DISCUSSION 
As for eugenics, it is still true, as it was fifty years ago, that 
while knowledge of human genetics has improved, it is still 
very limited. Eugenics has been through its first cycle—it 
started with extremely brilliant, rather unscrupulous scientists 
of the type of Karl Pearson, and popularizing humbugs of the 
type of Saleeby, and in the Edwardian decade it was intellec- 
tually fashionable. I think that this first cycle of eugenics never 
recovered from the witticisms of Haldane and Hogben— 
Haldane in the more classical, Hogben in the more popular 
manner. It is just as well that it did die because we have seen 
in Nazism where it may lead. I think that it is no accident that 
the Nazi doctrines about sterilization were closely linked, 
intellectually and morally, to Nazi doctrines about genocide. 
That is why I am so alarmed to see what is happening today. 
Apparently we are beginning a second cycle of eugenic 
doctrines supported by some brilliant and misguided scientists, 
and which I am afraid will attract its quota of humbugs as well. 
Crick: I disagree strongly with Dr. Clark’s remarks and 
with the standpoint from which he made them. It is clear that 
if we take the broad ethical question of ultimate ends we shall 
never reach any agreement. Moreover, those of us who are 
humanists have a great difficulty in that we are unable to 
formulate our ends as clearly as is possible for those of us who 
are Christians. Nevertheless there are some ends that we can 
all share, even though we have these differences. It is surely 
clear that good health, high intelligence, general benevolence— 
the qualities Muller listed—are desirable qualities which we 
would all agree on. We would agree also that these qualities 
are not uniformly distributed. There are people who are 
deficient in intelligence, for example (I mention intelligence 
because this is something we can to some extent measure). 
Surely it is a very reasonable aim for us to try to increase that. 
Some of the arguments that “nature is doing it all right”’ may 
possibly be correct but they seem to me only to reflect con- 
servatism and to have no real basis of fact. We are now in an 
environment that is changing very rapidly, and has been chang- 
ing for the last few thousand years, but we evolved, as was 
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