308 



The Journal of Heredity 



up so well that I cannot refrain from 

 quoting. He says: "... these 

 are individual illustrations of what is 

 happening, because the intensive se- 

 lection of the old days has been sus- 

 pended. That suspension is partly due 

 to medical progress; you are enabling 

 the deformed to live, the blind to see, 

 the weakling to survive — and it is 

 partly due to the social provision made 

 for these weaklings — the feeble-minded 

 woman goes to the workhouse as a 

 matter of course for her fourth or fifth 

 illegitimate child, while the insane man, 

 overcome by the strain of modem life, 

 is fed up and restored for a time to his 

 famih' and paternity. In our insti- 

 tutions we provide for the deaf-mute, 

 the blind, the cripple, and render it 

 relatively easy for the degenerate to 

 mate and leave their like. In the old 

 days, without these medical benefits and 

 without these social provisions the hand 

 of Nature fell heavily on the unfit. 

 Such were numbered, as they are 

 largely numbered now, among the un- 

 employables ; but there were no doctors 

 to enable them to limp through life; no 

 charities to take their offspring or 

 provide for their own necessities. A 

 petty theft meant the gallows, un- 

 employment meant starvation, feeble- 

 mindedness meant persecution and 

 social expulsion; insanity meant con- 

 finement with no attempt at treat- 

 ment. To the honour of the medical 

 I^rofession, to the credit of our social 

 instincts, be it said, we have largely 

 stopped all this. We have held out a 

 helping hand to the weak, but at the 

 same time we have to a large extent 

 suspended the automatic action where- 

 by a race progressed mentally and 

 physically. 



MEDICAL PROGRESS VS. EUGENICS. 



"Surely here is an antinomy — a 

 fundamental opposition between medical 

 l^rogress and the science of national 

 eugenics, or race efficiency. Gentlemen, 

 I venture to think it is an antinomy, and 

 will remain one until the nation at large 

 recognizes as a fundamental doctrine the 

 principle that everyone, being born, has 



the right to live, but the right to live 

 does not in itself convey the right to 

 everyone to reproduce their kind. 



"Our social instincts, our common 

 humanity enforce upon us the con- 

 ception that each person bom has the 

 right to live, yet this right essentially 

 connotes a suspension of the full in- 

 tensity of natural selection. Darwinism 

 and medical progress are opposed forces, 

 and we shall gain nothing by screening 

 that fact, or, in ojjposition to ample 

 evidence, asserting that Darwinism has 

 no application to civilized man." 



I have made these quotations frankly 

 and at length because I believe they will 

 show you, more faithfully than I could 

 perhaps have done it in my own words, 

 the positions held b}' various students of 

 race progress and betterment. I believe 

 that any reasonable person must agree 

 with Pearson that in spite of the masking 

 influence of the "increasingly complex 

 social heritage which is passed on from 

 generation to generation in our customs, 

 iDcliefs, books, laws — in fact in all our 

 increasing knowledge of science and the 

 arts — nevertheless biological inheritance 

 is operating in man now on the same 

 principles that it did when he swung the 

 stone axe, or scuttled through the trees 

 with his simian congeners. The de- 

 tailed studies of individual lines of 

 inheritance which ha\-e in recent years 

 been made from the Mendelian view- 

 point"^ leave no doubt of this. Further- 

 more, this being true, it must be con- 

 ceded by all thinking persons at all 

 conversant with biological principles 

 that selection pla\'s the same role in 

 directing the course of heredity, that is 

 the surviving line of germ plasm, that 

 it always has. Note that I say selection 

 here rather than Natural Selection, for 

 the latter tenn is associated in many 

 minds with the crude methods of Nature 

 uninfluenced by sentient forces. Will 

 anyone deny that the animal or i)lant 

 breeder utilizes the same principles of 

 selection in breeding his cattle or his 

 com that have in Nature brought about 

 the evolution of one form from another? 

 The difference is that instead of being 

 Natural selection it is now conscious 



'"For a summary treatment of these see Davenport, C. B., "Heredity in Relation to Eugenics," 

 New York, 1911. 



