Seminars Explore the Immorality of the Eugenics Movement and Its Implications Today – Bowdoin News

Hadley Horch and Scott McEachern

The second session featured Horch alongside noted anthropologist and former Bowdoin professor Scott MacEachern, who is now vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke Kunshan University in China. This discussion, titled Eugenics and the IQ Test, revisited the theme of the misuse of scientific knowledge. Particular attention was paid to the problems of trying to define and measure intelligence. Any documented difference in IQ scores between different racial and ethnic groups says more about inequality in societies than it does about intelligence, said Horch. Environmental and cultural factors are rarely well-controlled in these comparison studies, she added.

There are important lessons to be learned from studying the impact of eugenics in the last century, said Horch and Logan. Today we are exposed to brand new sources of information, vast troves of genomic information that weve never had before, said Logan, and in managing that there comes huge ethical responsibility. He is referring to the era ushered in by the Human Genome Projecta multiyear international scientific effort to map all human genes. The thirteen-year project, which concluded in 2003, has given scientists the most accurate reading yet of the entire human genetic sequence and greatly increased our capacity to survey the genomes of humans and other organisms. The discovery, said Logan, marked a quantum leap in human knowledge. There are, however, problems with the huge data sets used in the project, said Horch, because about 70 percent of the genetic information sampled is from people of white European stock. This points to an inherent bias in the data, she explained, so there is much in the way of complexity and richness that is not represented.

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Seminars Explore the Immorality of the Eugenics Movement and Its Implications Today - Bowdoin News