Fabricating Facts in Behavior Genetics

Since its emergence in 1960 as a subfield of psychology, behavior genetics has functioned primarily as what the historian of science Michael Gordin terms a “counter-establishment science.” While mainstream social sciences attributed socioeconomic and racial inequality to social, economic, and political factors, behavior genetics developed analytic methods that produced apparent evidence in support of eugenic theory that linked socioeconomic and racial inequality to genetic diversity. Social and natural scientists in neighboring fields initially critiqued the methods and dismissed the findings of behavior genetics. In the early 2000s, however, behavior genetics became the foundation for sociogenomics, in which a broad coalition of natural and social scientists embarked on a molecular hunt for the specific genes behind disparate social outcomes. With the results of behavior genetics serving as ground truth, this hunt could not fail: negative results could always be interpreted as anticipatory positive findings. This talk draws on core STS concepts to trace the long history of behavior genetics, from its eugenic past to its sociogenomic present, examining how the questionable methods of behavior genetics produced the foundational facts of sociogenomics.

Dr. Emily Merchant is a historian of science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the quantitative human sciences and technologies of human measurement. Her current project, Molecular Eugenics, combines archival research, oral history, and computational textual analysis to develop an intellectual, institutional, and material history of the genetic and genomic social sciences since the mid-twentieth century and their contribution to eugenic projects in the postgenomic era. Her first book, Building the Population Bomb (Oxford 2021), examines how human population growth became a subject of scientific expertise and an object of governmental and philanthropic intervention in the twentieth century. Past projects include studies of historical demography and agricultural history in the United States West, which use computational methods to explore migration between Mexico and the United States, the environmental consequences of agriculture on the Great Plains, and the changing living arrangements of older women. These projects have resulted in publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, International Migration Review, and Population Research and Policy Review, as well as the production of public-use datasets for historical demography and environmental history.

This event will only be held in-person in the History Conference Room, Building 200, Room 307.