Backdoor to Eugenics

A discussion of the social and political implications of genetic technologies. The author says that by using genes as a scapegoat, we are ignoring evidence for the causes of problems such as crime and mental illness and subsequently paving the way for the development of eugenics.

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The enormous advances in recent biomedical genetics have blinded us to their socially dangerous spin-offs. In "Backdoor to Eugenics", Troy Duster grapples with the social and political implications of the new genetic technologies. He sees the promise of the new technologies for lessening human suffering but warns against the appropriators who ominously substitute genetic answers to problems linked to identifiable groups such as Jews, Scandinavians, African-Americans, Italians and Arabs. This development has fuelled the kind of old-line thinking about race and ethnicity that was popular at the turn of the century, but temporarily buried after World War II. The author documents an increasing propensity to see crime, mental illness, and even intelligence as expressions of genetic predisposition. He shows how we are ignoring evidence for the causes of problems thereby weakening our ability to address and solve them. It is ironic that today's technology has identified select social groups as being at higher risk for specific genetic disorders.
Thus we may be unwittingly opening and accepting eugenics by the backdoor in efforts to control an ever widening band of "genetic defects" and "genetic disorders". Duster urges us not to sell the new genetics technologies short, but also not to inflate what can be done with them.