538 SOCIAL ASPECTS OF BIOLOGICAL RESULTS 



to recognise the intervention of rational selection as an ac- 

 celerant or as a brake on natural selection. (2) When a society 

 deliberately sets to work to select discriminately among the in- 

 dividualities which make up its own body politic, we have to do 

 with an infinitely subtler process than that observed when a 

 breeder selects in his stock, or when the physical environment 

 eliminates the ill-adapted members of a race. (3) There is in 

 human affairs a much more prominent occurrence of inter- 

 group, inter-societary, or inter-racial selection, which introduces 

 fresh complexities, e.g. that in the conflict of races the apparent 

 victors are sometimes, in some measure, conquered by the 

 vanquished. 



In all selectionist proposals we have to face the difficulty 

 of agreeing what we are to select for. If selection processes 

 are to succeed, they must be consistent. As to the negative 

 ideal of trying to lessen the precipitate of undoubted incapables, 

 all will agree ; but the positive ideal of working towards evolu- 

 tion is necessarily vague, meaning different things to different 

 people. It will be generally admitted, however, that if we are 

 to avoid fallacious endeavour, our ideal must include " eutopias " 

 and " eutechnics " as well as " eugenics," and that it must be 

 not merely biological but distinctively sociological in its 

 outlook. 



