TABOO AND GENETICS 37 



selection involved a long string of corollaries, 

 of which biology has about purged itself, but 

 they hang on tenaciously in sociological and 

 popular literature. For instance, Ward believed 

 in the tendency of opposites to mate (tall men 

 with short women, blonds with brunettes, etc.), 

 although Karl Pearson had published a statistical 

 refutation in his Grammar of Science, which 

 had run through two editions when the Pure 

 Sociology appeared. The greater variability of 

 males than females, another gynsecocentric 

 dogma had also been attacked by Pearson on 

 statistical evidence in 1897 (in the well-known 

 essay on Variation in Man and Woman, in 

 Chances of Death) and has become increasingly 

 unacceptable through the researches of Mrs. 

 Hollingworth (6, 7, 8). The idea of a vanished 

 age of mother-rule in human society, so essential 

 to the complete theory, has long since been 

 modified by anthropologists. 



De Vries' experiments showed that a mod- 

 erately simple fact practically makes all 

 these complicated theories unnecessary. No 

 two living things are exactly alike — that is, 

 all living matter is more or less variable. Some 

 variations are more fortunate than others, and 

 these variants are the ones which survive — 

 the ones best adapted to their environment. 

 Given this fact of the constant variation of 

 living matter, natural selection (i.e., survival 



