THE PURPOSIVE IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN RACE 577 



as well as by popular writers. Long ago (1872- 1873), Darwin 

 expressed to Galton his doubt as to the feasibility of any 

 satisfactory method of selecting the best human stocks and 

 Huxley (1894) indicated the difficulties and dangers of 

 permitting any individual or class of individuals to decide 

 which human famihes were most fit. Recently several 

 leading students of genetics have criticised many phases of 

 current eugencial propaganda. Bateson (192 1), in his 

 Galton Lecture before the Eugenics Education Society, while 

 endorsing the fundamental principles of eugenics, said that 

 we know altogether too httle of the ways in which heredity 

 and environment cooperate to produce genius to justify 

 at present any extensive interference with human reproduc- 

 tion. He pointed out that eugenic caution might have lost 

 to the world Beethoven, Keats, perhaps even Francis Bacon, 

 and to these names he might have added many others, 

 such as Schubert, Faraday, Lincoln and a host of others 

 in whom democracy glories. Still more recently, Jennings 

 (1925) and Pearl (1927) have stressed the difficulty, if not the 

 impossibihty, of deciding who are the fittest and the real 

 danger that any attempted decision of this kind might be 

 made on the basis of family, class or race pride and arrogance. 

 Both of these authorities also emphasize the fact that good 

 and bad heredity are so mixed in all men, in short that 

 man is such a mongrel or heterozygote, that no one can 

 predict with any degree of accuracy what the individual 

 characteristics of the children of any particular mating 

 will be, and both insist that social distinction may depend 

 more upon environment than upon heredity. 



All modern geneticists approve the segregation or sterih- 

 zation of persons who are known to have serious hereditary 

 defects, such as hereditary feeblemindedness, insanity, etc., 

 but they very properly object to the extravagant proposals to 

 sterihze all persons who are socially dehnquent. Bateson says 

 that the sterihzation of habitual criminals, which has been 

 mooted in America, might ehminate many with good inherit- 

 ance as well as those with hereditary defects. Morgan (1925) 

 says that the segregation of defectives is now attempted 

 on a somewhat extensive scale in asylums of the insane and 

 feebleminded, but that he "would hesitate to recommend the 



