Sociogenomics is the latest chapter in a tradition of
hereditarian social science dating back more than 150 years.
In the long term, eugenics would give way to the confluence of changing science and rising social activism--modern genetics and the civil rights movement would quash, but not eradicate the
hereditarian thinking that sought to parse humanity into the curable fit and the disabled defective.
However, Christine Ferguson's point that "the intensely
hereditarian aspects of 'The Critic as Artist' remain neglected" draws attention to an aspect of the essay which today's readers will inevitably find ideologically problematic: that is, Wilde's deployment of a quasi-Eugenicist discourse (65).
In several countries, England, for example, and Italy as well as in Poland, there were debates between
hereditarian, individualistic positions and more social problem and poverty-focused ones.
But at the time of The Scarlet Letter's composition, the departure of fathers from the home to the public sphere coincided with an emerging
hereditarian theory that posited the mother's far greater responsibility.
This positivist criminology incorporated
hereditarian and biological explanations for crime (borrowing from Italian criminologists) and environmental explanations (borrowing from French criminologists).
These early '
hereditarian' theories followed the belief also propagated by the 'polygenist thesis' that racial differences had existed from the beginning of humanity.
(14) American natural scientists in the 1890s "imposed a radically
hereditarian interpretation upon the new experimental discoveries," and American social scientists drew from evolutionary science intriguing possibilities for social control (Cravens xviii).
Eugenicists of all political backgrounds identified themselves as
hereditarian. (62) As eugenics became more widespread, the role of the environment was incorporated, and social welfare workers looked for environmental explanations for impoverished families.
Victorian openness arose, in large measure, from a new hope of improvement, and against a backdrop less colored by
hereditarian beliefs than has often been assumed.
Dental cavities are defined as a multifactorial disease, infectious and transmissible which interact with the host, the oral microflora, the substrate and the time and is
hereditarian. (3) One of the most common chronic diseases in children and despite its high prevalence it's a preventable disease.
Bowler, The Mendelian Revolution: The Emergence Of
Hereditarian Concepts in Modern Science and Society (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), 130-7.
