Applied Eugenics Part 1

Applied Eugenics.

by Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson.

PREFACE

The science of eugenics consists of a foundation of biology and a superstructure of sociology. Galton, its founder, emphasized both parts in due proportion. Until recently, however, most sociologists have been either indifferent or hostile to eugenics, and the science has been left for the most part in the hands of biologists, who have naturally worked most on the foundations and neglected the superstructure. Although we are not disposed to minimize the importance of the biological part, we think it desirable that the means of applying the biological principles should be more carefully studied. The reader of this book will, consequently, find only a summary explanation of the mechanism of inheritance. Emphasis has rather been laid on the practical means by which society may encourage the reproduction of superior persons and discourage that of inferiors.

We a.s.sume that in general, a eugenically superior or desirable person has, to a greater degree than the average, the germinal basis for the following characteristics: to live past maturity, to reproduce adequately, to live happily and to make contributions to the productivity, happiness, and progress of society. It is desirable to discriminate as much as possible between the possession of the germinal basis and the observed achievement, since the latter consists of the former plus or minus environmental influence. But where the amount of modification is too obscure to be detected, it is advantageous to take the demonstrated achievement as a tentative measure of the germinal basis. The problem of eugenics is to make such legal, social and economic adjustments that (1) a larger proportion of superior persons will have children than at present, (2) that the average number of offspring of each superior person will be greater than at present, (3) that the most inferior persons will have no children, and finally that (4) other inferior persons will have fewer children than now. The science of eugenics is still young and much of its program must be tentative and subject to the test of actual experiment. It is more important that the student acquire the habit of looking at society from a biological as well as a sociological point of view, than that he put his faith in the efficacy of any particular mode of procedure.

The essential points of our eugenics program were laid down by Professor Johnson in an article ent.i.tled "Human Evolution and its Control" in the _Popular Science Monthly_ for January, 1910. Considerable parts of the material in the present book have appeared in the _Journal of Heredity_.

Helpful suggestions and criticism have been received from several friends, in particular Sewall Wright and O. E. Baker of the United States Department of Agriculture.

PAUL POPENOE.

WASHINGTON, _June, 1918._

INTRODUCTION

The Great War has caused a vast destruction of the sounder portion of the belligerent peoples and it is certain that in the next generation the progeny of their weaker members will const.i.tute a much larger proportion of the whole than would have been the case if the War had not occurred. Owing to this immeasurable calamity that has befallen the white race, the question of eugenics has ceased to be merely academic.

It looms large whenever we consider the means of avoiding a stagnation or even decline of our civilization in consequence of the losses the War has inflicted upon the more valuable stocks. Eugenics is by no means tender with established customs and inst.i.tutions, and once it seemed likely that its teachings would be left for our grandchildren to act on.

But the plowshare of war has turned up the tough sod of custom, and now every sound new idea has a chance. Rooted prejudices have been leveled like the forests of Picardy under gun fire. The fear of racial decline provides the eugenist with a far stronger leverage than did the hope of accelerating racial progress. It may be, then, that owing to the War eugenic policies will gain as much ground by the middle of this century as without it they would have gained by the end of the century.

This book could not have been written ten years ago because many of the data it relies on were not then in existence. In view of inquiries now going on, we may reasonably hope that ten years hence it will be possible to make a much better book on the subject. But I am sure that this book is as good a presentation as can be made of eugenics at its present stage of development. The results of all the trustworthy observations and experiments have been taken into account, and the testing of human customs and inst.i.tutions in the light of biological principles tallies well with the sociology of our times.

I cannot understand how any conscientious person, dealing in a large way with human life, should have the hardihood to ignore eugenics. This book should command the attention not only of students of sociology, but, as well, of philanthropists, social workers, settlement wardens, doctors, clergymen, educators, editors, publicists, Y. M. C. A. secretaries and industrial engineers. It ought to lie at the elbow of law-makers, statesmen, poor relief officials, immigration inspectors, judges of juvenile courts, probation officers, members of state boards of control and heads of charitable and correctional inst.i.tutions. Finally, the thoughtful ought to find in it guidance in their problem of mating. It will inspire the superior to rise above certain worldly ideals of life and to aim at a family success rather than an individual success.

EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS.

The University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin July 1918.

APPLIED EUGENICS

CHAPTER I

NATURE OR NURTURE?

At the First Race Betterment Conference held at Battle Creek, Mich., many methods were suggested by which it was believed that the people of America might be made, on the average, healthier, happier, and more efficient. One afternoon the discussion turned to the children of the slums. Their condition was pictured in dark colors. A number of eugenists remarked that they were in many cases handicapped by a poor heredity. Then Jacob Riis--a man for whom every American must feel a profound admiration--strode upon the platform, filled with indignation.

"We have heard friends here talk about heredity," he exclaimed. "The word has rung in my ears until I am sick of it. Heredity! Heredity!

There is just one heredity in all the world that is ours--we are children of G.o.d, and there is nothing in the whole big world that we cannot do in His service with it."

It is probably not beyond the truth to say that in this statement Jacob Riis voiced the opinion of a majority of the social workers of this country, and likewise a majority of the people who are faithfully and with much self-sacrifice supporting charities, uplift movements, reform legislation, and philanthropic attempts at social betterment in many directions. They suppose that they are at the same time making the race better by making the conditions better in which people live.

It is widely supposed that, although nature may have distributed some handicaps at birth, they can be removed if the body is properly warmed and fed and the mind properly exercised. It is further widely supposed that this improvement in the condition of the individual will result in his production of better infants, and that thus the race, gaining a little momentum in each generation, will gradually move on toward ultimate perfection.

There is no lack of efforts to improve the race, by this method of direct change of the environment. It involves two a.s.sumptions, which are sometimes made explicitly, sometimes merely taken for granted. These are:

1. That changes in a man's surroundings, or, to use the more technical biological term, in his nurture, will change the nature that he has inherited.

2. That such changes will further be transmitted to his children.

Any one who proposes methods of race betterment, as we do in the present book, must meet these two popular beliefs. We shall therefore examine the first of them in this chapter, and the second in Chapter II.

Galton adopted and popularized Shakespere's ant.i.thesis of _nature_ and _nurture_ to describe a man's inheritance and his surroundings, the two terms including everything that can pertain to a human being. The words are not wholly suitable, particularly since nature has two distinct meanings,--human nature and external nature. The first is the only one considered by Galton. Further, nurture is capable of subdivision into those environmental influences which do not undergo much change,--e.g., soil and climate,--and those forces of civilization and education which might better be described as culture. The evolutionist has really to deal with the three factors of germ-plasm, physical surroundings and culture. But Galton's phrase is so widely current that we shall continue to use it, with the implications that have just been outlined.

The ant.i.thesis of nature and nurture is not a new one; it was met long ago by biologists and settled by them to their own satisfaction. The whole body of experimental and observational evidence in biology tends to show that the characters which the individual inherits from his ancestors remain remarkably constant in all ordinary conditions to which they may be subjected. Their constancy is roughly proportionate to the place of the animal in the scale of evolution; lower forms are more easily changed by outside influence, but as one ascends to the higher forms, which are more differentiated, it is found more and more difficult to effect any change in them. Their characters are more definitely fixed at birth.[1]

It is with the highest of all forms, Man, that we have now to deal. The student in biology is not likely to doubt that the differences in men are due much more to inherited nature than to any influences brought to bear after birth, even though these latter influences include such powerful ones as nutrition and education within ordinary limits.

But the biological evidence does not lend itself readily to summary treatment, and we shall therefore examine the question by statistical methods.[2] These have the further advantage of being more easily understood; for facts which can be measured and expressed in numbers are facts whose import the reader can usually decide for himself: he is perfectly able to determine, without any special training, whether twice two does or does not make four. One further preliminary remark: the problem of nature vs. nurture can not be solved in general terms; a moment's thought will show that it can be understood only by examining one trait at a time. The problem is to decide whether the differences between the people met in everyday life are due more to inheritance or to outside influences, and these differences must naturally be examined separately; they can not be lumped together.

To ask whether nature in general contributes more to a man than nurture is futile; but it is not at all futile to ask whether the differences in a given human trait are more affected by differences in nature than by differences in nurture. It is easy to see that a verdict may be sometimes given to one side, sometimes to the other. Albinism in animals, for instance, is a trait which is known to be inherited, and which is very slightly affected by differences of climate, food supply, etc. On the other hand, there are factors which, although having inherited bases, owe their expression almost wholly to outside influences. Professor Morgan, for example, has found a strain of fruit flies whose offspring in cold weather are usually born with supernumerary legs. In hot weather they are practically normal. If this strain were bred only in the tropics, the abnormality would probably not be noticed; on the other hand, if it were bred only in cold regions, it would be set down as one characterized by duplication of limbs. The heredity factor would be the same in each case, the difference in appearance being due merely to temperature.

Mere inspection does not always tell whether some feature of an individual is more affected by changes in heredity or changes in surroundings. On seeing a swarthy man, one may suppose that he comes of a swarthy race, or that he is a fair-skinned man who has lived long in the desert. In the one case the swarthiness would be inheritable, in the other not. Which explanation is correct, can only be told by examining a number of such individuals under critical conditions, or by an examination of the ancestry. A man from a dark-skinned race would become little darker by living under the desert sun, while a white man would take on a good deal of tan.

The limited effect of nurture in changing nature is in some fields a matter of common observation. The man who works in the gymnasium knows that exercise increases the strength of a given group of muscles for a while, but not indefinitely. There comes a time when the limit of a man's hereditary potentiality is reached, and no amount of exercise will add another millimeter to the circ.u.mference of his arm. Similarly the handball or tennis player some day reaches his highest point, as do runners or race horses. A trainer could bring Arthur Duffy in a few years to the point of running a hundred yards in 9-3/5 seconds, but no amount of training after that could clip off another fifth of a second.

A parallel case is found in the students who take a college examination.

Half a dozen of them may have devoted the same amount of time to it--may have crammed to the limit--but they will still receive widely different marks. These commonplace cases show that nurture has seemingly some power to mold the individual, by giving his inborn possibilities a chance to express themselves, but that nature says the first and last word. Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, hit on an ingenious and more convincing ill.u.s.tration by studying the history of twins.[3]

There are, everyday observation shows, two kinds of twins--ordinary twins and the so-called identical twins. Ordinary twins are merely brothers, or sisters, or brother and sister, who happen to be born two at a time, because two ova have developed simultaneously. The fact that they were born at the same time does not make them alike--they differ quite as widely from each other as ordinary brothers and sisters do.

Identical twins have their origin in a different phenomenon--they are believed to be halves of the same egg-cell, in which two growing-points appeared at a very early embryonic stage, each of these developing into a separate individual. As would be expected, these identical twins are always of the same s.e.x, and extremely like each other, so that sometimes their own mother can not tell them apart. This likeness extends to all sorts of traits:--they have lost their milk teeth on the same day in one case, they even fell ill on the same day with the same disease, even though they were in different cities.

Now Galton reasoned that if environment really changes the inborn character, then these identical twins, who start life as halves of the same whole, ought to become more unlike if they were brought up apart; and as they grew older and moved into different spheres of activity, they ought to become measurably dissimilar. On the other hand, ordinary twins, who start dissimilar, ought to become more alike when brought up in the same family, on the same diet, among the same friends, with the same education. If the course of years shows that identical twins remain as like as ever and ordinary twins as unlike as ever, regardless of changes in conditions, then environment will have failed to demonstrate that it has any great power to modify one's inborn nature in these traits.

With this view, Galton collected the history of eighty pairs of identical twins, thirty-five cases being accompanied by very full details, which showed that the twins were really as nearly identical, in childhood, as one could expect to find. On this point, Galton's inquiries were careful, and the replies satisfactory. They are not, however, as he remarks, much varied in character. "When the twins are children, they are usually distinguished by ribbons tied around the wrist or neck; nevertheless the one is sometimes fed, physicked, and whipped by mistake for the other, and the description of these little domestic catastrophes was usually given by the mother, in a phraseology, that is sometimes touching by reason of its seriousness. I have one case in which a doubt remains whether the children were not changed in their bath, and the presumed A is not really B, and _vice versa_. In another case, an artist was engaged on the portraits of twins who were between three and four years of age; he had to lay aside his work for three weeks, and, on resuming it, could not tell to which child the respective likeness he had in hand belonged. The mistakes become less numerous on the part of the mother during the boyhood and girlhood of the twins, but are almost as frequent as before on the part of strangers. I have many instances of tutors being unable to distinguish their twin pupils. Two girls used regularly to impose on their music teacher when one of them wanted a whole holiday; they had their lessons at separate hours, and the one girl sacrificed herself to receive two lessons on the same day, while the other one enjoyed herself from morning to evening. Here is a brief and comprehensive account: 'Exactly alike in all, their schoolmasters could never tell them apart; at dancing parties they constantly changed partners without discovery; their close resemblance is scarcely diminished by age."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOUR BABY GIRLS AT ONCE

FIG. 1.--These quadruplet daughters were born to Mr. and Mrs.

F. M. Keys, Hollis, Okla., on July 4, 1915, and were seven months old when the photograph was taken. Up to that time they had never had any other nourishment than their mother's milk. Their weights at birth were as follows (reading from left to right): Roberta, 4 pounds; Mona, 4-1/2 pounds; Mary, 4-1/4 pounds; Leota, 3-3/4 pounds. When photographed, Roberta weighed 16 pounds and each of the others weighed 16-1/4. Their aunt vouches for the fact that the care of the four is less trouble than a single baby often makes. The mother has had no previous plural births, although she has borne four children prior to these. Her own mother had but two children, a son and a daughter, and there is no record of twins on the mother's side. The father of the quadruplets is one of twelve children, among whom is one pair of twins. It is known that twinning is largely due to inheritance, and it would seem that the appearance of these quadruplets is due to the hereditary influence of the father rather than the mother. If this is the case, then the four girls must all have come from one egg-cell, which split up at an early stage. Note the uniform shape of the mouth, and the ears, set unusually low on the head.]

"The following is a typical schoolboy anecdote:

"'Two twins were fond of playing tricks, and complaints were frequently made; but the boys would never own which was the guilty one, and the complainants were never certain which of the two it was. One head master used to say he would never flog the innocent for the guilty, and the other used to flog them both.'

"No less than nine anecdotes have reached me of a twin seeing his or her reflection in the looking-gla.s.s, and addressing it in the belief that it was the other twin in person.