Science, Politics and the Production of Biological Knowledge: New Trends and Old Challenges: Jonathan Marks: Is Science Racist? Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017, 142 pp, Hardcover €44.74, ISBN: 9780745689210 Maurizio Meloni: Political Biology. Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics. Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, 2016, 284 pp, Hardcover $150.00, ISBN: 9780199692026 [Book Review]

Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 49 (3):467-473 (2018)
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Abstract

In the history of biology, knowledge about human differences often has been produced through an interaction with politics and values assumed to be external to science. Two recent books—Jonathan Marks’ Is Science Racist? and Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology—shed new light on this interplay. While Marks looks into the field of anthropology, Meloni offers a historiographical view on the soft-hard heredity debate. Based on these new contributions, this essay addresses a number of current ways in which society and science conceptualize human differences through categories like race, gender, and class. Especially, this refers to the separation of what is taken as natural and purportedly fixed, from what is cultural and changeable.

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10.1007/s10838-018-9406-3

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The biological reification of race.Lisa Gannett - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2):323-345.
Why epigenetics is not a vindication of Lamarckism – and why that matters.Ute Deichmann - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:80-82.
Introduction: Why Biopower? Why Now?Vernon W. Cisney & Nicolae Morar - 2015 - In Vernon W. Cisney & Nicolae Morar (eds.), Biopower: Foucault and Beyond. University of Chicago Press. pp. 1-26.

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