THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF EUGENICS

BY JULIAN HUXLEY

EUGENICS is running the usualcourse of many new ideas. Ithas ceased to be regarded as a

fad, is now receiving serious study, andin the near future will be regarded as anurgent practical problem.

It is convenient to pigeonhole ourideas, and the usual way of pigeon-holing our ideas on eugenics is to dividethe subject into negative and positive.Negative eugenics is concerned withpreventing degeneration, while positiveeugenics aims at the improvement ofthe human stock. Perhaps a bettermethod of classification is to divide thesubject into short-range and long-rangeeugenics. Short-range eugenics con-cerns itself merely with altering theproportions of already existing andcommonly recurring human types with-in the total population, while long-range eugenics sets itself the aim ofbringing new types into existence.And both of these, of course, have theirpositive and their negative sides. Isaid that short-range eugenics aimedmerely at altering the proportions ofexisting kinds of human beings. Thatmerely must be taken in relation to themuch larger aims of long-range eugen-ics, and to the slow and enormousprocesses of evolution in general. Inrelation to human history (itself so fara short-range process, biologically con-sidered), short-range eugenics is ofutmost importance, and may well turnout to be the most urgent human prob-lem of the next few centuries. For donot let us forget that the human race

consists of an astounding variety andrange of different kinds of men. Fromsavage to Nordic business man, fromhunting pygmy to Chinese sage, therace is prodigal in types; and evenwithin the single race or nation werange from imbecile and moron to manof talent or genius; from those con-genitally weak and susceptible to dis-ease to those born to be championathletes; from those who through in-heritance lack moral or eesthetic feelingto those hypersensitive to virtue or tobeauty. And even when we havemade all allowances for environmentand upbringing, the major part of thesedifferences in type are due to differ-ences in inborn constitutions. Even ifwe leave the rare extremes out ofaccount, the monsters and the idiots,the hypersensitives and geniuses, anyreshufiling of the proportions of thetypes that are left will be importantenough. It matters a great dealwhether one quarter or three quartersof the community shall have brains ofpoor quality or of good quality;whether the proportion of those en-dowed by nature with initiative behalved or doubled; whether, when wehave made England a home fit forheroes to live in, we shall find that thereare fewer heroes and more human sheepto inhabit it; whether congenital de-bility and defect go up or down.

Let us take in illustration the case ofmental defect. I am using the termmentally defective in its strict sense-someone with such a feeble mind that

THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF EUGENICS 325

he cannot support himself or look afterhimself unaided-and not in the loosesense which would include the muchlarger class of borderline types gener-ally called morons by American writers.The number of such mentally defectivepersons in Great Britain is now overthree hundred thousand, according to avery careful Government Report pub-lished in 1929; in other words, one inevery hundred and twenty of ourpopulation is through sheer insuffi-ciency of brains incapable of pulling hisweight in the national life; and this, ofcourse, leaves on one side all thoseincapable on account of insanity or ofpurely physical handicap.

That is bad enough. But there isworse behind it. Another committeereporting on the same subject twenty-five years previously found a, far lowerproportion of mental defectives.* Weare making two mental defectives growwhere only one grew before.

The only plausible reason advancedfor this state of affairs is that it isan effect of the improvement in ourmeasures of public health and preven-tive medicine, especially with regardto infant welfare. Mentally defectivechildren are on the average less resist-ant in other ways; and their usualupbringing leaves more to be desiredthan that of normal children. Accord-ingly, if our infant-welfare schemessave a thousand babies which otherwisewould have died, we are likely to save adisproportionate number of mentallydefective children among them, Ninehundred and ninety of them may befine babies, whose preservation is anational asset; but if the remaining tenare mental defectives, and if ten perthousand is a higher proportion of

* It may be objected that the increase from then tonow might be only apparent, due to a greater eaae in theaseertainment of defect; the earlier committee eimplymieeed a lot of defectivee. But, for a variety of tech-nical reaoona, this appears quite definitely not to be theC881!. At ito face value the increase in twenty-five YearBrerresento an actual doubling of the percentage of men-ta defectivee. When all poeeible aIIowancee have beenmade, the real increase it would seem must be not lesethan fifty per cent.

defectives than exists in the populationat large, then we are increasing thepercentage of defectives in the newgeneration. By reducing the rigor ofnatural selection, we are allowing anundue proportion of unfit types tosurvive. And as in all probability newhereditary varieties towards defective-ness are. more common than thosetowards an improvement of the type,there is no saying where such a processmay end.

What is to be done about it? Thepurely biological method of keeping thestock up to standard by natural selec-tion is, though effective, cruel anduneconomical. It involves wholesaledestruction to make sure that the fewtypes you want destroyed shall beincluded in the holocaust, thus showinga resemblance to Elia'staccount of theoriginal method for obtaining roastpork. It is of the essence of civiliza-tion to set its face against such hap-hazard, blind, and wasteful methods.

There is only one immediate thing tobe done-to ensure that mental defec-tives shall not have children. Whetherthis should be achieved by the pro-hibition of marriage or, as many be-lieve, by combining the method ofsegregation in institutions with that ofsterilization for those who are at large,is not our present concern. We want ageneral agreement that it is not in theinterests of the present community, orthe race of the future, or the chil-dren who might be born to defectivesthat defectives should beget offspring.When discussing concrete proposalsthis simple question should always bekept in mind-" Do you want mentallydefective people to have children?"

If, by whatever means, defectivescan be prevented from reproduction,then, since the considerable majority ofmental defect is due to hereditary fac-tors, it will decrease from generation togeneration. The decrease will unfortu-nately not be very fast, since much

•

326 HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE

hereditary defect is caused by what areknown as recessive factors, which canbe carried in a latent state by appar-ently normal people. When two such"carriers" mate they will produce acertain proportion ofdefective children.But in spite of this, to prevent defec-tives themselves from having childrenwould in point of fact steadily decreasethe percentage of defectives and ofcarriers in each generation.

The next step, could it but beachieved, would be to discover how todiagnose the carriers of defect. Ifthese could but be detected, and thendiscouraged or prevented from repro-duction, mental defect could veryspeedily be reduced to negligible pro-portions among our population. Thereis nothing inherently improbable in ourbeing able to discover a test for car-riers: but we have not done so yet, andhave no very immediate prospect ofdoing so in the future.

III have spent some time over this

question, since it brings up the issuesofshort-range eugenics in clear-cut form:There is in process a change in the pro-portion of genetic types within ourpopulation; it is a regrettable change;we can give a reasonable explanationfor it, and we can envisage practicalmeasures for putting an end to theracial degeneration which it involves.

But a; more penetrating prophecy ofdegeneration has recently been givenbyDr. R. A. Fisher, whose mathematicaltalents, so long devoted to the analysisof experimental agriculture, are nowvivifying eugenics as well as the gen-eral theory of evolution.

His starting point is the celebratedobservation made by Galton, thatnoble (or other) families whose repre-sentatives marry heiresses tend to dieout with abnormal frequency. Thisfact Galton brilliantly explained by

pointing out that the heiresses wouldnot have been heiressesif they were notmembers of very small families, so thatthe probability was that they inherited,together with their wealth, a congenitaltendency to low fertility. Thus twofactors which are not of necessity inter-connected, female wealth and low fer-tility, are automatically brought intocorrelation.

Fisher has simply generalized thisparticular case and applied the princi-ple to society as a whole. He pointsout that in primitive societies, organ-ized for efficiency in war, with polyg-amy as the recognized practice, thequalities which made for successwouldin general come to be coupled with anincreased fertility. For prowess, onthe whole, would lead to success, andsuccess to more wives: while largefamilies are not only honored andapplauded but, far from being an eco-nomic or social drag, are a help and asolace to their parents. But the his-torical change from tribal times,through an aristocratic period wherewealth was based on land, to unre-stricted commercialism or individual-ism, particularly sincecoupledwith thechange to monogamy, and particularlyin its later stages, when the world isfilling up, has completely altered thepicture. And Fisher lays down as ageneral law that in any society of ourgeneral economic type the two bio-logicallyindependent variables of thosetendenciesmaking for successand thosemaking for lowfertility, of socialneces-sity become coupled together. Andsince these tendencies are largely ge-netic, the result is a progressive andcumulative diminution within the pop-ulation of the proportion of gene-unitsmaking for success and, therefore, ofthe successfultype of person.

I speak of "tendencies." Thesemay be of the most varied nature. Thetendenciesmaking for lowfertility maybe purely physiological,such as defects

•

THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF EUGENICS 327

in the reproductive apparatus; theymay be temperamental, like extremecaution; they may have a more complexpsychological basis, as when ambitionoverrides desire for children, and theten,dencies making for success may bepure intellect or mere energy, charm,or ruthlessness, personal magnetism orliterary genius. So long as there is anyhereditary basis for any, the coupling ofthem together can have only oneresult-the decrease within the stock ofthe qualities which make for success.For of two business or professional menof equal brains and ability but with adifferent number of children, the onewith the fewer children will usually beable to concentrate more on his work,to avoid more worries, to rise morerapidly; and, what is biologically evenof greater importance, his children willreceive a better education, more chancesof travel and pleasure, a more favorablestart in life, a greater financial inherit-ance at his death, and be able to con-tract marriages which socially andfinancially are more desirable. Con-versely, of two men with the same-sizedfamilies, but of differing abilities, theone with more of the qualities makingfor success will usually rise the faster.And this applies throughout society inso far as society is commercial and in-dividualistic. It will not apply ofnecessity to the lowest grades of un-skilled labor; but as this stratum mustpresumably contain more than its dueproportion of unsuccessful types whohave slipped down the social ladder,and as families in this stratum are wellabove the average, actually it providesno exception. The only notable excep-tion concerns that type of agriculture inwhich the children can be usefully em-ployed from an early age, and are,therefore, an asset; but this constitutesbut a very small and a decreasingfraction of modern society.

Let us give two examples to point themoral. Most people would agree that

men who have been educated at Har-vard come from stock which is abovethe average of success in America.Now if Harvard were to recruit itselfentirely from the sons of its alumni,then, even if every Harvard man werecompelled to send his sons to the oldcollege, the institution would progres-sively and quite rapidly decline; for theaverage number of sons which Harvardalumni now have is not three or four,as it would have been in earlier ages,not even one, which is necessary tomaintain the absolute numbers of Har-vard-educated stock, but only aboutthree-fourths.

The other example comes from Eng-land. In the Census of 1911-theonly one for which accurate figures onthis subject are available-the popula-tion was grouped into five main eco-nomic classes, of which the highestincluded all the professional classes, aswell as some others, while the lowestconsisted of unskilled labor. This low-est economic class had a fertility which,even after all corrections were made forinfant mortality, age of marriage and soforth, was not only about double thatof the professional group, but wasnearly fifty per cent above that of thepopulation as a whole. As a result, theeconomically least successful twentyper cent of the working populationexisting in 1911 gave rise to abouttwenty-five per cent of the next gen-eration of Englishmen.

Fisher goes on to point out that, farfrom man being universally moreexempt from natural selection than arewild species of animals or plants, inregard to one characteristic at least heis exceptionally subject to selectiveinfluences, and that is fertility. Thereason for this is that human beingsvary far more in regard to their actualfertility than do wild species of animalsor plants. Lions may vary from, say,two to five in number of offspring,snowshoe rabbits from perhaps three to

sss HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE

twelve; but human families range regu-larly from zero to ten, fifteen, or eventwenty. The number of couples withtwo, one, or no children is relativelylarge; and thus the possessors of six,five, or even four children are at anenormous reproductive advantage. Ifthis were all, then the quicker-multi-plying stocks would simply increase atthe expense of the slower, a processwhich we may observe in EasternCanada to-day. But if other qualities,desirable or undesirable, come to beassociated with fertility, then theautomatic reproductive selection whichfertility brings will change the stock inthese regards as well. And the evolu-tionary changes thus effected can be,as Fisher points out, far more rapidthan any evolutionary change broughtabout by selectiorl in any non-humanspecies.

What, then, is the effect of this cou-pling, which has come into beingthrough the agency of our economicsystem, between the tendencies to fail-ure and fertility? There are tender-minded people and liberal doctrinaireswho will argue that the qualities whichmake for success are on balance notparticularly good, or even that they areevil. Ruthlessness, egotism, vulgarity,double-dealing, subservience, the limi-tations that are willing to concentrateon dull routine-all these only too oftenmake for success, and it is a good thingthat the race should be purged of them.

Granted; but we must not forget thatbrains, energy, concentration, specialgifts, devotion to ideals-these, too, ingeneral make for success. And mostpeople would, I think, agree that thissecond list more than counterbalancesthe first; for even if vulgarity and ruth-lessness and the rest are unpleasant,they can be combated; but withoutbrains, energy, and special talents theworld would both collapse and cease tobe worth living in. It is true that thereis scriptural warrant for the view that

the meek shall inherit the earth, and' atendency in that direction is one resultof our modern civilization. But it isonly one result; the other tendencies arefor ~he stupid to inherit the earth, andthe shiftless, and the imprudent, andthe dull. And this is a prospect neitherscriptural nor attractive.

III

I, for one, regard the state of affairs asextremely gloomy. What may be theremedies for it? One is to alter yourwhole economic and social system; butthat, however desirable, could only bebrought about so slowly that the cumu-lative dysgenic process would have hadtime to work a very great deal of harmbefore the remedy began to be effective.This niay be the ultimate goal; butmeanwhile we need some remedy whichwill work within the limits of ourexisting system.

R. A. Fisher himself suggests a com-prehensive scheme of family allow-ances, not restricted to the laboringclasses, but running right through so-ciety; not all on the same scale butwith the amount per child propor-tional to the man's total or, at least,his earned income. The extensionthroughout society is necessary if theprogressive reduction in,the numbers ofthe best-trained, most intelligent, andmost successful stocks is to be checked.By the same token, the second provisois also necessary. A contribution perchild which would mean a great deal toan unskilled laborer would be trifling toa professional man, while the reallysuccessful would not even find it worthwhile to fill in the necessary forms.The proviso has the additional meritthat it is elastic. If the economic sys-tem changes so that the manual work-ers receive more, the manufacturer ororganizer less, their family allowanceswill go up or down to suit the newscale.

THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF EUGENICS :Ji9

At first sight, such a scheme mayappear unjust and undemocratic, push-ing to extreme lengths the principle ofgiving to those who already! have.But if we look at it in its true light, theinjustice is seen to be apparent only.The scheme is simply intended toremedy the existing economic disad-vantages of having children: it is anadjustment of wages or salaries to theconditions of family life. Under ourpresent economic system, we pay dif-ferent amounts to different groups ofpeople: one group, say, gets two hun-dred pounds a year, another group twothousand. In each group the manwith children is being economicallyhandicapped, while the childless man isfor all practical purposes receiving abonus for his childlessness. The sug-gested scheme of family allowances ismerely intended as a biological meas-ure, designed to equalize matterswithin each group, by correcting.wagesor salary for number of children. Hsociety decrees that the poorer classesshall be better paid, or that the richershall get less, the correction auto-matically follows suit. But it is acorrection which has to be applied forbiological reasons, and in applying it wemust accept economic facts as we findthem.

For the wage-earning classes the sys-tem of wage-pools already successfullyadopted as the basis of the widespreadsystem of family allowance in vogue inFrance would be satisfactory; and asimilar method could be applied tomany of the professional classes. Withthose who draw money from manysources, like doctors, it would be moredifficult to devise a scheme which couldbe put into immediate operation; butonce the principle had been agreed on,its general application could be slowlybut surely worked out.

It is difficult to see any other meas-ure which would have any markedeffect on this degenerative tendency,

apart from radical Change in economicsystem, as in Russia, or equally radicalchange in social system, involving Statecharge of children; and even with sucha comprehensive scheme of familyallowances, it is difficult to believe thatthe process would be wholly checked,for there are intangible factors at work,such as the desire to be free to travel, towrite or do research, as well as merelyfinancial considerations. operating torestrict the size of families of successfulpeople; and there will remain the temp-tation to marry money, and with itbring low fertility into the family. Allone can say is that such a measure,combined with similar measures such asfree (and good) higher education for all,would undoubtedly help to check aprocess which, if left to itself, willinevitably cause the collapse of ourcivilization, and to give us a breathingspace in which to look for other weap-ons to combat the uhfamiliar menace.

Mr. Churchill, when Chancellor ofthe Exchequer a few years ago, inanswer to a reasoned request for higherincome-tax rebates for children, saidthat, while the aim of encouraging theprofessional classes to have more chil-dren was in every way praiseworthy, ithad no connection with the Budget,whose only preoccupations were tofinance the country. It is preciselysuch a point of view which needs chang-ing. In the long run, the quantity andquality of the country's population isits basic economic asset. Chancellorsof the Exchequer already consider theeffect of their proposals upon trade;there is every reason for them to con-sider their effect upon racial stabilityand racial health.

IVFinally there remains the question of

what I have styled long-range eugenics-the attempt to alter the character ofthe human race out of its present mold.

880 HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE

to lead it on to new evolutionaryachievements. We are sometimes toldthat the more likely fate for humanityis for it, like many another organictype, to pass its apogee and degenerate,owing to the rise of other forms of life;and claimants for the biological thronehave been named, such as the rat oreven, straying outside the vertebratefield, the ant or the termite. Thisprophecy we need not take too seri-ously. There is no likelihood of anyother animal species becoming a bio-logical rival to man. Man is uniqueamong organisms in his power of speechand conceptual thought, which haveresulted in his equally unique charac-teristics of an enduring and cumulativetradition and the power of making toolsand machines. Thanks to these prop-erties, he has entrenched himself over awider range of the globe's surface thanany other kind of animal, and is in aposition of dominance which wouldappear to be quite impregnable so longas he continues to cultivate his dis-tinctively human characteristics, theproper exercise of which will inevitablymake for further progress. Nowhere isthe dictum "unto him who hath shallbe given" truer than in the spheres ofcompetitive evolution; it is only whenthe progress of a given type is haltedthat others have the chance of oust-ing it.

Along these lines, the one possibilityis that of self-caused degeneration of ourspecies, leading to a collapse of thehuman domination which would thenleave the door open for the rise of otherforms of life. There are cases knownin the paleontological history of lifewhich can perhaps be best interpretedas a degeneration of the species due tosome inherent decay of the germ-plasm, rather than to competition orchanged conditions; but we need notappeal to these; for man is from thebiological point of view very young;and no one acquainted with the evolu-

tionary time-scale could possibly ac-cuse him of racial senility. If thehuman race is to bring about its owncollapse, it will be because it has coun-teracted the effects of natural selectionwithout attempting to put anything inits place, has allowed harmful muta-tions to accumulate instead of weedingthem out or prevented them from ap-pearing, and, in fine, has neglectedeugenic measures.

The commonest objection to suchconstructive eugenic ideas is that we donot know enough about the subject todecide upon the most desirable direc-tion in which to push forward, that theviews of, say, clerics, medical men,politicians, men of science, artists,business men, and trades union leadersupon the most desirable type would bealtogether at variance, and that in anycase to entrust any body of men withthe task of deciding who should beallowed to propagate and who shouldnot would be to place too large anddangerous a power in their hands.

But this is to misrepresent the posi-tion. No eugenist in his senses everhas suggested or ever would suggestthat one particular type or standardshould be picked out as desirable, andall other types discouraged or pre-vented from having children. Herebiology joins hands with common sense.The dictum of common sense, crystal-lized into a proverb, is that "it takesall kinds to make a world." The evi-dence of biology, drawn from the factsof evolution, is that this dictum appliesas much to different species and groupsof animals and plants as to typeswithin the one human species.

All ordinary people would agree thatthere are certain qualities which it isdesirable for the race to possess,Among desirable qualities we should allput health and energy, physical andmental; special aptitudes, for music ormathematics, practical engineering oradministrative genius, poetry or leader-

THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF EUGENICS 331

ship; all-round qualities, such as gen-eral ability, perseverance, manual dex-terity, humor, adaptability; and do notlet us forget beauty. It is possible andindeed probable that certain desirablequalities in an individual excludeothers; in any case, no one in his senseswould set out to breed a race of super-men who should all combine the goodqualities of, say, Keats, Henry Ford,Buddha, Abraham Lincoln, Adonis,and Sir Isaac Newton. The task is asimpler one-s-to encourage the breedingof those with desirable qualities, even ifthey also possess defects in other quali-ties. It will be time enough after athousand or ten thousand years of thisto look into further questions such asthe precise proportion of poets, physi-cists, and politicians required in acommunity, or the combination of anumber of different desirable qualitiesin one human frame.

It is perfectly true that it is at themoment very difficult to envisagemethods for putting even this limitedconstructive program into effect. Butthis is due as much to difficulties in-herent in our present social-economicorganization as to our ignorance ofhuman heredity, and most of all to theabsence of a eugenic sense in the publicat large.

A change in public opinion is indeedthe first requisite. Dean Inge, in arecent essay, asserted that once a manhas grasped the implications of biologyin respect of evolution and inheritance,eugenics becomes for him not merely animportant aim, but the most sacredideal of the human race as a race. Itbecomes not merely an outlet for hu-man altruism, but the outlet which is

most comprehensive and of longestrange of all outlets for altruism. Itbecomes, in fact, in Dean Inge's words,one of the supreme religious duties.

It is this attitude which we want tosee grow and spread among civilizedmen and women, of every professionand of every class. Man has becomewhat he is by a process of evolutionwhich has taken perhaps a thousandmillion years; there is no reason whythat evolution should not continue; andwe can look forward, according to theastronomers, to at least another thou-sand million years of earth's habitabil-ity. If the past with its crude methodshas .taken life from single cells, orwhatever simpler units it at first in-habited, to man, what may not man doin the future with the aid of consciousreason and deliberate planning?

Once that attitude has been assimi-lated, the idea of eugenics will take itsproper place in our repertory of ideas.On its negative side it becomes racialpreventive medicine; on its positiveside, racial hope.

And once this is so, the pressure ofpublic opinion to get something donewill become so great that somethingwill be done. More minds will be setto amass the necessary knowledge,more will be detailed to think out waysand means of applying knowledge.We cannot yet see what those discov-eries will be, or envisage the organiza-tion of a eugenic society. But knowl-edge will slowly grow, ways and meanscan surely be found. And so man maytake up his birthright, which is tobecome the first organism exercisingconscious control over its own evolu-tionary destiny.