#x1C;Carlson's thoroughly readable, at times wryly entertaining, account of the history of the old eugenics shows that it was not invented by monsters, and that while some of its proponents were people one would not invite to lunch, many were progressive, decent radicals and doctors with a passion for constructive social reform. There are strange and unexpected precursors; sterilization started as what was thought to be the much#x13;needed cure for habitual masturbation. Many of the measures, including mandatory sterilization of the "unfit", were deemed in their day to be humane and progressive social policies. The fashionable commination of eugenics has obscured both the unpleasant physical realities about our genes and the wider truths about the two deep currents of human culture on which eugenics floated#x14;beating up the neighbours, and ensuring the quality of our own posterity. Carlson maintains an exemplary detachment: he does not demonize or mock, and extracts only limited morals. A biologist by trade, unlike some other biologists who have written much on this subject, he stands as a historian rather than a man with a big agenda. He attributes the change, around the end of the nineteenth century, from social reform to the application of newly available genetic ideas, to a mounting frustration at the sheer lack of progress that had been made in fifty years of sincere assaults on social problems by environmental means. Although much intellectual racism owed nothing to eugenics, it is sadly true that systematized bigotry, racism and genocide, for a brief period only, were able to use a primitive and substantially flawed understanding of human genetics as a rationalization for what they would have done anyway.

As such, genetics is a minor episode in this aspect of human history.#x1D;.