The groundwork of eugenics / by Karl Pearson.

  • Pearson, Karl, 1857-1936.
Date:
1912
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The groundwork of eugenics / by Karl Pearson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    18 THE GROUNDWORK OF EUGENICS ' Y OU fellows would little think that I wrote a tragedy when I was young.' Huxley said promptly : ' I know what it was about' Spencer declared it was impossible as he had never shown or even spoken of it to any one before. Huxley persisted. Spencer put him to the test. Huxley replied: 'It was the history of a beautiful induction killed by a nasty little fact.' The beautiful induction, that human progress has been accelerated by the acquired results of education inherited by the offspring, is killed by the nasty little fact, that no conclusive experiment on mammals which showed definite action of somatic cells upon germ cells in an attuned direction has ever been made, and from the standpoint of modern biology such action is not only nigh unthinkable, but must be as largely harmful as useful. The race has evolved protec¬ tion for itself from individual excess, by rendering the germ cells largely independent of the somatic cells and their changes. It is not only at this point, but at another also, that eugenics must receive help from modern biological knowledge. Without pledging ourselves to any special physiological theory of heredity, it is quite possible to investigate the facts of heredity and to measure the rate of inheritance of any character in man living in a community. If we accept the theory of Mendel we reach in broad lines the same theoretical results as the Biometrie School has reached from dealing solely with the statistics of populations, namely, there is an average degree of resemblance between parent and child, and this degree is lessened in geometrical progression as we pass to grandparents and great- grandparents. Now as eugenists our object is to determine to what extent a differentiated class of the community impresses its characters on its offspring, and the average