DISCUSSION 
particular woman is not suitable to have any children and 
another woman is only suitable if linked with certain specified 
spermatozoa. One would have to decide which spermatozoa, 
not just which men, were best. The fundamental unanswered 
question would then be—for what values are you going to 
breed? What is there to stop a totalitarian country breeding 
for efficiency, even cruelty and the absence of a moral and social 
sense? Is not this the logical outcome of breeding for a humanis- 
tic concept of survival and progress? If that is our aim one 
cannot leave these matters to the individual. 
Crick: I believe that basically society has the right to decide, 
but what techniques can our society use to impose this to a 
reasonable extent (not necessarily to 100 per cent), without 
incurring some other costs? The proposal of licensing that I 
somewhat playfully suggested might, or might not, be accept- 
able in our present social system. The question that was just 
raised as to whether there is a drive for women to have children 
and whether this would lead to disturbances is very relevant. 
I would add, however, that there are techniques by which one 
can inconspicuously apply social pressure and thus reduce such 
disturbances. After all, we already have social forces which 
make us limit in one way or the other the size of our families. 
So although it may turn out that society has the right to 
determine who should have children, and in what way, the 
actual technique to be used has to be judged against the back- 
ground of a social complex including the amount of education. 
This is why I think biological education is so important, 
because it enables the solutions to be attained with less stress 
to the social system. 
Coon: Adoption of children sometimes seems to fill the bill 
so far as the maternal urge is concerned: plenty of women have 
a tremendous maternal urge which is satisfied perfectly well 
with someone else’s children. 
Crick: That is a very good example of how one could get 
round one of these problems. 
Bronowski: I find myself out of sympathy with much that 
has been said in Muller’s and Lederberg’s papers. ‘That is 
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