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Carving up Population Science

Eugenics, Demography and the Controversy over the ‘Biological Law’ of Population Growth

117 Alma Road, Windsor, Berkshire SL4 3EU, UK; tel.: +44 1753 850471ed_ramsden{at}hotmail.com

Using the analytical framework of boundary-work, I examine how the cultural space of demography, its borders and its territories, were constructed and reconstructed as scientists continuously struggled to maintain, increase, and defend the cognitive authority of science and particular interpretations of reality. While the emerging field of population united both biologists and social scientists in the early 20th century, the controversy over the biologist Raymond Pearl’s logistic curve in the inter-war period became one of the defining features in the development of the population sciences in the United States. Pearl’s use of the logistic curve reflected his biologically determinist vision of human progress and the definition and function of science within that process. Pearl’s critics, the majority numbered among the social sciences, opposed such an imperialistic vision. With the weakening of Pearl’s influence, American demography was clearly defined as a social science. In disciplinary histories, Pearl’s defeat is attributed to scientific progress and the collapse of credibility for the eugenics movement. Thus a history of a scientific progression from biological determinism to social empiricism is combined with a shift from population ideology to population science. Yet the attack on the biological lawsin the 1930s had as much to do with differing opinions as how to best regulate a population according to eugenic standards, as it was a struggle between a biologically determinist eugenics and a social science of reform.

Key Words: boundary-work • demography • eugenics • population biology

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, No. 5-6, 857-899 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/030631270203200509


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