The eugenics movement of the early 20th century, which led to immigration bans and state-mandated sterilization of the genetically unfit, appears so crude and sinister today that it seems unlikely anyone would ever embrace it.

		Darwin Day Garland E. Allen will speak at 7 p.m. Friday in the Pappert lecture hall of Duquesne's Bayer Learning Center. It is free and open to the public. For more information on Darwin Day, visit ltc.cr.duq. edu/bsnes/darwinday/.

Not so, warns Garland E. Allen, a biologist and science historian at Washington University in St. Louis. In his estimation, the expanding knowledge of and interest in genes today may actually make the world susceptible to re-packaged eugenics.

Allen, who will speak Friday evening during Duquesne University's annual Darwin Day event, says the major difference now is that the emphasis has shifted from concerns about certain racial, ethnic and other "undesirable" groups, to those about individuals who are perceived to have undesirable genes.

Rather than arguing for mandatory sterilization of the feebleminded, as eugenicists advocated, today's version of eugenics is more likely to concern whether individuals with certain genetic mutations should be covered by insurance, or whether prenatal diagnosis of certain mutations should prompt abortions, he said.

Charles Darwin died before the rise of eugenics, Allen noted, but his ideas about human evolution provided inspiration for eugenicists, who saw their efforts as a way of adding "self-direction" to evolution.

The eugenics movement of 100 years ago contended that certain undesirable traits, such as feeblemindedness, alcoholism and prostitution, were inherited and that their frequency in society could be reduced if people with those traits were not allowed to reproduce.

It was, at best, a naive view and one that could be used to justify many unfortunate social policies, Allen said.

Eugenics was thoroughly discredited, but some scientists still persist in overemphasizing the importance of genes, assuming an almost mechanistic relationship between the presence of certain genetic mutations and certain traits.

"The [Human] Genome Project has shown how naive that view is," Allen said, referring to the international effort to identify and analyze all human genes. Many of its proponents believed in the mechanistic view of genes, he observed, but "we've learned something that we didn't expect to learn."

Now that the human genome has been sequenced, he explained, scientists have come to appreciate how complex the genome is and how certain genetic mutations can result in different traits or, in the case of disease genes, in different degrees of illness from one person to another.