Amit Sharma, 2015 Infosys Laureate, delivered a case for an ethical, humanist approach to the sciences at the Infosys campus, Electronic City, on Thursday.
Exploring the history of the ‘use and misuse’ of evolutionary thought, Dr. Sharma traced the dialectical relationship between Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1858), and the racial theories of Darwin’s first cousin Francis Galton, founder of the Eugenics Movement.
“A misunderstanding of Darwinian principles has been used against humanity for a century,” argued Dr Sharma, “and it is possibly still being used.”
The lecture followed the genealogy of eugenic ideas of intellectual and moral hierarchy, based in hereditary distinction, from Galton through American anti-immigration lobbies, and eventually to its apotheosis in the Nazi Holocaust. Throughout, Dr. Sharma stressed upon the support eugenics received from the august institutions of the western world — from Carnegie and Rockefeller, to presidents of Harvard — as well as its existence entwined with colonialism.
Discrimination
The idea that reproduction control can save our society from inferior minds was part of a pseudo-scientific attempt to mix biology with theology; an attempt that was directed against those of dark skin, Dr. Sharma said.
In the final part of the talk, Dr. Sharma looked at recent work in genetics that has shown that only fifty of the five-hundred trillion cells in the human body are human, the rest being bacterial. The ‘human microbiome’, suggested Dr. Sharma, can be affected by environmental factors, and is important to several facets of human health, particularly infant well-being.
Dr. Sharma is currently head of the Structural and Computational Biology Group at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology.
