Eugenics / by A. M. Carr-Saunders.

  • Alexander Carr-Saunders
Date:
[1926]
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Eugenics / by A. M. Carr-Saunders. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    their efforts to improve farm animals during the preceding hundred years, and no less success had followed the efforts of horticul turists. There were thus abundant examples which Darwin used in another connection to which to point in order to show what might be effected by controlled breeding. Again, about that time men were beginning to recog nise that human problems were susceptible of treatment by scientific methods. Formerly science had dealt chiefly with matters remote from human interests. At the date when Galton first turned his attention to eugenics the popularity of works attempting to give scientific explanations of historical events shows that the outlook of men was changing. Far more important, however, was the influence of Darwin. Before the publication of the Origin of Species in 1869, not only laymen but also nearly all experts favoured the view that species were fixed, that there were then as many species as there had been in the beginning. It is evident that so long as such views held the field it was difficult if not impossible to grasp the fact that the human or any other species might undergo considerable change, beneficial or otherwise. But as soon as men came to believe that highly organised species had evolved from primitive types by the operation of natural selection, they were prepared to believe that equal, if not greater, changes might result from deliberate selection.
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