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William E. Kellicott. The Social Direction of Evolution: An Outline of the Science of Eugenics
The Social Direction of Evolution: An Outline of the Science of Eugenics
Table of Contents
PREFACE
I. THE SOURCES AND AIMS OF THE. SCIENCE OF EUGENICS
I
THE SOURCES AND AIMS OF THE SCIENCE OF EUGENICS
II. THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF. EUGENICS
II
THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF EUGENICS
III. HUMAN HEREDITY AND THE EUGENIC. PROGRAM
III
HUMAN HEREDITY AND THE EUGENIC PROGRAM
INDEX
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
William E. Kellicott
Published by Good Press, 2019
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The biologist asks whether it is not high time to look beyond this artificial bolster of education, to the possibility of actual improvement of the innate mental abilities of man. The student of heredity and evolution looking at this problem has two contributions to make. First, if the mental capabilities of the present race are too limited, increase them; if our minds are too weak to carry the burdens which now must be carried, do not give up the task—strengthen the racial mind. Second, if we should seem to be in danger of developing a stock which is well fitted and able to carry the load of mental acquirement and to push on intellectually, but which is at the same time physically deficient, weak, or sterile, or susceptible to disease, do not let the intellectual capabilities diminish, but build up the physical constitution to a higher supporting level. These are not idle suggestions nor whimsical schemes. The biologist makes them knowing that these things are possible; not only possible, they must be accomplished. We are foolishly building our civilization in the form of an inverted pyramid of individually acquired characteristics. This structure can be made stable only by supplying a broader basis of innate ability which can safely carry the load. This is the first biological warning to sociology.
The second warning we may put in the form in which Ray Lankester in his "Kingdom of Man" has recently presented it so strikingly and which we may abstract freely and with some interpolation. "In Nature's struggle for existence, death … is the fate of the vanquished, while the only reward to the victors … is the permission to reproduce their kind—to carry on by heredity to another generation, the specific qualities by which they triumphed." The origin of man, partly, at any rate, by such a process of natural selection, is one chapter in his history. Another begins with the development of his mental qualities, which are of such unprecedented power in Nature. These qualities so dominate all else in his "living" activities that they largely cut him off from the general operations of natural selection. Perhaps the only direction in which natural selection is the chiefly operative factor in human evolution to-day is in the development of immunity from infectious disease. Just as man is a new departure in the unfolding scheme of the world, so his presence and characteristics lead to new methods of evolution, of survival, and the like. Knowledge, reason, self-consciousness, will, are new processes in Nature, and it is these which have largely determined the direction of man's history. Nature's discipline of death is more or less successfully resisted by the will of man. Man is Nature's Rebel. "Where Nature says 'Die'! Man says 'I will live.'" By his wits and his will man has overcome many of Nature's bounds and difficulties without changing, as other organisms would, his innate characteristics. Not only this but man has obtained control of his surroundings and at every step of his development he has receded farther from the rule of Nature. Now "he has advanced so far and become so unfitted to the earlier rule, that to suppose that Man can 'return to Nature' is as unreasonable as to suppose that an adult animal can return to its mother's womb."
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