Eugenics and the Human/Animal Divide in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
By Leigha McReynolds,
Tor
| 09. 19. 2023
The 2011 X-Men franchise prequel, X-Men: First Class, briefly featured a mutant named Darwin who could adapt to any circumstances. For example, when he stuck his head in a fish tank he grew gills. Now if you’re a history of science nerd like me, you both appreciate the Darwinian reference and wish that the movie had instead named the character Lamarck, who theorized that individual animals could adapt to environments and experience physical changes during their lives—but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Darwin, on the other hand, believed that species changed through heredity and over many generations.
While in this case the slippage between evolutionary theorists and their ideas is harmless, there is a long tradition of misusing Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection to explain and justify concepts that are not scientific but are actually actively harmful. The creation and deployment of the term “social Darwinism” is one, and the development of the pseudoscience of eugenics in the late nineteenth century is another. Eugenics took concepts rooted in Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Joy Zhang, Progress Educational Trust | 08.12.2024
What do China's new ethical guidlines tell us about the country's changing attitude to human genome editing? Professor Joy Zhang reads between the lines...
Recently, China's National Science and Technology Ethics Committee introduced a new set of ethics guidelines on...
By Priyanka Runwal, Chemical and Engineering News | 08.05.2024
Saritee Sanodiya, 26, has spent countless days wondering if she’ll ever live a “normal” life. Growing up, Sanodiya often missed school, frequenting the hospital for sudden, life-threatening drops in her hemoglobin levels and excruciating pain in her joints. High fever...
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...