Eugenics and the Modern Synthesis, Part I

This is the first part of the 14th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books, and supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, the Othering & Belonging Institute, and Berkeley Public Health.

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THIS STORY BEGINS on a train. It is May 8, 1900, and we’re traveling from Cambridge to London. In one of the seats, we spy a slender, youngish man with a thatch of wavy brown hair, broad forehead, long nose and moustache. He is William Bateson, 38 years old, a biologist at St. John’s College, on his way to deliver a lecture at the Royal Botanical Society. As the train rattles along, he opens an old report from the proceedings of an obscure society for natural sciences that, although published 34 years ago, has only just begun to receive attention (while its author, poor man, has been dead...