WAR AND GENETIC VALUES' 



David Starr Jordan 

 Stanford University, California 



CERTAIN recent writers, speaking 

 in the name of science, have 

 attempted in different ways to 

 minimize the recognized evils of 

 war-selection, the destruction of the 

 fittest in camp and in the field. 



It is claimed by Dr. McFie of London, 

 and others, that the soldier shows but 

 slight genetic superiority (physical, 

 mental, moral), 5% perhaps, over the 

 men left at home. "The best for 

 warlike purposes, not necessarily the 

 best for any other." In the aggregate, 

 they argue, war-selection is therefore 

 negligible, tending at the worst to lower 

 physical strength while leaving the 

 mental acumen of the race unimpaired. 



A writer of larger outlook. Dr. Thor- 

 stein Veblen, in his trenchant and sug- 

 gestive volume "Germany and the In- 

 dustrial Revolution," pushes this idea 

 still further, regarding the reversal of 

 selection as an undoubted fact, but of 

 slight racial importance. Veblen bases 

 his view on two premises : that the men 

 killed in war do not as a whole represent 

 high racial values, and that by the 

 Mendelian law the descendants of the 

 "depauperate" spared by war will in 

 two or three generations regain the 

 racial average. 



As to the first contention, Veblen 

 regards war as the business of the leisure 

 classes and of the bullying type of men. 

 The first of these he finds to be made up, 

 in general, of inefficient social units, the 

 second to be of inferior mental caliber. 

 Destruction by war is thus, in his mind, 

 largely confined to those human types 

 which civilization can well spare. 



The first contention of our author 



raises certain questions of fact. In 

 general, the leisure class has been made 

 so by incidents of wealth, society, and 

 education. The stock is not necessar- 

 ily inferior because the individual has 

 suffered from an unfortunate upbringing. 

 It may, of course, be at once admitted 

 that those who find joy in war are in 

 general of a low type of mind as well as 

 of morals. Doubtless in the course of 

 history there have been many free lances 

 and soldiers of fortune whose extermina- 

 tion left the world better off. War- 

 selection is a racial evil only to the 

 degree in which the best are sacrificed. 

 In modern armies the best elements are 

 certainly drawn upon heavily. Every 

 one knows this to be the case. Natu- 

 rally the stronger the appeal of the 

 "cause," the higher the type of men 

 drawn to the sacrifice. To this, the 

 selective draft, or any other form of dis- 

 crimination, affords no modification. 

 In his second contention, Dr. Veblen 

 urges that, according to the Mendelian 

 principle, the ravages of war are soon 

 restored by the tendency to revert, in 

 mathematical proportion, to qualities 

 of past ancestors. Thus the descend- 

 ants of the weak and incapable would 

 soon line up with the others. There is 

 nothing in "Mendel's Law," however 

 (so far as anyone knows) , which implies 

 that bad stock can be made good, or 

 that any appreciable percentage of 

 those who are, to use Veblen 's term, 

 "depauperate" through heredity, or 

 who may suffer from other ancestral 

 weakness, will rise above the level of 

 their personal forbears. When the in- 

 dividual overtops his parentage it is 



1 This is a discussion in genetics, and for emphasis of the great and terrible truths contained 

 therein it waives for the moment the fact that some part of the loss owing to war wastage may be 

 balanced ultimately by advantage to humanity in the establishment of international harmony and 

 national freedom and efficiency. — The Author. 



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