TABOO AND GENETICS 93 



fill up the gaps made by war, accident and di- 

 sease as well as death from old age. To this 

 biological service which they alone can perform 

 are added those which lie nearest it and inter- 

 fere least with carrying it out. 



We must therefore keep in view all the activi- 

 ties of any group in which the sex problem is 

 being studied. There is a certain tendency to 

 disregard the female specialization to child- 

 bearing, and to regard the sex question as one 

 merely of adaptation to extra-biological 

 services. In every group which has survived, 

 some machinery — a " crust of custom," rein- 

 forced by more arbitrary laws or regulations — 

 has sought to guarantee reproduction by keeping 

 women out of lines of endeavour which might 

 endanger that fundamental group necessity. 

 Primitive societies which got stabilized within 

 a given territory and found their birth-rate 

 dangerously high could always keep it down by 

 exposing or destroying some of the unfit child- 

 ren, or a certain per cent of the female children, 

 or both. 



In primitive groups, the individual was prac- 

 tically nil. But modern civilized society is able 

 to survive without the rigid control of 

 individual activities which the old economy 

 entailed. Man comes to choose more and more 

 for himself individually instead of for the 

 group, uniformity weakens and individualism 



