Habit and heritage / by Frederic Wood Jones.

  • Frederic Wood Jones
Date:
1943
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Habit and heritage / by Frederic Wood Jones. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    101/108 (page 97)
    HABIT AND HERITAGE 97 on the way to the inauguration of an era of the prac¬ tice of hinnan genetics. The dawn of such an era is apparently a consummation of the teachings of modern genetics that some people would consider desirable. But there is a more immediate, and far more impor¬ tant, outcome of the comfortable doctrine that in man there is no possibility that acquired characters can be inherited. For if this doctrine is true, it follows quite definitely that no improvement of social conditions, no raising of the standard of living or of education can ever find its reward in the betterment of any human stock. And such a doctrine can be extended, as at present it is being extended, to warrant the teaching that no advancement in social organization and no amelioration of human conditions can ever hope to efifect anything towards an ultimate improvement of humanity. Unfortunately this doctrine may also be applied in such a way as to justify that cowardly acceptance of the avoidable evils of modern ' civilization ' that should at no time have received any support from science. The statement that : then we are freed, at least, from undue pessimism at the thought of the many harmful functions and environments that disfigure our civiliz¬ ation seems to me to rank the teachings of modern genetics as among the least helpful of all the dicta of science. For a science which produces evidence that would give sanction for condoning the preventable degradation of human existence, imposed by certain of the conditions of modern civilization, can hardly be claimed as commendable, even were all its findings surely based on ascertained facts and unassail¬ able premises. But when, as we have attempted to show, the premises upon which its claims are founded are by no means surely established, there can be little but condemnation for those who would ven¬ ture to extend its teachings into the realm of human affairs.