DISCUSSION 
encourage by financial means those people who are more 
socially desirable to have more children (this is not the idea 
favoured by Muller). The obvious way to do this is to tax 
children. This seems dreadful to a good liberal because it is 
exactly the opposite of everything he has been brought up to 
believe. But at least it is logical. ‘There are various objections: 
there will be people who, however much the tax, will have many 
children, but they may be a minority. It is unreasonable to 
take money as an exact measure of social desirability, but at 
least they are fairly positively correlated. Of course, it is per- 
fectly clear that you could not take such measures, as Muller 
very rightly said, with public opinion as it is, and with the 
general lack of biological knowledge. 
Now to come to Muller’s ideas. Is it possible that his scheme 
is the best way to give this type of biological education to the 
public at large? If some individuals were allowed to choose the 
father in the way he suggests, this might make the population 
as a whole reflect on the social responsibilities of parenthood. 
There are also legal problems. For example, should it be 
open to any individual to allow his spermatozoa to be stored, or 
would he need to have a licence for his spermatozoa to be put 
into storage? Secondly, there is the question of how many 
progeny of a given individual should be permitted. And surely, 
one must be licensed; this is at least as much a matter of public 
interest as having a licence to drive a motor car. Again, how 
much influence should society have in the actual choice of 
sperm donor? I think it is reasonable that, up to a point, 
the individuals concerned should have a choice. And one 
might also license the mothers for the number of children they 
can have. These are the sort of issues which these two papers 
raise. 
I would like to raise one final possibility of the way things 
may go. If such practices were adopted, it might happen that 
one particular country would initiate a larger-scale programme 
than any of the others, and after 20, 25 or 30 years the results 
might be rather startling, if, for example, all Nobel Prizes began 
to go to, say, Finland because they had gone in for improvement 
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