HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT. In the new science of eugenics is to be discovered, we are told, a remedy for the social ills arising from the propagation of the unfit and parasitic members of society. Education, hailed so long as a panacea for these and other menacing evils, has, it is declared, been tried and found wanting. Says Professor Charles Richmond Henderson in his late work, Preventive Agencies and Methods: "For a long time in the United States skepticism as to the omnipotence of education of the abnormal and degenerate has gained in extent and influence. The cheerful optimism of Horace Mann has yielded to a more discriminating and cautious mood. Discussions in the National Conference of Charities and Correction and in the American Prison Association reveal a clear comprehension of the peril of trusting too far to education alone for social protection and we note a more decided and frequent advocacy of methods which promise to reduce the propagation of the unfit, the vicious and the habitual criminal included." 1 We gather that the Professor here takes education in the more restricted sense of mental training and equipment. But the word admits of a wider acceptation. It can be used to denote the entire body of influences that make for "guidance of growth," and hence to comprehend the pressure of environment. Even thus broadly understood the comparative impotency of education as compared with heredity is maintained by the student of eugenics; and this too without restriction to the extreme types of degeneracy referred to in the quotation just given. "So far as our investigations have gone," says Ethel M. Edgerton, Galton research scholar, "they show that improvement in social conditions will not compensate for a bad 1 Charles Richmond Henderson, Preventive Agencies and Methods, New York Charities Publication, 1910, p. 40. heredity influence." 2 We shall consider later the validity of such conclusions. In the meantime it is necessary that we have correct and clear ideas of the two terms of the comparison here instituted. For this it is sufficient that we gain an adequate notion of heredity, since all other contrasting forces we may reckon as comprehended under the general agency-environ ment. According to Ribot " Heredity is that biological law by which all beings endowed with life tend to repeat themselves in their descendants. It is for the species what personal identity is for the individual. By it a groundwork remains unchanged amid incessant variations; by it nature ever copies and imitates herself." 3 It is seen that in its first and most obvious sense, heredity means the transmission of those characteristics that distinguish species from species. By it like tends to beget like. Men do not gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. The offspring of fish is fish, of eagles, eagles. But its operation knows a more extended scope. It is the means by which qualities recog nized as racial are perpetuated. The child of the Indian is clearly marked off from the issue of the Norwegian, and the descendant of the Negro will, we know, inevitably show forth the distinctive traits of his race. All this is accepted as commonplace. But what is to be said of the transmissibility of purely family characteristics? Clearly it is only with the inheritance of such traits that the eugenist is concerned. And that there are many instances in which a particular quality of ancestors is bequeathed to offspring we cannot doubt. We recall as striking examples of this the aquiline noses of the Bourbons and the thick lips of the Hapsburgs. But does this transmission operate in every instance with anything like a calculable certainty. As an overshadowing and compelling fate, the idea of heredity, is an 2 Ethel M. Edgerton, The Relative Strength of Nurture and Nature, London, 1909. engaging one for the moralist and playwright. As a force breaking forth, like a second personality, at critical junctures, in a manner irresistible, lighting up with searching rays the dark vistas of an ancestral past, it allows of dramatic handling. So it has been employed by Robert Hitchens in his "Call of the Blood" and by Henrik Ibsen in his "Ghosts." For a different purpose, we hear appeal to it very often made by the morally weak and depraved. It is the refuge behind which the debauchee often seeks to hide his shame and folly, representing it as a compulsion to evil against which all the battling of his better self is vain and hopeless. "This is the excellent foppery of the world," says Edmund in King Lear, "that, when we are sick in fortune, (often the surfeit of our behaviour), we make guilty of our disaster, the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on." To assert and theorize, however, is a more serious matter for the scientist. For this he must have a sufficient basis of facts. And such a basis we make bold to say is, as yet, too meagre for a science of eugenics. This will appear evident we think from even a cursory consideration of the two principal generalizations regarding the measure and course of heredity. The first of these is the law of ancestral inheritance, enunciated by Sir Francis Galton, the acclaimed father of eugenics. From the study of the pedigree records of the Basset Hounds Club and the genealogical tables of the British peerage, Galton drew the conclusion that "every organism of bi-sexual parentage draws one-half of its inherited qualities from its parents, (one-fourth from each parent), one-fourth from its grandparents; one-eighth from its great-grandparents and so on." This surely looks like bringing order out of chaos. Indeed, it is so simple that it arouses suspicion. And the suspicion upon investigation is discovered to be well founded. It is seen that according to Galton's law the characteristics of offspring are a blend or fusion of parental traits. In the 517 case of a tall father and short mother this blending could be discernible enough in the stature of their child. So too could it be with regard to many physical characteristics such as span, eye-color, hair-color and head measurements. Even regarding psychic qualities, supposing their transmissibility by heredity, there could be easily discovered a resultant fusion. A child of an extremely ill-tempered father and extremely amiable mother could be seen possessed of a disposition somewhere between these wide opposites. But to announce a law which would declare the exact or approximate ratio according to which the traits of parents combine in offspring, while possible quite for physical qualities, is, in the case of psychical characteristics, nothing short of gratuitous assumption. To declare, for instance, in our present state of biological and psychological knowledge, that the determination of purpose observed in a given child is in one-fourth measure due to its father, in one-fourth to its mother, in one-fourth to its grandparents, and in oneeighth to its great-grandparents is not setting forth a law. It is simply making a statement that is possessed of about as much scientific character as a formula in alchemy. It is evident, moreover, that this law fails to cover the case of reversions or reappearances of characteristics possessed by ancestors more remote than the immediate forbears. We are all familiar with the phenomenon known as "skipping a generation," though a longer period of intervening time than this is supposed by reversion understood in its stricter sense. Tennyson, in his Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, refers to: "Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the Mud." But this is only one kind of reversion. There is a form that saves from the mud. And although the phenomenon is hardly as frequent as the poet would lead us to believe, it was known and reckoned with before the time of Plutarch.5 after having given birth to a black child, alleged in defense that she had H Again, in the view of evolutionists the law is radically defective in that it fails to reckon with the presence of variations. And variation, in the evolutionary doctrine, is not a whit less important than heredity. Indeed it is the co-factor with heredity, making for development. For if organic transmission be something undeviating, of mechanical exactness, if offspring be but the double of its parents, selection finds no place for lack of material upon which to operate, and without selection there can be no evolution. It is needless to point out that the fluctuating modifications of which Galton's law takes cognizance are quite distinct from the mutations here supposed. Of course it is to be borne in mind that Galton's law is not for individual application. It is statistical. It is a generalization based upon numbers, and therefore, only strikes a general average. It cannot foretell just what will be the effect of heredity in this or that instance. But this for working purposes is a fatal inadequacy, giving it no more of a compelling force than is contained in the vital statistics of our insurance companies. The individual can not bring himself to think that as a social unit only he will fall under its operations. Now eugenics, as its name implies, aims at being a preeminently practical science. It proposes some very particular and even drastic legislation. But for this it furnishes a poor sanction when one of its recognized basic principles can present for individual cases mere probabilities. Quite distinct in quality from the law we have been considering is that discovered about the year 1865 by Gregor Johann Mendel, an Augustinian monk of the village of Brünn in Austria. Studying the transmissibility of some characteristics of edible peas in his cloister garden Mendel came to the knowledge of certain principles of heredity, the establishment of which, in the words of Professor Vernon L. Kellogg of Leland Stanford University, marks "the greatest advance toward a rational explanation of inheritance that has been made since the beginning of the scientific study of the problem.' Vernon L. Kellogg, "Heredity and its Laws," Independent, August 24, 1911. |