Eugenics and Genetics 
social rank. The same observation was made approximately 
2,000 years ago in the statement “Blessed are the meek for they 
shall inherit the earth’’. It is possible that this is not an entirely 
bad thing, because the bad qualities of people who achieve 
social prominence in the human societies of which we have 
record are quite as striking as their good ones. Obviously you 
need a certain amount of ability for this, but you may need 
some other qualities which are not as desirable. I think that 
this ‘‘meek inheritance”’ does apply on a larger scale. If you 
resist invaders, provided you do it sufficiently well, you may 
survive, but otherwise you will be massacred. The people whose 
ancestors have never offered much resistance to invaders, such 
as the Gujeratis in India, seem to have survived in considerable 
numbers. Similarly the West African negroes have been 
sufficiently meek to propagate as slaves, and survived, while the 
Caribs, for example, did not. I think we have to consider such 
points as these before we regard social approbation as neces- 
sarily desirable from the point of view of what we want in the 
ultimate future. 
I think most of Muller’s ideas are entirely acceptable to 
traditional Hindu thought. In Hindu law there are approxi- 
mately 12 categories of sons: it is much the best to have your 
own sons begotten on your own wife; and in about the third 
category are those begotten on your own wife by someone 
appointed by you—they are much better than those begotten 
as a result of seduction or rape. I do not think that among 
people with the Hindu tradition you would find the resistance 
to such ideas which you would in some other traditions. 
My own view is that what Lerner calls “‘genetic homoeostasis”’ 
makes it much harder than seems likely at first sight to produce 
the results which you wish by selection, unless it is something 
comparatively trivial like the colour of an egg-shell or of hair. 
Anything even as complicated as the qualities of a good laying 
hen is very much harder to fix by selection than was considered 
earlier. I am afraid we might find the same thing with human 
characters, until we know something about the genetics of the 
desirable ones—which in my opinion we hardly do. 
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