Eugenics will never work – thankfully

In his most recent book, How to Argue With a Racist, the geneticist Adam Rutherford set out a lucid account of how the basis for many widely held and apparently commonsensical ideas about race are pseudoscientific; and he lightly sketched, along the way, the historical context in which they arose and the ideological prejudices that nourished them. We might have some half-baked ideas about how evolution works — and have unthinkingly accepted racial categories invented by 18th-century imperialists — but, he assured us in perhaps the standout line of the book, the underlying genetics is ‘wickedly complicated’.

Control is a companion piece to that one. It again looks at the way in which ideological and political ideas co-opt science, or a half-baked understanding of it. These days, thanks to the Nazis, ‘eugenics’ is so dirty a word that it tends to blight anything it touches; and to that end it’s applied in newspaper scare stories to a whole range of interventions and ideas.