| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Homo sapiens 1900. Directed, produced, and written by Peter Cohen. 1999; color; 88 minutes. Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films.
Eugenics has become a hot field of historical research in the past two decades. Much of the interest seems to be driven by fears of a resurgent genetic determinism, manifested by rising support for sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, genetic engineering, and cloning. Peter Cohen's film is clearly driven by concerns that science is overstepping its bounds when it reduces Homo sapiens to its biological and hereditary traits. Near the end of the film, the narrator states, "Speculation on the meaning of biological heredity has had a fateful impact on political and scientific ideas in the twentieth century." He then assures us that human nature is still shrouded in mystery, and science has not even come close to plumbing its depths, especially in relation to human thought, talent, and creativity.	1
This documentary begins (after a brief introduction) with clips from a Frankenstein movie, reminding us of the dangers of science run amok. Then it proceeds quickly to the beginnings of the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth century. However, most of the film discusses ways that the science of heredity was abused in the first half of the twentieth century. The American eugenics movement receives only brief treatment, and instead Cohen focuses on Germany, Russia, and Sweden. He ends the story with the German eugenics movement producing the Holocaust, the Russian genetics community being hijacked by Trofium Denisovich Lysenko's Lamarckian genetics, and the Swedes compulsorily sterilizing those deemed unfit to procreate.	. . .

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