Genetics and eugenics : a consideration of the relation of animal experimentation top human inheritance and infant conservation / by Raymond Pearl.

  • Raymond Pearl
Date:
[1912?]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Genetics and eugenics : a consideration of the relation of animal experimentation top human inheritance and infant conservation / by Raymond Pearl. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    GENETICS AND EUGENICS: A CONSIDERATION OF THE RELATION OF ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION TO HUMAN INHERITANCE AND INFANT CONSERVATION ' By Raymond Pearl, Ph.D., Biologist of the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station During the past decade there has developed an activity in the experimental and analytical study of the laws of inheritance in plants and animals unprecedented in the history of biology. In the same period we have seen the new science of eugenics rising rapidly to a position already certainly very respectable, and giving promise, because of its great intrinsic importance of some day perhaps becoming the crowning one of the biological sciences. It is obvious that these two great developments of biology, genetics and eugenics, are directly and intimately related. It is the purpose of the present paper briefly to discuss certain implications of this relationship. In a general way the importance for the study of human inheritance of genetic investigations of animals is evident, since it is only through these that we may by experimentation gain a definite knowledge of the basic laws of inheritance. In the nature of the case our knowledge of human inheritance must always remain in large degree inferential, in distinction to the direct and positive knowledge which we may get regarding lower animals and plants. Definite and comprehensive experiments in breeding men are, broadly speaking, impossible. Nature and social circumstances, it is true, have led to many experiments ; but the results of such “ natural ” experiments are, and must always be, extremely unsatisfactory from the standpoint of 1 A paper read before the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality at the annual meeting in Chicago, November 16-18, 1911. The paper as here printed has been slightly changed from that read. 4