Political Biology, 1st ed. 2016 Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics

This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human society via biological knowledge; the repositioning, after 1945, of biological thinking into a liberal-democratic, human rights framework; and the present postgenomic crisis in which the genome can no longer be understood as insulated from environmental signals.
In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigenetics we may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.

1. Political Biology and the Politics of Epistemology
2. Nineteenth Century: From Heredity to Hard-Heredity
3. Into the Wild: The Radical Ethos of Eugenics
4. A Political Quadrant
5. Time for a Repositioning: Political Biology after 1945
6. Four Pillars of Democratic Biology
7. Welcome to Postgenomics: Reactive Genomes, Epigenetics and the Rebirth of Soft-Heredity
8. Conclusions: The Quandary of Political Biology in the Twenty-First Century

Maurizio Meloni is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. He is a social theorist working on the historical, conceptual, and political implications of the life sciences. He is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK, and has held two EU Marie Curie Fellowships, a Fulbright scholarship, and an Annual Membership (2014–2015) at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.