Dr. Daniel J. Kevles
Dr. Daniel J. Kevles is the J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities at the California Institute of Technology, a member of that distinguished faculty since 1964. He lectures widely on the history of science and technology and their relationship to society. Receiving his B.S. in physics from Princeton University, he studied a year at Oxford, then returned to earn his Ph.D. in American History and the History of Science.
A visiting professor at the Ecole de Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Kevles was also a visiting fellow at Harvard University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto. Professor Kevles was named The Philip Maurice Deneke Lecturer by Oxford University in 1994, Distinguished Lecturer by the History of Science Society in 1992, and Sarton Lecturer by American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985.
Recognized internationally as an expert on the history of contemporary science and technology, Dr. Kevles has numerous publications. He is the author of several books and articles on the social and moral aspects of genetic engineering, including In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, and The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project.
The Human Genome Project is an international cooperative effort to map and sequence every gene in the human genome, the complement of DNA that defines our species. While scientifically exciting, the Project has exacerbated ethical apprehensions concerning the uses of human genetics. Since the working out of the genetic code, in the 1950s and 1960s, many observers have worried that new human genetic knowledge will be used to produce a super race or to rid the population of people determined to be genetically "undesirable." In short, they have feared that it will lead to a revival of eugenics. The eugenics movement, which flourished in many countries during the first several decades of our century, exploited theories of human heredity to stigmatize minority groups, assist in rationalizing a nationally discriminatory policy of immigration restriction, and justify the sterilization of thousands of people. In Germany, it helped lead to the Holocaust. Nowadays, the shadow of eugenics hangs over the Human Genome Project, which is producing information about human genetic makeup at an accelerating pace. In fact, as this talk will argue, apprehensions that the Project will lead to a new eugenics are largely unfounded,. However, the Project does raise genuine social and ethical issues. These center on how human genetic information will be used and controlled in medicine, employment, insurance, and society at large.
The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein, claims that the United States is now stratified occupationally and socioeconomically primarily by general intelligence and that this intelligence is reliably measurable by IQ tests and is determined far more by genes than by environment. It also insists that racial groups differ from each other in their innate mental capacities, that low intelligence is a likely cause of numerous social problems, and that high-fertility rates among low-income groups are increasing the frequency of genes for low intelligence in the population. However, such claims were made in the early twentieth century, when IQ testing first came into vogue. The objects of disparagement largely comprised white rather than non-white minority groups, particularly immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. At the time, the claims were called into serious question by research in anthropology, psychology, and genetics. The social and economic changes that have taken place in the United States during the last half century has also proved them wrong. This lecture will review the early debates over IQ and its social implications and draw lessons from them for the merits of the analysis advanced in The Bell Curve.
Amgen, the world's largest biotechnology company located in Thousand Oaks, California, joined California Lutheran University as a co-sponsor of the 1995 and 1996 Harold Stoner Clark Lectures, and provided a grant to support the lecture series in these two years.
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Harold Stoner Clark Lectures /1995 /chenxi@robles.callutheran.edu