Applied Eugenics Part 11

"Unfitness" in this connection must not be interpreted too narrowly. A child may be "unfit" to survive in its environment, merely because its parents are ignorant and careless. Such unfitness makes more probable an inheritance of low intelligence.

Evidence of natural selection was gathered by Karl Pearson from another source and published in 1912. He dealt with material a.n.a.logous to that of Dr. Snow and showed "that when allowance was made for change of environment in the course of 50 years, a very high a.s.sociation existed between the deaths in the first year of life and the deaths in childhood (1 to 5 years). This a.s.sociation was such that if the infantile death-rate _increased_ by 10% the child death rate _decreased_ by 5.3% in males, while in females the _fall_ in the child death-rate was almost 1% for every 1% _rise_ in the infantile death-rate."

To put the matter in the form of a truism, part of the children born in any district in a given year are doomed by heredity to a premature death; and if they die in one year they will not be alive to die in some succeeding year.

Lately a new mathematical method, which is termed the Variate Difference Correlation method, has been invented and gives more accurate results, in such an investigation as that of natural selection, than any hitherto used. With this instrument Professor Pearson and Miss Elderton have confirmed the previous work. Applying it to the registered births in England and Wales between 1850 and 1912, and the deaths during the first five years of life in the same period, they have again found[57] that "for both s.e.xes a heavy death-rate in one year of life means a markedly lower death-rate in the same group in the following year of life." This lessened death-rate extends in a lessened degree to the year following that, but is not by the present method easy to trace further.

"It is difficult," as they conclude, "to believe that this important fact can be due to any other source than natural selection, i. e., a heavy mortality leaves behind it a stronger population."

To avoid misunderstandings, it may be well to add to this review the closing words of the Elderton-Pearson memoir. "Nature is not concerned with the moral or the immoral, which are standards of human conduct, and the duty of the naturalist is to point out what goes on in Nature. There can now be scarcely a doubt that even in highly organized human communities the death-rate is selective, and physical fitness is the criterion for survival. To a.s.sert the existence of this selection and measure its intensity must be distinguished from an advocacy of high infant mortality as a factor of racial efficiency. This reminder is the more needful as there are not wanting those who a.s.sert that demonstrating the existence of natural selection in man is identical with decrying all efforts to reduce the infantile death-rate." A further discussion of this point will be found in a later chapter.

The conclusion that, of the infants who die, a large number do so through inherent weakness--because they are not "fit" to survive--is also suggested by a study of the causes of death. From a third to a half of the deaths during the first year of life, and particularly during the first month, are due to what may be termed uterine causes, such as debility, atrophy, inanition, or premature birth. Although in many cases such a death is the result of lack of prenatal care, in still more it must be ascribed to a defect in the parental stock.

In connection with infant mortality, it may be of interest to point out that the intensity of natural selection is probably greater among boys than among girls. There is a steady preponderance of boys over girls at birth (about 105 to 100, in the United States), while among the stillborn the proportion is 158 to 100, if the Ma.s.sachusetts figures for 1891-1900 may be taken as general in application. Evidently a large number of weak males have been eliminated before birth. This elimination continues for a number of years to be greater among boys than among girls, until in the period of adolescence the death-rates of the two s.e.xes are equal. In adult life the death-rate among men is nearly always higher than that among women, but this is due largely to the fact that men pursue occupations where they are more exposed to death. In such cases, and particularly where deaths are due to accident, the mortality may not only be non-selective, but is sometimes contra-selective, for the strongest and most active men will often be those who expose themselves most to some danger. Such a reversal of the action of natural selection is seen on a large scale in the case of war, where the strongest go to the fray and are killed, while the weaklings stay at home to perpetuate _their_ type of the race.

A curious aspect of the kind of natural selection under consideration,--that which operates by death without reference to the food-supply,--is seen in the evolution of a wide pelvis in women. Before the days of modern obstetrics, the woman born with an unusually narrow pelvis was likely to die during parturition, and the inheritance of a narrower type of pelvis was thus stopped. With the introduction and improvement of instrumental and induced deliveries, many of these women are enabled to survive, with the necessary consequence that their daughters will in many cases have a similarly narrow pelvis, and experience similar difficulty in childbirth. The percentage of deliveries in which instrumental aid is necessary is thus increasing from generation to generation, and is likely to continue to increase for some time. In other words, natural selection, because of man's interference, can no longer maintain the width of woman's pelvis, as it formerly did, and a certain amount of reversion in this respect is probably taking place--a reversion which, if unchecked, would necessarily lead after a long time to a reduction in the average size of skull of that part of the human race which frequently uses forceps at childbirth. The time would be long because the forceps permit the survival of some large-headed infants who otherwise would die.

But it must not be supposed that lethal, non-sustentative selection works only through forms of infant mortality. That aspect was first discussed because it is most obvious, but the relation of natural selection to microbic disease is equally widespread and far more striking.

As to the inheritance of disease as such there is little room for misunderstanding: no biologist now believes a disease is actually handed down from parent to child in the germ-plasm. But what the doctors call a diathesis, a predisposition to some given disease, is most certainly heritable--a fact which Karl Pearson and others have proved by statistics that can not be given here.[58] And any individual who has inherited this diathesis, this lack of resistance to a given disease, is marked as a possible victim of natural selection. The extent to which and the manner in which it operates may be more readily understood by the study of a concrete case. Tuberculosis is, as everyone knows, a disease caused directly by a bacillus; and a disease to which immunity can not be acquired by any process of vaccination or inoculation yet known. It is a disease which is not directly inherited as such. Yet every city-dweller in the United States is almost constantly exposed to infection by this bacillus, and autopsies show that most persons have actually been infected at some period of life, but have resisted further encroachment. Perhaps a fraction of them will eventually die of consumption; the rest will die of some other disease, and will probably never even know that they have carried the bacilli of tuberculosis in their lungs.

Of a group of men picked at random from the population, why will some eventually die of tuberculosis and the others resist infection? Is it a matter of environment?--are open-air schools, sanitary tenements, proper hygiene, the kind of measures that will change this condition? Such is the doctrine widely preached at the present day. It is alleged that the white plague may be stamped out, if the open cases of tuberculosis are isolated and the rest of the population is taught how to live properly.

The problem is almost universally declared to be a problem of infection.

Infection certainly is the immediate problem, but the biologist sees a greater one a little farther back. It is the problem of natural selection.

To prove this, it is necessary to prove (1) that some people are born with less resistance to tuberculosis than others and (2) that it is these people with weak natural resistance who die of phthisis, while their neighbors with stronger resistance survive. The proof of these propositions has been abundantly given by Karl Pearson, G. Archdall Reid and others. Their main points may be indicated. In the first place it must be shown that the morbidity from tuberculosis is largely due to heredity--a point on which most medical men are still uninformed.

Measurement of the direct correlation between phthisis in parent and child shows it to be about .5, i. e., what one expects if it is a matter of heredity. This is the coefficient for most physical and mental characters: it is the coefficient for such pathological traits as deafness and insanity, which are obviously due in most cases to inheritance rather than infection.

But, one objects, this high correlation between parent and child does not prove inheritance,--it obviously proves infection. The family relations are so intimate that it is folly to overlook this factor in the spread of the disease.

Very well, Professor Pearson replied, if the relations between parent and child are so intimate that they lead to infection, they are certainly not less intimate between husband and wife, and there ought to be just as much infection in this relationship as in the former. The correlation was measured in thousands of cases and was found to lie around .25, being lowest in the poorer cla.s.ses and highest in the well-to-do cla.s.ses.

At first glance this seems partly to confirm the objection--it looks as if there must be a considerable amount of tubercular infection between husband and wife. But when it is found that the resemblance between husband and wife in the matter of insanity is also .25, the objection becomes less formidable. Certainly it will hardly be argued that one of the partners infects the other with this disability.

As a fact, a correlation of .25 between husband and wife, for tuberculosis, is only partly due to infection. What it does mean is that like tends to mate with like--called a.s.sortative mating. This coefficient of resemblance between husband and wife in regard to phthisis is about the same as the correlation of resemblance between husband and wife for eye color, stature, longevity, general health, truthfulness, tone of voice, and many other characters. No one will suppose that life partners "infect" each other in these respects.

Certainly no one will claim that a man deliberately selects a wife on the basis of resemblance to himself in these points; but he most certainly does so to some extent unconsciously, as will be described at greater length in Chapter XI. a.s.sortative mating is a well-established fact, and there is every reason to believe that much of the resemblance between husband and wife as regards tuberculosis is due to this fact, and not to infection.[59]

Again, it is objected that the infection of children is not a family matter, but due to tuberculous cows' milk: how then does it appear equally among the j.a.panese, where cows are not tuberculous and cow's milk rarely used as an infant food: or among such people as the Esquimaux and Polynesians, who have never seen a cow?

But, it is argued, at any rate bad housing and unsanitary conditions of life will make infection easier and lower the resistance of the individual. Perhaps such conditions may make infection easier, but that is of little importance considering how easy it is for all city dwellers--for the population as a whole. The question remains, will not bad housing cause a greater liability to fatal phthisis? Will not dest.i.tution and its attendant conditions increase the probability that a given individual will succ.u.mb to the white plague?

Most physicians think this to be the case, but they have not taken the pains to measure the respective roles, by the exact methods of modern science. S. Adolphus Knopf of New York, an authority on tuberculosis, recognizes the importance of the heredity factor, but says that after this, the most important predisposing conditions are of the nature of unsanitary schools, unsanitary tenements, unsanitary factories and workshops. This may be very true; these conditions may follow after heredity in importance--but how near do they follow? That is a matter capable of fairly accurate measurement, and should be discussed with figures, not generalities.

Taking the case of dest.i.tution, which includes, necessarily, most of the other evils specified, Professor Pearson measured the correlation with liability to phthisis and found it to be .02. The correlation for direct heredity--that is, the resemblance between parent and offspring--it will be remembered, is .50. As compared with this, the environmental factor of .02 is utterly insignificant. It seems evident that whether or not one dies from tuberculosis, under present-day urban conditions, depends mainly on the kind of const.i.tution one has inherited.

There is no escape, then, from the conclusion that in any individual, death from tuberculosis is largely a matter of natural selection. But by taking a longer view, one can actually see the change to which natural selection is one of the contributors. The following table shows the deaths from consumption in Ma.s.sachusetts, per 10,000 population:

1851-60 39.9 1861-70 34.9 1871-80 32.7 1881-90 29.2 1891-1900 21.4 1901 17.5 1902 15.9

F. L. Hoffman further points out[60] that in Ma.s.sachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, 1872-1911, the decline in the death-rate from tuberculosis has been about 50%. "The evidence is absolutely conclusive that actually as well as relatively, the mortality from tuberculosis in what is the most intensely industrial area of America has progressively diminished during the last 40 years."

It will be noted that the great increase in death from consumption in this area began in the decade following 1840, when the large Irish immigration began. The Irish are commonly believed to be particularly susceptible to phthisis. Crowded together in industrial conditions, they rapidly underwent infection, and their weak racial resistance led to a high death-rate. The weak lines of heredity were rapidly cut off; in other words, the intensity of natural selection was great, for a while.

The result was to leave the population of these New England states much more resistant, on the average, than it was before; and as the Irish immigration soon slowed down, and no new stocks with great weakness arrived, tuberculosis naturally tended to "burn itself out." This seems to be a partial explanation of the decline in the death-rate from phthisis in New England during the last half century, although it is not suggested that it represents the complete explanation: improved methods of treatment and sanitation doubtless played their part. But that they are the sole cause of the decline is made highly improbable by the low correlation between phthisis and environmental factors, which was mentioned above, and by all the other biometric study of tuberculosis, which has proved that the results ascribed to hygiene, including sanitorium treatment, are to some degree illusory.

That tuberculosis is particularly fatal to the Negro race is well known.

Even to-day, after several centuries of natural selection in the United States, the annual death-rate from consumption among Negroes in the registration area is 431.9 per 100,000 population (census of 1900) as compared with 170.5 for the whites; in the cities alone it is 471.0.

That overcrowding and climate can not be the sole factors is indicated by the fact that the Negro race has been decimated, wherever it has met tuberculosis. "In the years 1803 and 1810 the British government imported three or four thousand Negroes from Mozambique into Ceylon to form into regiments, and of these in December, 1820, there were left just 440, including the male descendants. All the rest had perished mainly from tuberculosis, and in a country where the disease is not nearly so prevalent as in England."[61] Archdall Reid has pointed out[62] that the American, Polynesian and Australian aborigines, to whom tuberculosis was unknown before the advent of Europeans, and who had therefore never been selected against it, could not survive its advent: they were killed by much smaller infections than would have injured a European, whose stock has been purged by centuries of natural selection.

These racial histories are the most important evidence available to the student of natural selection in man. The conclusion to be drawn from them seems plain. Natural selection, which has in the past never had an opportunity to act upon the Negro race through tuberculosis, is now engaged in hastening, at a relatively rapid rate, the evolution of this race toward immunity from death by tuberculosis. The evolution of the white race on this line is, as the figures show, going on simultaneously, but having begun centuries earlier, it is not now so rapid. The weakest white stocks were cut off hundreds of years ago, in Great Britain or Europe; those of the black race are only now going.

Despite all the efforts of medicine and sanitation, it is likely that the Negro death-rate from phthisis will continue high for some years, until what is left of the race will possess a degree of resistance, or immunity, not much inferior to that of the whites among whom they live.

The blacks in North America now must be already more resistant than their ancestors; the mulattoes descended of normal healthy unions should be more resistant than the pure Negroes, although no statistics are available on the point; but were a new immigration to take place from Africa to-day, and the immigrants to be put into villages with their Americanized brethren, the high death-rate would result.

While the Negroes were thus undergoing the radical surgery of natural selection, what was happening to the aborigines of America? The answer of history is unmistakable; they were meeting the same fate, in an even more violent form. Not tuberculosis alone, but small-pox, measles, alcohol and a dozen other importations of the conquerors, found in the aborigines of the New World a stock which had never been selected against these diseases.

It is the custom of sentimentalists sometimes to talk as if the North American Indian had been killed off by the white man. So he was,--but not directly: he was killed off by natural selection, acting through the white man's diseases and narcotics. In 1841 Catlin wrote, "Thirty millions of white men are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of life over the bones of twelve millions of red men, six millions of whom have fallen victims to small-pox." Small-pox is an old story to the white race, and the death of the least resistant strains in each generation has left a population that is fairly resistant. It was new to the natives of America, and history shows the result. Alcohol, too, counted its victims by the thousand, for the same reason. The process of natural selection among the North American Indians has not yet stopped; if there are a century from now any Indians left, they will of necessity belong to stocks which are relatively resistant to alcohol and tuberculosis and the other widespread and fatal diseases which were unknown upon this continent before Columbus.

The decrease of natives following the Spanish conquest of tropical America has long been one of the most striking events of history.

Popular historians sometimes speak as if most of the native population had been killed off by the cruelty of the conquistadores. Surely such talk could not proceed from those who are familiar with the action of natural selection. It is obvious that when the Spaniard brought the natives together, making them work in mines and a.s.semble in churches, he brought them under conditions especially favorable for infection by the new diseases which he had brought. The aborigines of the New World, up to the time the Spaniards came, had undergone no evolution whatever against these diseases; consequently the evolution began at so rapid a rate that in a few centuries only those who lived in out-of-the-way places remain unscathed.

The same story is repeated, in a survey of the history of the Pacific Islands. Even such a disease as whooping-cough carried off adults by the hundred. Robert Louis Stevenson has left a graphic picture[63] of natural selection at work:

"The tribe of Hapaa," he writes, "is said to have numbered some four hundred when the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread like fire about the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from the newly-created solitude....

Early in the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, the first case of phthisis appeared in a household of 17 persons, and by the end of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, a boy who had been absent at his schooling."

In Tasmania is another good ill.u.s.tration of the evolution of a race proceeding so rapidly as to be fatal to the race. When the first English settled on the island, in 1803, the native population consisted of several thousand. Tuberculosis and many other new diseases, and, most of all, alcohol, began to operate on the aborigines, who were attracted to the settlements of the whites. In a quarter of a century there were only a few hundred left. Many, of course, had met violent deaths, but an enlightened perusal of any history of the period,[64] will leave no doubt that natural selection by disease was responsible for most of the mortality. By 1847 the number of native Tasmanians was reduced to 44, who were already unmistakably doomed by alcohol and bacteria. When the last full-blood Tasmanian died in 1876, a new chapter was written in the story of the modern evolution of the human race.

No such stories are told about the white settlements on this continent, even before the days of quarantine and scientific medicine. There is no other adequate explanation of the difference, than that the two races have evolved to a different degree in their resistance to these diseases. It is easily seen, then, that man's evolution is going on, at varying rates of speed, in probably all parts of the human race at the present time.

We do not mean, of course, to suggest that all the natives who have died in the New World since the landing of Columbus, have died because the evolution of their race had not proceeded so far in certain directions as had that of their conquerors. But the proportion of them who were eliminated for that reason is certainly very large. In the more remote parts of South America the process is still going on. Recent press dispatches have carried the account of the University of Pennsylvania's Amazon Expedition, under the direction of William C. Farrabee. In a letter dated March 16, 1916, the leader told of the discovery of the remains of the tribe of Pikipitanges, a once populous tribe of which a chief, six women and two boys alone are left. The tribe had been almost wiped out, Dr. Farabee reported, by an epidemic of _influenza_!

If the aborigines of the New World succ.u.mb to the diseases of the European, it is not less true that the European succ.u.mbs to diseases against which his race has not been selected. The deadliness of yellow fever to Americans in the tropics, and the relative immunity of Negroes, is familiar; so too is the frequently fatal result of the African tropical fevers on the white man, while the natives suffer from them much less, having been made more resistant by centuries of natural selection.

This long discussion may now be summarized. We dealt with lethal selection, that form of natural selection which operates by prematurely killing off the less fit and leaving the more fit to survive and reproduce their kind. It is of course understood that the word "fit" in this connection does not necessarily mean morally or mentally superior, but merely fit for the particular environment. In a community of rascals, the greatest rascal might be the fittest to survive. In the slums of a modern city the Jewish type, stringently selected through centuries of ghetto life, is particularly fit to survive, although it may not be the physical ideal of an anthropologist.

Two forms of lethal selection were distinguished, one depending on starvation and the other on causes not connected with the food supply.

Direct starvation is not a factor of importance in the survival of most races during most of the time at the present day so far as the civilized portion of the world is concerned. But disease and the other lethal factors not connected with the food-supply, through which natural selection acts, are still of great importance. From a half to two-thirds of all deaths are of a selective character, even under favorable conditions.

It is also to be noted, however, that with the progress of medicine, and the diminution of unfit material, this kind of natural selection will tend to become less and less widespread. For a long time, natural selection in man has probably done little to cause marked change in his physical or mental characteristics. Man's interference has prevented. In recent centuries natural selection has probably done no more on the whole than keep the race where it was: it is to be feared that it has not even done that. It is doubtful if there is any race to-day which attains the physical and mental average of the Athenians of 2,500 years ago.

Lethal natural selection, then, has been and still is a factor of great importance in the evolution of the race, but at present it is doing little or nothing that promises to further the ideal of eugenics--race betterment.

But lethal natural selection is only half the story. It is obvious that if the const.i.tution of a race can be altered by excess of deaths in a certain cla.s.s, it can equally be altered by excess of births in a certain cla.s.s. This is reproductive selection, which may appear in either one of two forms. If the individual leaves few or no progeny because of his failure to mate at the proper time, it is called s.e.xual selection; if, however, he mates, yet leaves few or no progeny (as compared with other individuals), it is called fecundal selection.

Even in man, the importance of the role of reproductive selection is insufficiently understood; in the lower animals scientists have tended still more to undervalue it. As a fact, no species ordinarily multiplies in such numbers as to exhaust all the food available, despite the teaching of Malthus and Darwin to the contrary. The rate of reproduction is the crux of natural selection; each species normally has such a reproduction rate as will suffice to withstand the premature deaths and sterility of some individuals, and yet not so large as to press unduly upon the food supply. The problem of natural selection is a problem of the adjustment between reproductive rate and death-rate, and the struggle for subsistence is only one of several factors.

While the reproductive rate must be looked upon as a characteristic which has its adaptations like other characteristics, it has one peculiarity--its increase is always opposed by lethal selection. The chances of life are reduced by reproducing, inasmuch as more danger is entailed by the extra activities of courtship, and later, in bearing and caring for the young, since these duties reduce the normal wariness of individual life. The reproductive rate, therefore, always remains at the lowest point which will suffice for the reproductive needs of the species. For this reason alone the non-sustentative form of selection might be expected to be the predominant kind.

J. T. Gulick and Karl Pearson have pointed out that there is a normal conflict between natural selection and fecundal selection. Fecundal selection is said by them to be constantly tending to increase the reproductive rate, because fecundity is partly a matter of heredity, and the fecund parents leave more offspring with the same characteristic.