Science and Citizenship 



XXVIII 



The favourite recourse of the ill-informed 

 members of a community to escape the penalties 

 of nescience, is to normalise their own defects 

 and to postulate a universal ignorance. This 

 protective device of the cunning animal is no- 

 where more frequent than in discussions of the 

 problem of heredity. It is frequently asserted that 

 we know nothing at all of heredity with precision 

 and certainty. It is quite true the biologists and 

 psychologists have a great deal still to learn about 

 heredity. But it is equally true that they have a 

 great deal to teach. And the citizen as well as 

 the student can only escape the charge of hope- 

 less obscurantism by promptly putting himself to 

 this school. One of the first things he will learn 

 is the deep significance and the practical import- 

 ance of the distinction between organic inheritance 

 and social inheritance. The former is concerned 

 with the heritage that comes to us in organic 

 descent from our family stock, i.e. the pre-natal 

 influences which condition our life. The latter is 

 concerned with the qualities and aptitudes that 

 come to us through training and education, 

 through tradition and experience in a word, 

 through the post-natal and therefore social in- 

 fluences that condition our life. Small or great 

 as may be the ordered and verified knowledge 

 accumulated by the students of organic inherit- 

 ance, there can be no question of the mere 

 massiveness and quantity of our knowledge of 



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