Since its emergence in 1960 as a subfield of psychology, behavior genetics has functioned primarily as what the historian of science Michael Gordin terms a “counter-establishment science.” While mainstream social sciences attributed socioeconomic and racial inequality to policy and structural factors, behavior genetics developed analytic methods that produced apparent evidence in support of eugenic theory that linked socioeconomic and racial inequality to genetic diversity. Social and natural scientists in neighboring fields initially critiqued the methods and dismissed the findings of behavior genetics. In the early 2000s, however, behavior genetics became the foundation for sociogenomics, in which a broad coalition of natural and social scientists embarked on a molecular hunt for the specific genes behind disparate social outcomes. With the results of behavior genetics serving as ground truth, this hunt could not fail: negative results could always be interpreted as anticipatory positive findings. This talk draws on core STS concepts to trace the long history of behavior genetics, from its eugenic past to its sociogenomic present, examining how the questionable methods of behavior genetics produced the foundational facts of sociogenomics.

Emily Klancher Merchant is an associate professor of science and technology studies at the University of California, Davis, where she teaches courses on gender and science, health and medical technologies, data visualization, and computational text analysis. Her first book, Building the Population Bomb (Oxford, 2021) examined how human population growth became a subject of scientific expertise and an object of governmental and philanthropic intervention in the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book about the history of efforts by American social scientists to attribute differences in intelligence, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status to genetic variation, from 1908 to the present. Merchant is also co-editor of DNA, Race, and Reproduction (California, 2025), which will be published in February.