The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle by Adrian Wilson

Meloni argues that the hardness of this distinction was a late 19th century innovation of Francis Galton, who presented it as a cornerstone of his eugenics programme.

The thesis is that the discreteness of the biological and social sciences as bodies of knowledge depends on a hard nature/nurture distinction. These challenges are epitomized by what I call the Meloni Thesis. In this review symposium, five scholars of history and philosophy of science and medicine take on the various challenges posed by Maurizio Meloni's Political Biology (Meloni, 2016a).

The article first unfolds a brief relevant history of biology and the concepts of deep time (fossil and trace) before examining how Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” plays on these themes to construct a fatalist eugenics carried out by a superhuman (yet still material) intelligence. This rearticulation was subsequently ramified by the trivialization of important complications to the Darwinian project prior to the so-called modern synthesis, namely, the downplaying of structuralist, mutationist, and epigenetic concerns. This undermining not only exposes Lovecraft's well-documented nativism and racism, but provides an exaggerated yet instructive example of how the neo-Darwinism of the latter half of the 19th and early part of the 20th century deployed eugenics by means of a politico-aesthetic rearticulation of the ambiguities of evolutionary theory. In particular, Lovecraft's aesthetically charged 'controlled evolution' in his famous novella undermines the generative effects of deep time he sets out to emphasize. Lovecraft's deployment of deep time in 'At the Mountains of Madness' as a historical artifact that bears the (at times conflicting) marks of evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, eugenics, and the various temporalities of biological life (recapitulation, degeneration).

The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle by Adrian Wilson