

Chapter IV 

 "Natural Selection" 



MR. BALFOUR made some illuminating remarks 

 on this subject at the opening of the first 

 international Eugenics Congress in London in 1912, 

 under the presidency of Major Leonard Darwin. He 

 said : "I read, for instance, as almost an ordinary 

 commonplace of eugenic literature, that we are 

 suffering at this moment from the fact that the law of 

 natural selection is, if not in abeyance, producing less 

 effect than it did when selection was more stringent, 

 and that what we have to do is, as it were, to go back 

 to the good old days of natural selection. I do not 

 believe that to be scientifically sound. I say nothing 

 about its other aspects. The truth is, that we are very 

 apt to use the word in two quite different senses. We 

 say that the ' fit ' survive. But all that means is that 

 those who survive are fit. They are fit because they 

 survive and they survive because they are fit. It 

 really adds nothing to our knowledge of the facts. 

 All it shows is that here is a class of a race or species 

 which does survive and is adapted to its surroundings, 

 and that is a definition from a strictly biological point 

 of view of what ' fit ' means." I have reproduced this 

 portion of his speech in order to demonstrate the 

 attitude of one of the most astute intellects of our time 

 towards the Darwinian hypothesis. " Fitness " and 

 " survival " are by no means one and the same thing, 



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