TYPES OF DATA AVAILABLE FOR EUGENICS RESEARCH IN 

 THE UNITED STATES 



FRANK LORIMER 

 Eugenics Research Association, Washington, D. C. 



It is necessary at the start to make a distinction between what we may 

 call Individual Eugenics and Social Eugenics. Certain hereditary defects 

 may be extremely painful in their consequences for individual families and 

 yet may not bulk large in public welfare. The development of genetic 

 therapy in dealing with hereditary disorders demands an intimate under- 

 standing of the special types of heredity which may be involved in each var- 

 iation. Such procedure, therefore, waits upon the researches of physicians, 

 physiologists, psychiatrists, and geneticists. On the other hand, there are 

 some very frequent hereditary limitations, notably limitations in capacity 

 for intellectual development, which may not be particularly painful to in- 

 dividuals but may involve serious social consequences. Our attention has 

 been devoted primarily to the study of data bearing on the social aspects 

 of general population trends. We are interested in data which show what 

 is happening with regard to the distribution of hereditary characteristics, 

 especially capacity for intellectual development, in the population of the 

 United States. And we are equally interested in data which throw light 

 on the causes of present trends and the possibilities of social control. 



With this approach in mind, comprehensive surveys, census data and vital 

 statistics are necessarily of first importance, in spite of all the inaccuracies 

 and limitations which necessarily infect such materials. In the study of 

 population changes we must deal almost wholly with mass data. In other 

 phases of our problem, however, more intimate and detailed studies are of 

 greater value. For example, in the study of intelligence, a few carefully 

 controlled experimental results with well selected samples are worth more 

 than a mass of data whose meanings are dubious. Of course, large-scale 

 and detailed studies are complementary in this field. The results of exten- 

 sive surveys such as the Army intelligence tests give some indication of the 

 distribution of degrees of present intellectual development. More detailed 

 studies throw light on how much, or in this case, how little, these results 

 mean as regards hereditary capacity. I should like to call attention to one 

 type of mass data with regard to distribution of intelligence, which has not, 



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