The Parents of Great Men 



407 



THE FOUNDATIONS OF MR. REDFIELD'S HYPOTHESIS 



standards of intelligence; for recent 

 researches in measurement of mental 

 development indicate that the heritable 

 standard of intelligence of adults does 

 not increase beyond the age of approxi- 

 mately 16 years. A person 40 years of 

 age has an additional experience of a 

 quarter of a century, and so has a 

 larger mental content, but his intelli- 

 gence is still at the sixteen-year level. 

 Mental activity is the effect, not the 

 cause of mental growth or develop- 

 ment. Education merely turns innate 

 mental powers to good account; it 

 makes very little change in those 

 powers themselves. To suppose that a 

 father can, by study, raise his innate 

 level of intelligence and transmit it at 

 the new level to his son, is a naive 

 idea which finds no warrant in. the 

 known facts of mental development. 



2. In his entire conception of the 

 storing-up and transmission of energy, 

 Mr. Redfield has fallen victim to a 

 confusion of ideas due to the use of 

 the same word to mean two different 

 things. He thinks of energy as an 

 engineer; he declares the body-cell is a 

 storage battery; he believes that the 

 athlete by performing work stores up 

 energy in his body (in some mystic and 

 undescribed manner) just as a clock 

 stores up energy when it is wound. 

 The incorrectness of supposing that the 

 so-called energy of a man is of similar 

 nature, is remarkable. If, hearing 

 Bismarck called a man of iron, one 

 should analyze his remains to find how 

 much more iron he contained than 

 ordinary men, it would be a per- 

 formance exactly comparable to Mr. 

 Redfield's, when he thinks of a man's 

 "energy" as something stored up by 

 the performance of work. 



As a fact, a man contains less energy, 

 after the performance of work, than he 

 did at the start. ^^ All of his "energy" 



This is not the place for a critical 

 examination of Mr. Redfield's hypo- 

 thesis in detail.^* But the publicity 

 which the Journal of Heredity has 

 given to his offers might lead someone 

 to suppose that the Journal sympa- 

 thized with his conclusions; and this 

 would be unfortunate. It is therefore 

 desirable to point out what appears to 

 be the fundamental weakness of his 

 hypothesis. The data which he has 

 accumulated are of value, even though 

 his own interpretation of them cannot 

 be accepted; and it was with the hope 

 of accumulating more data that the 

 Journal of Heredity cooperated with 

 Mr. Redfield. 



The Redfield hypothesis, that the 

 parent passes on to his children the 

 effect of his own experience, training or 

 education, may for the sake of con- 

 venience be considered here solely in 

 its application to man. It is untenable 

 (1) because it ignores much that has 

 been learned about the mind, and (2) 

 because it ignores more that has been 

 learned about the body. 



1. In the light of modern psychology, 

 it is absurd to lump all sorts of mental 

 ability under one head, and to suppose 

 that the father's exercise of reasoning 

 power, for example, will store up energy 

 to be manifested in the offspring in the 

 shape of executive or artistic ability. 

 Mental abilities are much subdivided, 

 and are inherited separately. Mr. Red- 

 field's idea of the process is much too 

 crude. 



Moreover, Mr. Redfield's whole con- 

 ception of the increase of intelligence 

 with increase of age in a parent, shows 

 a disregard of the facts of psychology. 

 As E. A. Doll has pointed out,^^ in 

 criticising Mr. Redfield's recent and 

 extreme claim that feeblemindedness is 

 the product of early marriage, it is in- 

 correct to speak of 20, 30, or 40 year 



1* See Raymond Pearl's review of Mr. Redfield's Dynamic Evolution (Journal of Heredity 

 Vol. vi, p. 254): "Like all pseudo-science, Mr. Redfield's is a conglomerate mixture of the true, 

 the false, and the unknown." 



1^ Doll, E. A. Education and Inheritance. Journal of Education, 85-5, Boston, February 

 1, 1917. 



'^Atwater's celebrated experiments proved that all the energy (food) which goes into an 

 animal can be accounted for in the output of heat or work. They are conveniently summarized 

 in Abderhalden 's Text-book of Physiological Chemistry, p. 335. 



