Has Science Shifted Humans' Sense Of Identity?

Yes. But the larger question may be whether than shift was for better or worse. JL

Nathaniel Comfort reports in Nature:

Copernicus displaced us from the centre of the Universe; Darwin displaced us from the centre of the living world. IQ was converted from a measure of a given child’s past performance to a predictor of any child’s future performance.IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are — a score for one’s inherent worth as a person.  Acknowledging that the law, not to mention ethics, might get in the way,  (Huxley) nevertheless wrote: “it may be possible, indirectly, to influence the character and prosperity of our descendants.”
In the iconic frontispiece to Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), primate skeletons march across the page and, presumably, into the future: “Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.” Fresh evidence from anatomy and palaeontology had made humans’ place on the scala naturae scientifically irrefutable. We were unequivocally with the animals — albeit at the head of the line.
Nicolaus Copernicus had displaced us from the centre of the Universe; now Charles Darwin had displaced us from the centre of the living world. Regardless of how one took this demotion (Huxley wasn’t troubled; Darwin was), there was no doubting Huxley’s larger message: science alone can answer what he called the ‘question of questions’: “Man’s place in nature and his relations to the Universe of things.”
Huxley’s question had a prominent place in the early issues of Nature magazine. Witty and provocative, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ was among the most in-demand essayists of the day. Norman Lockyer, the magazine’s founding editor, scored a coup when he persuaded his friend to become a regular contributor. And Huxley knew a soapbox when he saw one. He hopped up and used Nature’s pages to make his case for Darwinism and the public utility of science.It was in the seventh issue — 16 December 1869 — that Huxley advanced a scheme for what he called ‘practical Darwinism’ and we call eugenics. Convinced that continued dominance of the British Empire would depend on the “energetic enterprising” English character, he mused about selecting for a can-do attitude among Britons¹. Acknowledging that the law, not to mention ethics, might get in the way, he nevertheless wrote: “it may be possible, indirectly, to influence the character and prosperity of our descendants.” Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin and an outer planet of Huxley’s solar system — was already writing about similar ideas and would come to be known as the father of eugenics. When this magazine appeared, then, the idea of ‘improving’ human heredity was on many people’s minds — not least as a potent tool of empire.
Huxley’s sunny view — of infinite human progress and triumph, brought about by the inexorable march of science — epitomizes a problem with so-called Enlightenment values. The precept that society should be based on reason, facts and universal truths has been a guiding theme of modern times. Which in many ways is a splendid thing (lately I’ve seen enough governance without facts for one lifetime). Yet Occam’s razor is double edged. Enlightenment values have accommodated screechingly discordant beliefs, such as that all men are created equal, that aristocrats should be decapitated and that people can be traded as chattel.
I want to suggest that many of the worst chapters of this history result from scientism: the ideology that science is the only valid way to understand the world and solve social problems. Where science has often expanded and liberated our sense of self, scientism has constrained it.
Across the arc of the past 150 years, we can see both science and scientism shaping human identity in many ways. Developmental psychology zeroed in on the intellect, leading to the transformation of IQ (intelligence quotient) from an educational tool into a weapon of social control. Immunology redefined the ‘self’ in terms of ‘non-self’. Information theory provided fresh metaphors that recast identity as residing in a text or a wiring diagram. More recently, cell and molecular studies have relaxed the borders of the self. Reproductive technology, genetic engineering and synthetic biology have made human nature more malleable, epigenetics and microbiology complicate notions of individuality and autonomy, and biotechnology and information technology suggest a world where the self is distributed, dispersed, atomized.
Individual identities, rooted in biology, have perhaps never played a larger part in social life, even as their bounds and parameters grow ever fuzzier.

Frontispiece to Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863).Credit: Paul D. Stewart/SPL

Designs on intelligence

“Methods of scientific precision must be introduced into all educational work, to carry everywhere good sense and light,” wrote the French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1907 (English translation published in 1914 (ref. ²)). A decade earlier, Binet and Théodore Simon developed a series of tests for French schoolchildren to measure what they called ‘mental age’. If a child’s mental age was less than her chronological age, she could receive extra help to catch up. The German psychologist William Stern took the ratio of mental to chronological age, giving what he called the IQ and, theoretically, making it comparable across groups. Meanwhile, Charles Spearman, a British statistician and eugenicist of the Galton school, found a correlation between a child’s performance on different tests. To explain the correlations, he theorized an innate, fixed, underlying quality he called ‘g’, for ‘general intelligence’. Then the American psychologist Henry Goddard, with the eugenicist Charles Davenport whispering in his ear, claimed that low IQ was a simple Mendelian trait. Thus, step by scientistic step, IQ was converted from a measure of a given child’s past performance to a predictor of any child’s future performance.
IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are — a score for one’s inherent worth as a person. In the Progressive era, eugenicists became obsessed with low intelligence, believing it to be the root of crime, poverty, promiscuity and disease. By the time Adolf Hitler expanded eugenics to cover entire ethnic and cultural groups, tens of thousands of people worldwide had already been yanked from the gene pool, sterilized, institutionalized, or both.