EVOLUTION 991 



NATURE AND NURTURE IN EUGENICS.— As regards the 

 Eugenic movement, with its invaluable insistence on the funda- 

 mental importance of nature, it can do this with best effect 

 when it does not at the same time depreciate the work of 

 those devoted to the improvement of nurture : let it rather collabo- 

 rate with them. Writing in a region very actively concerned with 

 the breeding of cattle of well-known excellence, and of these to still 

 better qualities, it is encouraging to see also near us the active 

 Rowett Research Institute for animal nutrition; and besides this 

 again kindred undertakings for active experiment on the improve- 

 ment of pastures, and for these of the grasses, and the soil, both 

 separately and together; while further, all these experts, on nature 

 and nurture respectively, are in frequent and co-operative discussion. 

 Is it not time we were getting as far for our own species? — with 

 eugenists meeting and co-operating with educationists, and these 

 also with sanitarians and town- planners ? Why not organise this, 

 and no less definitely, between their respective but still too specialised 

 societies? Here, for instance, the British x\ssociation is increasingly 

 setting an example, in holding conferences between its sections, and 

 by devoting its South African meeting of 1929 to applied science. 



Let us face that difference between the biologically and the 

 socially minded, which not only impedes such co-operation as 

 just pled for, but substitutes unnecessary controversy, if not even 

 alienation. It is plain that the biologist is rightly insistent on that 

 process of organic heredity on which the continuance of aU forms of 

 life depends, and its quality also, and so of course for man and beast 

 essentially alike. Ever}^ serious student of social science is of course 

 bound to accept this, as well as all other verified teachings of biology, 

 and other sciences preliminary to his own, though he may well 

 confess not to be so fully at home in all these as he should be. Yet 

 it is for the biologist in turn to recognise that sociology has also its 

 own essential characteristic conception of transmission — that of the 

 Social Heritage. For this every human being — not abnormcdly 

 arrested at the purely organic level, as deeply defective — is also, as 

 a social being, the advancing heir of all such accumulated results 

 of social life and activity as can come or be brought within his 

 life-reach. And thus not simply of such socially inherited and 

 acquired access to the material means of life-maintenance as may be, 

 but also to that far vaster immaterial heritage, through which his 

 family, community, etc., are truly and socially human — ^witness 

 language, with the long and wide traditions which it bears; and of 

 course the like for institutional life as well. Hence so long as biologists 

 in general, and eugenists in particular, remain (or let themselves 

 appear) inadequate as sociologists, through under-appreciation of 

 the Social Heritage in its full significance, and its needed increasing 



