The ArgumentWhat are the aims of genetic services? Do any of these aims deserve to be labeled “eugenics”? Answers to these strenuously debated questions depend not just on the facts about genetic testing and screening but also on what is understood by “eugenics,” a term with multiple and contested meanings. This paper explores the impact of efforts to label genetic services “eugenics” and argues that attempts to protect against the charge have seriously distorted discussion about their purpose. Following Ruth Chadwick, (...) I argue that the existence of genetic services presupposes that genetic disease is undesirable and that means should be offered to reduce it. I further argue that the economic cost of such disease is one reason why governments and health care providers deem such services worthwhile. The important question is not whether such cost considerations constitute “eugenics,” but whether they foster practices that are undesirable and, if so, what to do about them. The wielding of the term “eugenics” as a weapon in a war over the expansion of genetic services, conjoined with efforts to dissociate such services from the abortion controversy, has produced a rhetoric about the aims of these services that is increasingly divorced from reality. Candor about these aims is a sine qua non of any useful debate over the legitimacy of the methods used to advance them. (shrink)

In recent years, as newborn screening has expanded to include conditions for which treatment is questionable, new rationales for screening have proliferated. One such rationale is the potential reproductive benefit to parents from the detection of a genetic condition or carrier status in infants. An unanticipated consequence of invoking knowledge of reproductive risk as a major benefit of screening has been to open newborn screening to the charge that it constitutes state‐sanctioned eugenics. Thus, an endeavor that had been viewed as (...) the converse of state programs of selective breeding has come to be seen in some quarters as yet another of its incarnations. The result has been serious and self‐inflected harm to the reputation of newborn screening programs. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that the question of the relative importance of innate characteristics and institutional arrangements in explaining human difference was vehemently contested in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus Sir Francis Galton’s work of the 1860s should be seen as an intervention in a pre-existing controversy. The central figure in these earlier debates—as well as many later ones—was the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s view, human nature was fundamentally shaped by (...) history and culture, factors that accounted for most mental and behavioral differences between men and women and among people of different classes, nationalities, and races. Indeed, Mill’s whole program of social reform depended on the assumption that human differences were not fixed by nature. To identify the leading figures in these disputes about difference and the concrete context in which they occurred, we explore three debates in which Mill played a key role: over the capacities and rights of women, the viability of peasant proprietorship in India and Ireland, and the status of black labor in Jamaica. The last two draw our attention to the important colonial context of the nature–nurture debate. We also show that ideas that for us seem of a piece were not always linked for these earlier thinkers, nor did views on innateness necessarily have the political correlates that we now take for granted. (shrink)

Newborn screening for the genetic disease phenylketonuria (PKU) is generally considered the greatest success story of applied human genetics. Even those generally skeptical of the value of genetic testing often comment enthusiastically on this program. In fact, PKU screening has been plagued with serious problems since its inception in the early 1960s. This essay describes some of these difficulties and asks what lessons they hold for other screening programs. It also argues that realism in our assessment of such programs requires (...) that we pay greater attention to the concrete experience of families. How screening should work in theory is of less importance than how it does work in practice. (shrink)

The bitterness and protracted character of the biometrician–Mendelian debate has long aroused the interest of historians of biology. In this paper, we focus on another and much less discussed facet of the controversy: competing interpretations of the inheritance of mental defect. Today, the views of the early Mendelians, such as Charles B. Davenport and Henry H. Goddard, are universally seen to be mistaken. Some historians assume that the Mendelians' errors were exposed by advances in the science of genetics. Others believe (...) that their mistakes could have been identified by contemporaries. Neither interpretation takes account of the fact that the lapses for which the Mendelian eugenicists are now notorious were, in fact, mostly identified at the time by the biometricians David Heron and Karl Pearson. In this paper we ask why their objections had so little impact. We think the answer illustrates an important general point about the social prerequisites for effective scientific critique. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This study explores the impact of both individual ethics (IE) and organizational ethics (OE) on ethical intention (EI). Ethical intention, or the individual's intention to engage in ethical behavior, is useful as a dependent variable because it relates to behavior which can be an expression of values, but also is influenced by organizational and societal variables. The focus is on EI in international business decision-making, since the international context provides great latitude in making ethical decisions. Results demonstrate that both IE (...) and OE influence EL Ethical congruence is also discussed as a positive influence. Younger managers are more influenced by OE than older managers. The findings call for creating governance mechanisms to enhance ethical congruence, thereby increasing the likelihood of managers making ethical choices in organizational decision-making. (shrink)

This book from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity provides a faith-based evaluation of recent technologies and trends in bioethics--including the current debate surrounding stem cell research. Fifteen noted scholars and medical practitioners discuss some of today's new and controversial work in biomedicine--xenotransplantation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and more--and evaluate from a Christian perspective both the science and the ethical questions it raises. Designed to orient general readers to the current state of biomedical research, Cutting-Edge Bioethics is must reading for (...) anyone wishing to confront and wrestle with the challenging moral issues posed by this ever-advancing field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recovering One's Self from PsychosisA Philosophical AnalysisThe author reports no conflicts of interest.Rosanna Wannberg (2024) has given us a dense but helpful introduction to certain philosophical questions raised by the fact that many patients recovering from psychotic illnesses describe their recovery in terms of gaining or regaining a 'sense of self' and a 'sense of agency,' which often involves acceptance of the 'fact' of being mentally ill, for example, (...) of 'having schizophrenia.' She raises two important questions: How should we understand what is going on in these accounts? and What are the implications of these reports for our understanding of what it is to have a 'sense of self' or a 'sense of agency'—of 'subjectivity' generally—which might have, both, clinical and nonclinical implications?What does it mean to have a self or a sense of having one, agency or a sense of having it? One might think these are the possession or experience of something 'inner' such as feelings of confidence or assurance, perhaps having a kind of inner structure or a set of deeply held ideas which give us coherence, motivate us and justify our actions, and which we can know by 'looking inward,' in an introspective act which provides direct, privileged acquaintance.Yet Wittgenstein called this a dangerously misleading 'picture' which 'held us captive,' and needed always to be 'gotten rid of' (Wittgenstein, 1958). One way of seeing the problem is to consider that no inner 'object,' no thing inside us, can be, or give us a sense of having, a self or agency, because no mere thing (whether an experience of confidence, or having an inner structure) can have any meaning or provide any explanation. A thing (like a word on a page) is just a thing—inert, dead— and must be interpreted, that is used, before it can play a role in our 'forms of life' (Wittgenstein, 1958) including explaining our sense of self or agency.Semantic externalists (Burge, 1979; Putnam, 1975), have argued that even what is internal to our minds—like thoughts—have contents which are determined by experiences in the 'outside' world in which we have lived and learned: if our experiences in the world, they have shown, were different, then so, also, would be the contents of our thoughts. It has even been argued that internal mental experiences which appear to be purely phenomenological (such as an image or a thought-token, so-called narrow content) can only [End Page 67] be identified and thought about using concepts having references in the external world: there is, so it is claimed, no narrow content (Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne, 2018); or, if there is, it is of no explanatory use in psychology (Fodor, 1994).If this is the philosophical background from which Wannberg confronts first-person accounts of recovery from psychosis which include (re)gaining a sense of self or agency, and if this philosophy is right, what becomes of the accounts? How are they to be understood?To meet this challenge, Wannberg invokes an alternative account of self-possession and firstperson authority provided by Richard Moran (2001). Moran's position is that we find or possess ourselves when we find or hold beliefs about the world which we do not merely believe but endorse or avow, where to endorse or avow a belief about the world is to find and endorse reasons in the world, which support that belief. Thus, I can avow that it's raining if I can look outside and see that it is raining. This Moran calls the transparency condition. Endorsing or avowing both a belief and the external reasons for it gives the self what Moran refers to as authenticity and which also might be said to provide cohesion, consistency and intelligibility—plausibly, a 'sense of self.'The transparency condition also applies to beliefs that justify actions. We act intentionally when we can give good reasons for what we do (Anscombe, 1957; Moran, 2001) and we can give good reasons for what we do when we can identify facts in the world that support those reasons. Thus, the transparency condition can explain both a sense of self and a sense... (shrink)

Countersexual society -- Countersexual reversal practices -- Theories -- Countersexual reading exercise -- On philosophy as a better way of taking it in the ass: deleuze and "molecular homosexuality.

IntroductionThe abstracts of a conference are important for informing the participants about the results that are communicated. However, there is poor reporting in conference abstracts in disability research. This paper aims to assess the reporting in the abstracts presented at the 5th African Network for Evidence-to-Action in Disability (AfriNEAD) Conference in Ghana.MethodsThis descriptive study extracted information from the abstracts presented at the 5th AfriNEAD Conference. Three reviewers independently reviewed all the included abstracts using a predefined data extraction form. Descriptive statistics (...) were used to analyze the extracted information, using Stata version 15.ResultsOf the 76 abstracts assessed, 54 met the inclusion criteria, while 22 were excluded. More than half of all the included abstracts (32/54; 59.26%) were studies conducted in Ghana. Some of the included abstracts did not report on the study design (37/54; 68.5%), the type of analysis performed (30/54; 55.56%), the sampling (27/54; 50%), and the sample size (18/54; 33.33%). Almost all the included abstracts did not report the age distribution and the gender of the participants.ConclusionThe study findings confirm that there is poor reporting of methods and findings in conference abstracts. Future conference organizers should critically examine abstracts to ensure that these issues are adequately addressed, so that findings are effectively communicated to participants. (shrink)