IS WAR DYSGENIC 245 



this publication for the detailed discussion of the investigation. A short 

 paper like the present one cannot possibly include a full account of the 

 statistical difficulties and analyses incident to the work. 



War is essentially a problem in human ecology. Just as the plants and 

 animals in an aquarium, pond, or forest constitute a balanced system, so 

 human society is a complicated organism. War affects not only the armies 

 engaged, but also the civil populations of the belligerent nations and even 

 of remote neutral countries. One should constantly keep in mind the fact 

 that different wars may have different biological effects and that the same 

 war might conceivably be beneficial to certain of the nations participating 

 and harmful to others. Conclusions drawn from my investigations, there- 

 fore, do not necessarily apply to the effects of wars other than the World 

 War, nor to the consequences of the World War in countries other than the 

 United States of America. 



The problem is complex. What happens during the peace-time period 

 of preparation for warfare? Physically and mentally normal young men 

 are sometimes conscripted and segregated in military barracks so that their 

 reproduction is delayed. To what extent do men rejected for military serv- 

 ice possess undesirable traits which they transmit to posterity? What are 

 the genetic consequences of venereal infection? When war comes, what 

 types of men are sent to the battlefields and what types are rejected for 

 enlistment because of the possession of physical or mental defects? What 

 about the age distributions of military mortality? What effect does the 

 war have upon the birth and death rates in civilian populations? Finally, 

 there are the aftermaths of war. Does the population of a belligerent coun- 

 try recover both qualitatively and quantitatively from the ill effects of the 

 conflict? It is obvious that a thorough-going appraisal of all the biological 

 effects of any one war would be a colossal task, so we have restricted our- 

 selves to the study of data provided by our own War Department for the 

 United States Army, and to statistics published by Harvard University con- 

 cerning the participation of Harvard men in the World War. 



The study was confined to two aspects of the World War. (1) What 

 types of men were selected and what types rejected for military service? 

 (2) What was the distribution of military deaths in the sections of the popu- 

 lation studied? Let us briefly, and of necessity rather superficially, con- 

 sider selection at enlistment, using first the excellent work of Love and 

 Davenport on the defects found in drafted men. Nearly 237,000 who pos- 

 sessed defects of a probably more or less hereditary nature were rejected 

 and about 50,000 such men were accepted for service in the United States 

 Army. That is about 17 per cent of these defectives were exposed to the 



