Heredity, race, and society.

  • Leslie Clarence Dunn
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Heredity, race, and society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    die off under natural conditions, meaning by natu ral the living conditions of savages or of animals. Hu man kindness and the desire to help the unhappy and the weak lead to the survival and propagation of defec tive genes. These arguments appear so plausible and the problem involved so grave that an intelligent per son must give them some thought. This is doubly true, because these arguments are exploited by those who would like to withhold the benefits of modern science and technology from great masses of people under the pretext of permitting nature to preserve by selection the biological powers of the masses for posterity. Genes in Mixed Populations Where does the great variety of bad genes come from? Has the hereditary endowment of mankind really be come hopelessly diseased? To consider some answers to these questions we must understand how genes change by mutation (p. 75), how particular forms of genes spread through populations, and why it is that the gene mixtures that distinguish different human populations tend to remain more or less constant from generation to generation. The last named problem was taken up in dependently and simultaneously by Hardy, an English mathematician, and by Weinberg, a German physician, in 1908, not long after the rediscovery of Mendel's law, and led to a great clarification of the nature of biologi cal populations. Now, the ideal way to study the behavior of human genes in mixed populations would be, one might think, to mix a known number of genes of one kind (actually of persons carrying that kind of gene) with a known number of genes of another kind, and to observe such a mixed population after one, two and several genera tions. Could one, for example, find one of those hospi table South Pacific islands inhabited by a thousand black people, and drop upon it one fine day, a thousand blond Americans? To ask such a question is to state the difficulties and limitations of this way of studying it, for
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