580 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



has now been replaced by the "law of Mendel." Furthermore, 

 he says that early environment rather than heredity may 

 determine this greater incidence of distinction in distin- 

 guished families. Finally, Pearl concludes that even if the 

 argument of Galton and Pearson were completely true 

 biologically, its social apphcation would be questionable, for 

 even if the average of the race were raised, and modern 

 genetics offers no guarantee of this, 95 per cent of the great- 

 est men who have ever lived ^^ would never have been horn 

 because the people who were in fact their parents would not 

 have been allowed to breed under such a regime." 



This is the most destructive criticism of the fundamental 

 principles of eugenics that has ever come from a distinguished 

 geneticist. Other criticisms have dealt largely with the 

 extravagances of certain popular writers on eugenics, but 

 these criticisms strike at the very foundations of eugenics 

 and if they are true indictments, eugenics must go to the 

 scrap-heap along with astrology and other pseudosciences. 

 But the eugenicist may well examine critically these criti- 

 cisms before proclaiming with Othello his occupation gone. 

 It is true thatGalton's" law of ancestral inheritance" has been 

 replaced by Mendelism when dealing with the mechanism of 

 the hereditary transmission of inheritance factors, but when 

 deahng with average results of inheritance in a general 

 population, Galton's law is still true. It is true that in 

 individual instances "hke does not produce hke, but only 

 somewhat like" as Brooks (1899) expressed it, but on the 

 whole and as an average of mass results it is true that "like 

 produces Hke" to such an extent that this principle has for 

 ages past furnished a valuable basis for selective breeding; 

 how much can be accomplished by such a method is shown 

 by the improvements in the breeds of domestic animals and 

 cultivated plants in all the period before the discovery of the 

 Mendehan principle. 



With regard to Pearl's conclusion that "ordinary people 

 have produced nineteen times as many of the greatest human 

 beings ... as have people in some degree distinguished," it 

 is only necessary to say in reply that ordinary people are at 

 least several million times as numerous as distinguished 

 people when measured by Pearl's standard of distinction. 



