238 



The Journal of Heredity 



concerned. Yet this population in- 

 cluded some hundreds of millions of 

 persons. Royalty, then, has several 

 hundred thousand times as many 

 chances of producing a j^enius, as has a 

 family picked at random from the 

 population at large. And this over- 

 whelming chance is due, as I have 

 attempted to show, not to the fact that 

 royalty has an unusually good environ- 

 ment or more opportunities, but to the 

 fact that the royal families are a selected 

 breed, who owe their origin to some one's 

 preeminence in statecraft, war and 

 leadership, and who have been more or 

 less consciously bred for these qualities 

 ever since. It is a gigantic, if incom- 

 plete , experiment in eugenics . Of course , 

 we might have preferred to see other 

 qualities picked out as the basis for 

 such an experiment; but whatever 

 qualities we selected, whether in the 

 scientific, artistic, or practical sphere, 

 we have every reason to believe that 

 we could have produced a breed of men 

 where genius would be relatively as 

 abundant as it is in this stock. 



I have now shown you specimens of 

 many kinds of the evidence on which we 

 rely to ]jrove our contention that man's 

 qualities, ]jhysical, mental or moral, 

 are far more due to heredity than to his 

 environment. I will not multi]3ly sta- 

 tistics: what I have set before you is a 

 fair example of our ammunition. The 

 conclusions to which this kind of inquiry 

 leads are startling to most people, and 

 we wish to use all due caution in stating 

 them. 



Let it be understood, then, that the 

 problem of heredity vs. environment 

 is an extremely complex one and cannot 

 be solved in general terms. We can 

 only attack each phase of it separately, 

 disentangle factors that can be meas- 

 ured, and compare them with each other. 

 I believe no one has ever questioned tlie 

 Ijropriety of this method of attack. In 

 every case that has ever been tried, S(j 

 far as I know, the influence of heredity 

 has been shown to be overwhelmingl\' 

 predominant, and the power of any 

 ordinary change in environment to 

 modify heredity has been shown to be in- 

 significant. We therefore feel ourselves 

 in a position safely to generalize to the 



extent of saying that the importance 

 of nature is five or ten times greater than 

 that of nurture in the making of a man. 

 Probably the objection will at once 

 occur to some of you, that my entire 

 line of reasoning is unfair, because I 

 have been measuring the total force of 

 heredity against some single factor of 

 environment in each case. You may 

 be willing to grant that the power of 

 heredity is greater than that of any 

 single factor of environment, but you 

 may think that if I took all the factors 

 of en\'ironment put together — pro\'ided 

 such a thing were possible — and meas- 

 ured them against heredity, the sum of 

 them would vastly outweigh heredity. 



SUPERIORITY OF HEREDITY 



This is not the case, but the proof 

 demands too much mathematics to be 

 given. I will do no more than tell you 

 that it involves a principle known as 

 multiple correlation, and the fact that 

 the various factors of the environment 

 are rather closely correlated to each 

 other. The result of this is that even if 

 we had an infinity of environmental 

 factors, each separate one correlated to 

 the individual to an equal degree with 

 that individual's parents or grand- 

 parents, yet the effect of these parents 

 and grandparents alone would be greater 

 than that of this infinity of environ- 

 mental factors of the same grade of 

 correlation; to say nothing of the influ- 

 ence of more remote ancestors, who are 

 by no means to be neglected. Such a 

 statement may seem incredible to you; 

 but if you are not mathematically 

 inclined enough to investigate the sub- 

 ject for yourself, I will have to ask you 

 to take the word of mathematicians for 

 it, that such is incontrovertibly the fact. 

 No one can successfully dispute, I think, 

 that heredity is not only much stronger 

 that any single factor of the environment, in 

 producing ijuportant hnmau differences, 

 but is stronger than any possible number 

 of them put together. It is on this fact 

 that we base our claim for a considera- 

 tion of heredity in the solution of social 

 problems, which arc now attacked 

 mainly through the environment alone. 



A rapidly growing and influential 

 school of sociologists has already grasped 



