Biological determinism

Biological determinism or biodeterminism is the belief that human behaviour is controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. It has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics, scientific racism, the supposed heritability of IQ, the supposed biological basis for gender roles, and the sociobiology debate. A pioneer of eugenics, Francis Galton, popularized the phrase nature and nurture, later often used to characterize the heated debate over whether genes or the environment determined human behaviour. Many scientists now see it as obvious that both factors are essential, and that they are intertwined.

Early ideas of biological determinism centred on the inheritance of undesirable traits, whether physical such as club foot or cleft palate, or psychological such as alcoholism, bipolar disorder and criminality. The belief that such traits were inherited led to the desire to solve the problem with the eugenics movement, led by a follower of Darwin, Francis Galton (1822–1911), by forcibly reducing breeding by supposedly defective people. By the 1920s, many states in America brought in laws permitting the compulsory sterilization of people considered genetically unfit, including inmates of prisons and mental hospitals. This was followed by similar laws in Germany in the 1930s.

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