First steps towards eugenic reform / by Leonard Darwin.

  • Darwin, Leonard, 1850-1943.
Date:
[between 1910 and 1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: First steps towards eugenic reform / by Leonard Darwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    FIRST STEPS TOWARDS EUGENIC REFORM By Major Leonard Darwin That all animals, including man, are the result of some slow process of evolution, by which the higher forms of life have been gradually evolved from the more primitive types, is now an almost universally accepted creed. The method by which this evolution has taken place is no doubt still a subject for discus¬ sion ; but, whatever it may have been, we get the impression that the process has proceeded, as it were, under the direction of certain general and changeless laws. When this conception of the universe was first generally adopted, it seemed as if man had nothing to do but to look on whilst Nature herself worked ceaselessly to ensure his continued upward movement on the path of progress. It seemed, in fact, indisputable that these general laws, on which our progress in the past has depended, might be relied on to continue in all circumstances to shed their beneficent influence upon us. Unfortunately our former happy and optimistic frame of mind has been subject to certain rude shocks in recent years, making us look forward with far less confidence to the future. In the first place it is now generally recognised that, in the course of this long evolutionary process, some species have altogether died out, leaving no descendants behind them, whilst other types have not only multiplied greatly in numbers, but have also slowly given rise to several new forms of life. The horse and the ass are probably descended from some common ancestral species, a species which flourished at the same time as some of those extinct mammoth mammalia, whose