With Political Biology Maurizio Meloni has pulled together a strikingly wide range of scholarly sources from the history of the human sciences and heredity, much of it in service of very contemporary ends. The book's primary aims are to marshal historical scholarship to inform, enrich and complicate current understanding of the relations between biological theory and its apparent social, economic and political implications. There is a great deal that historians of science will enjoy and admire about Meloni's work, particularly the breadth of reading and commitment to delivering the value of historical research to contemporary social and policy predicaments, avoiding clichéd notions of ‘the lessons from history’ or ‘history repeating itself’. The learning is analytical and unpacked in ways that immediately signal how and why history matters today. His particular scholarly agenda is the ‘application of political epistemology to the history of biology’ (p. 13), which I will return to below.

The historical arguments of the book can be reduced to two clear claims. First, that biological and sociological research on humans began to part ways in the early decades of the twentieth century, largely thanks to developments in biological theory and the rise of ‘hard’ heredity. It is not clear whether Meloni thinks a rapprochement is now in order. Second, if we take history as our guide there are no good reasons to think that adherence to either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ heredity necessarily commits a person to a position on the political left or right. One key concern is that contemporary social and political scientists may otherwise be tempted to see too much significance in current bioscience developments, in particular the rise of epigenetics as meaning a possible return to a more socialist or environmentalist politics. Over the course of eight chapters Meloni builds a history of humanity in theories of heredity, emphasizing how certain biological notions were used either in support of or against views about the operations of society. Setting the stage in the late nineteenth century he subsequently structures the book around three key periods: c.1900 to the Second World War, the bioscience of which is characterized as ‘from hard heredity to Nazi “barbarous utopianism”’; 1945 to the new millennium, characterized as ‘the democratization of biology and the hardening of hard heredity’; and 2000 to the present, characterized as the postgenomic age (pp. 28–31).

In terms of the length of his narrative, it is fair to say that Meloni has produced one of our most comprehensive overviews of humanity in recent hereditarian thought. Because of this length and as a result of its agenda, however, it can be a little shallow in the telling. Medicine and racial anthropology, for instance, are not given sufficient attention, which means that the myriad ways in which other forms of ‘political biology’ have been important, be it in racial profiling or social policy, reproductive medicine and so on, are not mentioned. Jim Tabery's Beyond Versus (2014) and a 2015 special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences on Genomics and the Philosophy of Race, edited by Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Roberta L. Millstein and Rasmus Nielsen, make for important additional readings. Such narrowness is, however, a direct result of the book's project, concerned with how bioscience is related to social theory and policy through an application of political epistemology to history. As such Meloni intends to select only a range of ideal cases that allow him to map out his epistemic and sociopolitical landscape, beginning with Haeckel, Galton, Weismann and Wilhelm Johannsen, who give way to Davenport, Fisher, Haldane, Saleeby, Kammerer and so on. Political biology means the political biology of an intellectual elite, who are mined for political and biological allegiances. The question for BJHS readers becomes whether such a project has added to the historiography. Here I highlight some of the ways in which Political Biology paves the way for further historical research.

As some of the authors that Meloni draws upon have shown, the extent to which sociology and biology divorced in the twentieth century has already been problematized. Chris Renwick, for instance, has emphasized not only professional sociology's entwined roots with biology at the start of the twentieth century, but also the subsequent ongoing interconnections between sociological theory and social policy with developments in the biosciences throughout the interwar period. The argument that sociology and biology part ways later on needs to be evidenced, and in the process the actual extent of that separation will come to be defined. Biology has always been available for mobilization in social policy, sociology and so on, and if for a time it has been extracted from the discipline of sociology, this does not necessarily imply that it has been extracted from everything sociologists, policymakers and social scientists get up to. Finding what they all get up to will require looking beyond the publications and statements of an intelligentsia. Lastly, considering the book's concern with the present, it is unclear how Meloni imagines the results of epigenetics can or should inform social policy. The historical lesson one might choose to take from his case studies is that the appeal to biology in support of one policy or another is not always a necessary one, is often dubious, and is in certain cases atrocious. Where should we go from here?

Regardless of one's own research goals and how sympathetic you are to Meloni's desire to close the barn door before too many epigenetic horses bolt, Political Biology is engaging, clear and an excellent inclusion in HPS and STS syllabi.