What is eugenics? / by Leonard Darwin.

  • Leonard Darwin
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

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

Credit: What is eugenics? / by Leonard Darwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    12 WHAT IS EUGEmCS? clerk, ■will the son of the blacksmith be more likely to have good muscles than the son of the clerk ? Or again, if one twin becomes a criminal after having been brought up in evü surroundings, whilst the other, coming under no such harmful influences, commits no crime, will the son of the criminal, even if removed from bad surroundings at birth, be more likely to become a criminal than his cousin whose father remained honest ? The answer given to-day by the majority of scientists is that neither the strength of the blacksmith nor the criminality of the criminal will tend to reappear in their descendants merely because the one exercised his muscles to an exceptional amount, whilst the other failed in consequence of being exceptionally tempted. The descendants of the blacksmith will be no stronger, and the descendants of the criminal no worse, than the descend¬ ants of their identical twin brothers, whose muscles and morals had not been thus exceptionally affected. It is true that some scientists hold that there wiU be very slight inherited effects in such cases. It is generally agreed, however, that those inherited effects wül be so small that they may be safely neglected when considering practical human affairs. And this, therefore, may be our final verdict with regard to the inheritance of acquirements. This conclusion is no doubt contrary to the beliefs of the man in the street. Here, then, we must decide whether we should place our trust in those scientists who have studied these questions for years, or whether we should be guided by men who have never given the matter any systematic thought. If we decide to trust to science, the care and education which are being given to-day to our fellow citizens must not be rehed on as practical methods of improving the actual breed of our nation in the coming generations. Then why is it, we may be asked, that drunkenness, for example, is to be noted so often generation after genera¬ tion in the same family? Is not this obviously because the man who first gave way to drink passed on this evil habit by inheritance to his descendants? This sounds