Nature and nurture : the problem of the future : a presidential address / delivered by Karl Pearson.

  • Karl Pearson
Date:
1913
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nature and nurture : the problem of the future : a presidential address / delivered by Karl Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of these problems would never be reached by verbal discussion ; that the principles of evolution could not be profitably applied to human societies by popular lecturers or by discussion clubs; still less could sociological problems be solved by the methods of political argument, or of philo- sophical reasoning. Well, you will again tell me, that this is common knowledge. So, perhaps, it is, or shall I say, it very nearly is? For I picked up a journal termed the Sociological Review the other day, and the first article that attracted my attention was by a distinguished professor of philosophy, entitled ‘ National Degeneracy’, and the problem was solved to the satisfaction of the professor in some ten pages of type, without a single figure, without a single sign that he had knowledge of the immense biological complexity of a question which for a true answer needs not verbal disquisition but an intensive study of heredity in man, of differential marriage rates, differential fertility, selective death-rates, to say nothing of immigration and emigration, and of the correlation of all these with the social and antisocial qualities of the several reproductive groups in the com- munity. No, I think there are still some exceptions to the universality of this negative knowledge! Do we not still occasionally see the most fundamental problems of our national and social life settled without a single appeal to reliable data, or to reliable data properly interpreted, from the hustings, in our fitly termed parlia- ment, or in the almost greater parliament of the press ? Let us remember that these were the sources whence our working classes drew most of their knowledge, and that Seeley thought that we ought to be in a position to give them something better. How ‘ better’? That was the question rapidly thrust
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