THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY 



obvious how easily a weapon such as steriHsation may be used in- 

 discriminately by a fascist government at the dictates of racialist 

 theories entirely without serious scientific foundation, as may be 

 read in the book of Huxley, Haddon & Carr-Saunders.^ If we may 

 judge from accounts of "national-socialist biology" such as that of 

 Brohmer,^ such political sterilisation is an actual fact to-day. 



I come back to the question of fitness and unfitness, and the 

 relative parts played by inheritance and environment in moulding 

 human material. The stupid acceptance of the conditions holding 

 good in the animal world, and their application to human societies, did 

 not originate with McBride. Already in the last century the conception 

 of the struggle for existence in the world of animals introduced by 

 Darwin under the name of natural selection, unfavourable or lethal 

 variations being weeded out by the press of circumstances, was 

 appealed to as the justification for laissei-faire economics. Such a 

 book as that of Headley,^ Darwinism and Modern Socialism^ dating 

 from 1903, well illustrates this trend, and the great embryologist, 

 O. Hertwig, found it necessary to write a book expressly condemning 

 the sociological application of the principle of natural selection.* 

 For men of the type of Headley, socialism conflicted with ineradicable 

 human instincts and could only thrive as a theory. In this way, the 

 atomistic and individualistic character of the system of capitalist enter- 

 prise, which had already in the seventeenth century received support 

 from the concurrent theories of physical atomism, was now to be 

 based on the perpetual and universal strife for food and generation 

 found in the world of wild animals. It was, of course, suggested, as 

 by Engels^ and later by Pannekoek,^ that die theory of natural selection 

 was the effect, not the cause, of capitalist production, since Darwin's 

 mind cannot but have been receptive to the atmosphere of the society 

 in which he found himself; and certainly it is undeniable that the 



philosophers of genius, only three were themselves sufficiently distinguished to leave 

 behind them any record of the fact. Among the 170 parents of 85 poets of genius, only 

 three (again) were sufficiently distinguished for posterity to be aware of it. 



^ J. S. Huxley, A. C. Haddon & A. M. Carr-Saunders, JVe Europeans (London, 



1935)- 



^ P. Brohmer, Mensch-Natur-Staat; Grundlinien einer naiional-soiialistischen Biologie 



(FYankfurt, 1935). 



^ F. W, Headley, Darwinism and Modern Socialism (London, 1909). 



* O. Hertwig, Zur Abwehr des ethischen, soiialen, und politischen Darwinismns 

 (Jena, 1921). 



^ F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 641. 



* A. Pannekoek, Marxism and Darwinism (Chicago, 1912). ^ 



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