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One of the reasons for the special stress that is laid upon race investigations is the fear of race degeneration. It is assumed that the intermixture between different racial types and the rapid increase of the poorest part of the population have a deteriorating effect upon the nation. In the introductory remarks I have tried to show that there is little reason to believe that racial intermixture of the kind occurring in the United States at the present time should have a deteriorating effect. I do not believe that it has been adequately proved that there is a clearly marked tendency toward general degeneration among all civilized nations. In modern society the conditions of life have become more varied than those of former periods. While some groups live under most favorable conditions that require active use of body and mind, others live in abject poverty and their activities have more than ever before been degraded to those of machines. At the same time the variety of human activities is much greater than it used to be. It is therefore quite intelligible that the functional activities of each nation must show an increased degree of differentiation, a higher degree of variability. Even if the general average of the mental and physical types should remain the same, there must be a larger number now than formerly who fall below a certain given low standard, and also a larger number who exceed a given high standard. The number of defectives can be counted by statistics of poor relief, delinquency, and insanity, but there is no way of determining the increase of those individuals who are raised above the norm of a higher standard, and they escape our notice. It may therefore very well be that the number of defectives increases without influencing the value of a population as a whole, because it is merely an expression of an increased degree of variability.

Furthermore, arbitrarily selected absolute standards of value do not retain their significance. Even if no change in the absolute standard should be made, the degree of physical and mental energy required under modern conditions to keep oneself above a certain minimum of achievement is greater than it used to be. This is due to the greater complexity of our life and to the increasing number of competing individuals. Greater capacity is required to attain a high degree of prominence than was needed in other periods of our history. The claim that we have to contend against national degeneracy must, therefore, be better substantiated than it is now.

The problem is further complicated by the advance in public hygiene which has resulted in lowering infant mortality and has thus brought about a change in the composition of the population, in so far as many who would have succumbed to deleterious conditions in early years enter into the adult population and must have an influence upon the general distribution of vitality.

Notwithstanding the doubtful basis of many of the assertions relating to degeneracy, the problem of eugenics is clearly before the public, and the investigation of racial and social types cannot be separated from the practical aims involved in the eugenic movement.

The fundamental thought underlying eugenic theory is that no environmental influences can modify those characteristics which are determined by hereditary nature. Nurture, it is said, cannot overcome nature.

We should recall here what has been said before regarding the difference between the characteristics of hereditary strains and those of races, and that while it is true that strains differ greatly in physical and mental vigor and in specific characteristics, it is not equally true of races as a whole, because strains which are very much alike in all these characteristics are found in every single race. Even if it is not possible to prove with absolute certainty the complete identity in mental traits of selected strains belonging to races as diverse as Europeans and Negroes, there is not the slightest doubt that such identity prevails among the various European types. Eugenics, therefore, cannot have any possible meaning with regard to whole races. It can have a meaning only with regard to strains. If the task of the eugenist were the selection of that third of humanity representing the best strains, he would find his material among all European and Asiatic types, and very probably among all races of man; and all would contribute to the less valuable two-thirds.

As an objection to this point of view it is sometimes claimed that closely allied animal types are so different in their physical make-up and mental characteristics that members of one race can be clearly differentiated from those of another race. It is, for instance, said that the race horse and the heavy dray horse are so different in character that no matter what may be done to the dray horse its descendants can never be transformed into race horses. This is undoubtedly true, but the parallelism between the races of dray horses and race horses on the one hand and human races on the other is incorrect. The races of horses are developed by careful selection, by means of which physical and mental characteristics are fixed in each separate strain, while in human races no such selection occurs. We have rather a racial panmixture, which brings it about that the racial characteristics are distributed irregularly among all the different families. As a matter of fact, dray horses and race horses correspond to family strains, not to human races, and the comparison is valid only in so far as race horses and dray horses are compared to the characteristics of certain family lines, not to human races as a whole. In Johannsen’s terminology the human races are to a much greater extent phenotypes than races of domesticated animals.

For this reason the task of eugenics cannot be to devise means to suppress some races and to favor the development of others. It must rather be directed to the discovery of methods which favor the development of the desirable strains in every race.

This problem can be attacked only after the solution of two questions. First of all, we have to decide what are the desirable characteristics; and secondly, we must determine what characteristics are hereditary. With regard to the former question, we shall all agree that physical health is one of the fundamental qualities to be desired; but there will always be fundamental disagreement as to what mental qualities are considered desirable—whether an intense intellectualism and a repression of emotionalism or a healthy development of emotional life is preferable. Obviously, it is quite impossible to lay down a standard that will fit every person, every place, and every time, and for this reason the application of eugenic measures should be restricted to the development of physical and mental health. Even if it were possible to control human mating in such a way that strains with certain mental characteristics could be developed, it would seem entirely unjustifiable for our generation to impose upon future times ideals that some of us may consider desirable. It might furthermore be questioned whether the interests of humanity will be better served by eliminating all abnormal strains which, as history shows, have produced a number of great men who have contributed to the best that mankind has done, or by carrying the burden of the unfit for the sake of the few valuable individuals that may spring from them. These, of course, are not scientific questions, but social and ethical problems.

For the practical development of eugenics it is indispensable to determine what is hereditary and what is not. The ordinary method of determining heredity is to investigate the recurrence of the same phenomenon among a number of successive generations. If, for instance, it can be shown that color-blindness occurs in successive generations, or that certain malformations like polydactylism are found repeatedly in the same family, or that multiple births are characteristic of certain strains, we conclude that these are due to hereditary causes; and if parents and children have the same head form or the same or similar statures, we decide that these similarities also are due to heredity. It must be recognized that in many of these cases alternative explanations are conceivable. If, for instance, a family lives under certain economic conditions which are repeated among parents and children, and if these economic conditions have a direct influence upon the size of the body, the similarity of stature of parents and children would be due to environment and not to heredity. If a disease is endemic in a certain locality and occurs among parents and children, this is not due to heredity but to the locality which they inhabit. In other words, wherever the environmental conditions have a marked influence upon bodily characteristics, and wherever these environmental conditions continue for a number of generations, they have an effect that is apparently identical with that of heredity. In many cases the causes are so obvious that it is easy to exclude persistence of characteristics due to environment. Under other conditions the determination of the causes is not so easy.

It is still more difficult to differentiate between heredity and congenital features. For example, if a child before birth should be infected by its mother, there might be the impression of a hereditary disease, which, however, is actually only congenital in the sense that it is not inherent in the structure of the germ plasm. Although the distinction between environmental causes as previously defined and hereditary causes is generally fairly easy, the distinction between congenital causes and true hereditary causes is exceedingly difficult, in many cases impossible. The long continued discussions relating to hereditary transmission of disease are a case in point. Most of these questions cannot be solved by statistical inquiries, but require the most careful biological investigation. The conditions, however, are such that we must demand in every case a clear differentiation among these three causes.

There is little doubt that in the modern eugenic movement the assumption of hereditary transmission as a cause of defects has been exaggerated. Although certain mental defects that occur among well-to-do families seem to be determined by heredity, the mental defects generally included in eugenic studies are of such a character that many of them may readily be recognized as due to social conditions rather than as expressing specific hereditary traits. A weakling who is economically well situated is protected from many of the dangers that beset an individual of similar characteristics whose economic condition is not so favorable, and it must be admitted that criminality in families that may be mentally weak and which are at the same time struggling for the barest subsistence is at least as much determined by social conditions as by heredity. Investigators of criminal families have succeeded in showing frequencies of occurrence of criminality which are analogous to frequencies which may be due to heredity, but they have failed to show that these frequencies may not as well be explained either wholly or in part by environmental conditions. We should be willing to admit that among the poor undernourished population, which is at the same time badly housed and suffers from other unfavorable conditions of life, congenital weakness may develop which lowers the resistance of the individual against all forms of delinquency. Whether this weakness is hereditary or congenital is, however, an entirely different question. Experiments made with generations of underfed rats^[16] suggest that a strain of rats which has deteriorated by underfeeding can be fed up by a careful amelioration of conditions of life, and it may well be questioned whether delinquent strains in man may not be improved in a similar way. Certainly the history of the criminals deported to Australia and of their descendants is very much in favor of such a theory. In other words, it seems very likely that the condition of our subnormal population is not by any means solely determined by heredity, but that careful investigations are required to discriminate between environmental, congenital, and hereditary causes.

[16]	Helen Dean King, Studies on Inbreeding (Wistar Institute, 1919).