Breeding The human history of heredity, race, and sex

Presents a historical backdrop to current debates about heredity, sex and race.

Breeding charts more than two thousand years of ideas about the nature of sex and heredity. From the speculations of the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds to the birth of genetics in the modern age, John Waller examines how we came to solve one of the greatest of enigmas: why offspring tend to look like their parents. But this book goes further than telling a story of scientific advance. It also explores the social and political realities which often determined how people used the concept of heredity. It reveals how, from Plato's Republic to the modern IQ and race debate, the notion that some qualities of body and mind are inborn has been used to justify the supremacy of social elites and the racist ideologies of those who have profited from slavery and colonial expansion. This is a history of scientific developments, ideological inventions, and how the two have changed one another.

1 - Bred in the bone
2 - The ideology of blood
3 - Thinking about race: Moors, slaves and native Americans
4 - Polydactyly, preformation and racial science
5 - The invention of progress
6 - The patrician's malady and other afflictions
7 - Bakewell's sheep: the vogue for animal breeding
8 - Progress and decay
9 - Breeding in and out
10 - Monads, men and mockingbirds
11 - Degeneration and dire predictions
12 - 'Galaxies of geniuses'
13 - The gospel spreads
14 - From heredity to genetics
15 - Edging towards disaster
16 - 'Lives not worth living'
17 - The Double Helix and beyond
18 - The demise of post-war consensus

John Waller was educated at the universities of Oxford and London, and is now associate professor of the history of medicine at Michigan State University. He is the author of a number of books and articles on the history of science, medicine, and child warfare, including Fabulous Science (OUP, 2002), The Discovery of the Germ (Columbia University Press, 2005), and The Real Oliver Twist (Icon Books, 2006).