THE SOONG FAMILY 



An Example of Great Ability in the Common Man 



RUDOLPH M. BINDER 



New York University, New York 



A WORD ABOUT METHODOLOGY 



The contest between heredity and environment is perennial. At the 

 present time, the theory of "behaviorism" seems to have given the environ- 

 mentalists a new and stronger weapon for defending environment as the 

 more important element in evolution and the making of man. On the 

 other hand, meetings of eugenists, like this one, staunchly and determinately 

 affirm the supremacy of heredity over and against environment. And so 

 the battle rages without any definite conclusion. 



What is the trouble? It is the old scholastic futility of abstract reasoning. 

 A man takes the position that A is true, ergo, B cannot be true. He argues 

 by means of the syllogism that everything contained in his premise or 

 premises is true, but everything false contained in other premises. This 

 scholastic method of reasoning, inherited from pre-scientific education, 

 still haunts many supposedly well informed men, and works havoc even in 

 scientific circles; and the contention between environmentalists and heredi- 

 tarians is only one example out of many that might be given. 



The scientist must take cognizance of both facts. Heredity does not 

 work in a vacuum but in the specific environment in which it is placed; 

 environment does not affect any heredity except that which is exposed to it. 

 The result is an effect of the meeting and the interaction of the two; and it 

 is impossible to tell which is more important — heredity or environment. 

 The situation is this: Heredity supplies ability; environment furnishes 

 opportunity. The two must meet, if results are to be attained. 



We have two striking illustrations of this fact in our history of the Civil 

 War. When U. S. Grant, a descendant of an old New England family and 

 with a good record in the Mexican war, resigned his commission at the age 

 of thirty-two to take up farming and selling of real estate only to make a 

 fizzle of it and had to seek refuge as a clerk in his father's leather shop at the 

 age of thirty-eight, he was looked upon as a broken and disappointed man. 

 The heredity was there, but it had no way of manifesting itself in that dreary 



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