Applied Eugenics Part 39

Many of them, such as the economic and social changes we have suggested in earlier chapters, are an important part of eugenics. Every euthenic measure should be scrutinized from the evolutionary standpoint; if it is eugenic as well as euthenic, it should be whole-heartedly favored; if it is dysgenic but euthenic it should be condemned or adopted, according to whether or not the gain in all ways from its operation will exceed the damage.

In general, euthenics, when not accompanied by some form of selection (i. e., eugenics) ultimately defeats its own end. If it is accompanied by rational selection, it can usually be indorsed. Eugenics, on the other hand, is likewise inadequate unless accompanied by constant improvement in the surroundings; and its advocates must demand euthenics as an accompaniment of selection, in order that the opportunity for getting a fair selection may be as free as possible. If the euthenist likewise takes pains not to ignore the existence of the racial factor, then the two schools are standing on the same ground, and it is merely a matter of taste or opportunity, whether one emphasizes one side or the other. Each of the two factions, sometimes thought to be opposing, will be seen to be getting the same end result, namely, human progress.

Not only are the two schools working for the same end, but each must depend in still another way upon the other, in order to make headway.

The eugenist can not see his measures put into effect except through changes in law and custom--i. e., euthenic changes. He must and does appeal to euthenics to secure action. The social reformer, on the other hand, can not see any improvements made in civilization except through the discoveries and inventions of some citizens who are inherently superior in ability. He in turn must depend on eugenics for every advance that is made.

It may make the situation clearer to state it in the customary terms of biological philosophy. Selection does not necessarily result in progressive evolution. It merely brings about the adaptation of a species or a group to a given environment. The tapeworm is the stock example. In human evolution, the nature of this environment will determine whether adaptation to it means progress or retrogression, whether it leaves a race happier and more productive, or the reverse.

All racial progress, or eugenics, therefore, depends on the creation of a good environment, and the fitting of the race to that environment.

Every improvement in the environment should bring about a corresponding biological adaptation. The two factors in evolution must go side by side, if the race is to progress in what the human mind considers the direction of advancement. In this sense, euthenics and eugenics bear the same relation to human progress as a man's two legs do to his locomotion.

Social workers in purely euthenic fields have frequently failed to remember this process of adaptation, in their efforts to change the environment. Eugenists, in centering their attention on adaptation, have sometimes paid too little attention to the kind of environment to which the race was being adapted. The present book holds that the second factor is just as important as the first, for racial progress; that one leg is just as important as the other, to a pedestrian. Its only conflict with euthenics appertains to such euthenic measures as impair the adaptability of the race to the better environment they are trying to make.

Some supposedly euthenic measures opposed by eugenics are not truly euthenic, as for instance the limitation of a superior family in order that all may get a college education. For these spurious euthenic measures, something truly euthenic should be subst.i.tuted.

Measures which show a real conflict may be typified by the infant mortality movement. There can be no doubt but that sanitation and hygiene, prenatal care and intelligent treatment of mothers and babies, are truly euthenic and desirable. At the same time, as has been shown, these euthenic measures result in the survival of inferior children, who directly or through their posterity will be a drag on the race. Euthenic measures of this type should be accompanied by counterbalancing measures of a more eugenic character.

Barring these two types, euthenics forms a necessary concomitant of the eugenic program; and, as we have tried to emphasize, eugenics is likewise necessary to the complete success of every euthenic program.

How foolish, then, is antagonism between the two forces! Both are working toward the same end of human betterment, and neither can succeed without the other. When either attempts to eliminate the other from its work, it ceases to advance toward its goal. In which camp one works is largely a matter of taste. If on a road there is a gradient to be leveled, it will be brought down most quickly by two parties of workmen, one cutting away at the top, the other filling in the bottom. For the two parties to indulge in mutual scorn and recrimination would be no more absurd than for eugenics and euthenics to be put in opposition to each other. The only reason they have been in opposition is because some of the workers did not clearly understand the nature of their work. With the dissemination of a knowledge of biology, this ground of antagonism will disappear.

APPENDIX A

OVARIAN TRANSPLANTATION

In 1890, W. Heape published an account of some experiments with rabbits.

Taking the fertilized egg of an angora rabbit (i. e., a long-haired, white one) from the oviduct of its mother previous to its attachment to the wall of the uterus, he transferred it to the uterus of a Belgian hare, a rabbit which is short-haired and gray. The egg developed normally in the new body and produced an animal with all the characteristics, as far as could be seen, of the real mother, rather than the foster-mother. Its coat was long and white, and there was not the slightest trace of influence of the short, gray-haired doe in whose body it had grown.

Here was a case in which environment certainly failed to show any modifying influence. But it was objected that the transplanted egg was already full-grown and fertilized when the transfer was made, and that therefore no modification need be expected. If the egg were transferred at an earlier stage, it was thought, the result might be different.

W. E. Castle and J. C. Phillips therefore undertook an experiment to which this objection should not be possible.[195]

"A female albino guinea-pig just attaining s.e.xual maturity was by an operation deprived of its ovaries, and instead of the removed ovaries there were introduced into her body the ovaries of a young black female guinea-pig, not yet s.e.xually mature, aged about three weeks. The grafted animal was now mated with a male albino guinea-pig. From numerous experiments with albino guinea-pigs it may be stated emphatically that normal albinos mated together, without exception, produce only albino young, and the presumption is strong, therefore, that had this female not been operated on she would have done the same. She produced, however, by the albino male three litters of young, which together consisted of six individuals, all black. The first litter of young was produced about six months after the operation, the last about one year.

The transplanted ovarian tissue must have remained in its new environment therefore from four to ten months before the eggs attained full growth and were discharged; ample time, it would seem, for the influence of a foreign body upon the inheritance to show itself were such influence possible."

While such experiments must not be stretched too far, in application to the human species, they certainly offer striking evidence of the fact that the characters of any individual are mainly due to something in the germ-plasm, and that this germ-plasm is to a surprising degree independent of any outside influence, even such an intimate influence as that of the body of the mother in which it reaches maturity.

APPENDIX B

"DYNAMIC EVOLUTION"

As C. L. Redfield has secured considerable publicity for his attempt to bolster up the Lamarckian theory, it deserves a few words of comment.

His contention is that "the energy in animals, known as intelligence and physical strength, is identical with the energy known in mechanics, and is governed by the same laws." He therefore concludes that (1) an animal stores up energy in its body, in some undescribed and mystical way, and (2) that in some equally undescribed and mystical way it transmits this stored-up energy to its offspring. It follows that he thinks superior offspring are produced by parents of advanced age, because the latter have had more time to do work and store up energy for transmission. In his own words:

"Educating the grandfather helps to make the grandson a superior person.... We are, in our inheritance, exactly what our ancestors made us by the work they performed before reproducing. Whether our descendants are to be better or worse than we are will depend upon the amount and kind of work we do before we produce them."

The question of the influence of parental age on the characters of the offspring is one of great importance, for the solution of which the necessary facts have not yet been gathered together. The data compiled by Mr. Redfield are of value, but his interpretation of them can not be accepted for the following reasons.

1. In the light of modern psychology, it is absurd to lump all sorts of mental ability under one head, and to suppose that the father's exercise of reasoning power, for example, will store up "energy" to be manifested in the offspring in the shape of executive or artistic ability. Mental abilities are much subdivided and are inherited separately. Mr.

Redfield's idea of the process is much too crude.

Moreover, Mr. Redfield's whole conception of the increase of intelligence with increase of age in a parent shows a disregard of the facts of psychology. As E. A. Doll has pointed out,[196] in criticising Mr. Redfield's recent and extreme claim that feeble-mindedness is the product of early marriage, it is incorrect to speak of 20-, 30-, or 40-year standards of intelligence; for recent researches in measurement of mental development indicate that the heritable standard of intelligence of adults increases very little beyond the age of approximately 16 years. A person 40 years old has an additional _experience_ of a quarter of a century, and so has a larger mental content, but his intelligence is still nearly at the 16-year level.

Mental activity is the effect, not the cause, of mental growth or development. Education merely turns inherent mental powers to good account; it makes very little change in those powers themselves. To suppose that a father can, by study, raise his innate level of intelligence and transmit it at the new level to his son, is a nave idea which finds no warrant in the known facts of mental development.

2. In his entire conception of the storing-up and transmission of energy, Mr. Redfield has fallen victim to a confusion of ideas due to the use of the same word to mean two different things. He thinks of energy as an engineer; he declares the body-cell is a storage battery; he believes that the athlete by performing work stores up energy in his body (in some mysterious and unascertainable way) just as the clock stores up energy when it is wound. The incorrectness of supposing that the so-called energy of a man is of that nature, is remarkable. If, hearing Bismarck called a man of iron, one should a.n.a.lyze his remains to find out how much more iron he contained than ordinary men, it would be a performance exactly comparable to Mr. Redfield's, when he thinks of a man's "energy" as something stored up by work.

As a fact, a man contains less energy, after the performance of work, than he did at the start. All of his "energy" comes from the metabolism of food that he has previously eaten. His potential energy is the food stored up in his body, particularly the glycogen in the liver and muscles.[197]

Why, then, can one man run faster than another? Mr. Redfield thinks it is because the sprinter has, by previous work, stored up energy in his body, which carries him over the course more rapidly than the sluggard who has not been subjected to systematic training. But the differences in men's ability are not due to the amount of energy they have stored up. It is due rather to differences in their structure (using this word in a very broad sense), which produce differences in the efficiency with which they can use the stored-up energy (i.e., food) in their bodies. A fat Shorthorn bull contains much more stored-up energy than does a race horse, but the latter has the better structure--coordination of muscles with nervous system, in particular--and there is never any doubt about how a race between the two will end. The difference between the results achieved by a highly educated thinker and a low-grade moron are similarly differences in structural efficiency: the moron may eat much more, and thereby have more potential energy, than the scholar; but the machine, the brain, can not utilize it.

The effects of training are not to store up energy in the body, for it has been proved that work decreases rather than increases the amount of energy in the body. How is it, then, that training increases a man's efficiency? It is obviously by improving his "structure," and probably the most important part of this improvement is in bringing about better relations between the muscles and the nerves. To pursue the a.n.a.logy which Mr. Redfield so often misuses, the effect of training on the human machine is merely to oil the bearings and straighten out bent parts, to make it a more efficient transformer of the energy that is supplied to it.

The foundation stone of Mr. Redfield's hypothesis is his idea that the animal by working stores up energy. This idea is the exact reverse of the truth. While the facts which Mr. Redfield has gathered deserve much study, his idea of "Dynamic Evolution" need not be taken seriously.[198]

APPENDIX C

THE "MELTING POT"

America as the "Melting Pot" of peoples is a picture often drawn by writers who do not trouble themselves as to the precision of their figures of speech. It has been supposed by many that all the racial stocks in the United States were tending toward a uniform type. There has never been any real evidence on which to base such a view, and the study completed in 1917 by Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, curator of the division of physical anthropology of the U. S. National Museum, furnishes evidence against it. He examined 400 individuals of the Old White American stock, that is, persons all of whose ancestors had been in the United States as far as the fourth ascending generation. He found little or no evidence that hereditary traits had been altered. Even the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, the Virginia cavaliers, the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Huguenots, while possibly not as much unlike as their ancestors were, are in no sense a blend.

The "Melting Pot," it must be concluded, is a figure of speech; and as far as physical anthropology is concerned, it will not be anything more in this country, at least for many centuries.

Announcing the results of study of the first 100 males and 100 females of his series,[199] Dr. Hrdlicka said, "The most striking result of the examinations is the great range of variation among Old Americans in nearly all the important measurements. The range of variation is such that in some of the most significant determinations it equals not only the variation of any one group, but the combined variations of all the groups that enter into the composition of the Americans." This fact would be interpreted by the geneticist as an evidence of hybridity. It is clear that, at the very beginning, a number of diverse, although not widely differing, stocks must have made up the colonial population; and intermarriage and the influence of the environment have not welded these stocks into one blend, but have merely produced a mosaic-like mixture.

This is good evidence of the permanence of inherited traits, although it must be qualified by the statement that it does not apply equally to all features of the body, the face, hands and feet having been found less variable, for instance, than stature and form of head.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "MEAN MAN" OF THE OLD WHITE AMERICAN STOCK

FIG. 45.--Anthropologists have an ideal "mean man," whose every feature measures the arithmetic mean or average of that feature in all the individuals of his race. The above diagram drawn to scale from Dr.

Hrdli[vc]ka's measurements represents the mean man of Colonial ancestry.

The outline of the face is almost oblong; the head is high and well-developed, particularly in the regions which are popularly supposed to denote superior intelligence. In general, it is a highly specialized type, denoting an advanced evolution.]

The stature of both American men and women is high, higher than the average of any European nation except the Scotch. The individual variation is, however, enormous, amounting to 16.4% of the average in males and nearly 16% in females. For males, 174 cm. is the average height, for females 162. The arm spread in males is greater than their stature, in females it is less.

The average weight of the males is 154 lbs.[typo: missing comma?] of the females 130. Taking into consideration the tall stature, these weights are about equal to those among Europeans.

The general proportions of the body must be cla.s.sed as medium, but great fluctuations are shown.

The face is, in general, high and oval; in females it occasionally gives the impression of narrowness. The forehead is well developed in both s.e.xes. The nose is prevalently long and of medium breadth, its proportions being practically identical with those of the modern English. The ears are longer than those of any modern immigrants except the English. The mouth shows medium breadth in both s.e.xes, and its averages exactly equal those obtained for modern French.