BRAVE NEW WORLD OF BIOSOCIAL SCIENCE

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12058
• Date: 01 February 2015
• Author: DOUGLAS S. MASSEY
• Published date: 01 February 2015

BRAVE NEW WORLD OF BIOSOCIAL SCIENCE∗

DOUGLAS S. MASSEY

Office of Population Research, Princeton University

KEYWORDS: biosocial epigenetics, allostatic load, telomere, genes, environment

The last attempt to marry biological and social science occurred in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, and at that time, the union did not go well. Neither biology

nor social science was very well developed, leaving scientists in both disciplines ill posi-

tioned to make use of the two perspectives. The field of genetics, in particular, was in its

infancy. The managed breeding of simple organisms such as sweet peas and fruit flies con-

firmed that something called “genes” existed, that genetic traits could be inherited, and

that gene expression depended on combinations of dominant and recessive genes; but no

one knew what genes were made of or how genetic information was transmitted in the

course of reproduction.

Social science, for its part, had only recently been invented, and powerful statistical

techniques, complex data sets, and sophisticated analytic models lay years in the future.

As a result, there was much theorizing and little hard data analysis, yielding slow progress

adjudicating between competing concepts and theories. This reality left ample room for

fallible human scientists to project their own prejudices into the theoretical schemes they

constructed, leading to a proliferation of competing schools of thought—structuralist,

functionalist, Marxist, Freudian, and Darwinian—all with very different political

implications.

The marriage of social and biological science was pursued mainly by social scientists

working in the Darwinian tradition, such as Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, and Karl

Pearson. They drew from a simple model of Mendelian inheritance—the only model

available at the time—in which genes were passed from parents to offspring and duly

expressed as a phenotype. Once expressed, the genes were subject to natural selection

through competition to produce a “survival of the fittest.” Because Darwinian social sci-

entists were themselves White and upper class, it was a short inferential leap to conclude

that people like them had risen to the top of society because of their superior genetic

endowments.

This hypothesis was seemingly confirmed by the nascent field of intelligence testing,

which showed that the measures of mental ability varied sharply by race, class, and eth-

nicity, with upper class Whites of northern European extraction coming out on top. Dif-

ferences in measured intelligence also were found to follow family lines, whereas class

differences persisted over time and across generations. It was thus another short infer-

ential leap to conclude that human society could be improved by encouraging the repro-

duction of people with high measured intelligence and discouraging the reproduction of

those with low assessed abilities. This view perforce meant promoting the reproduction of

∗Direct correspondence to Douglas S. Massey, Office of Population Research, Princeton University,

Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 (e-mail: dmassey@princeton.edu).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12058

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 1 127–131 2015 127