Control is a book about eugenics, what geneticist Adam Rutherford
calls "a defining idea of the twentieth century." Inspired by Darwin's
ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory
for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America,
where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists,
and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological
cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics
looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty
years--from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing
techniques--have brought the idea of population purification back into
the mainstream.
Eugenics has "a short history, but a long past," Rutherford writes. The
first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key
philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their
genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the
book explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and
culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an
eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to improve society
through reproductive control.
With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why
eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite
its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring
questions--did eugenics work in Nazi Germany? And could it work
today?--revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the
scientific impossibility of its realization.
