Practical applications of heredity / by Paul Popenoe.

  • Paul Popenoe
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Practical applications of heredity / by Paul Popenoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    distinguished themselves in their early schooling proves nothing except the incompetence of their teachers. It is worth while to review the facts here, because of a widespread misconception. Even among college students, more than half of a group recently questioned agreed with the statement, Many emi nent men have been feebleminded as children. Finally, the objection is often raised: if genius is dependent on heredity, why do not great men more frequently have great sons? Who remembers even the existence, much less the name, of a son of Pericles, Thucydides, Socrates, Themistocles, Cicero? The answer is, in the first place, that they do have great sons much more frequently than do ordinary men; and that their sons, as a whole, average much higher than ido those of an ordinary lot of men. But the particular combination of characters which makes genius is of necessity so rare that it can not often occur. Every child inherits from two parents alike: his father and his mother. One of these, it is here supposed, is a genius, but what of the other? When Goethe wedded his serving woman, is it surprising that he had a son and two grandsons whom it is kind est to forget? When Napoleon married into the Austrian royal family, shot through and through with biological defects, is it astonishing that the King of Rome was a sickly nonentity? Commodus was the
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