A first book in organic evolutionShute, D. Kerfoot (Daniel Kerfoot)
Science
A first book in organic evolution
Shute, D. Kerfoot (Daniel Kerfoot)
Evolution
Why should the habitual drunkard, for
instance, be permitted to evolve his poisoned germ cells into helpless
beings, giving them diseased bodies and vitiated moral characters, thus
foredooming them to life-long physical ailments and moral turpitude?
Removal of the procreating glands should be the penalty for chronic
alcoholism. In objection to this suggestion, some may prate of personal
liberty. What a multitude of outrages and brutalities the broad mantle of
personal liberty is often made to cover! In allowing personal liberty to
an undeserving individual, which more often means unbridled license to
that individual, a whole generation of offspring are frequently enslaved
by poverty, vice, crime, and disease in its manifold manifestations.
During organic evolution Natural Selection has been incessantly on the
watch for weaknesses of any kind, ruthlessly exterminating the helpless,
the weak, the sick, and those that in any way are unfit. In social
evolution Natural Selection has often been of necessity no less ruthless.
But during social evolution characters that are unfolding more and more
loving and lovable traits have so largely subordinated Natural Selection
as to permit the helpless, the old, the sick, and the unfit, to live,
thus strengthening those highest attributes of the greatest minds, viz.:
intelligent sympathy, pity and love.
But it seems to us that the highest altruism, in dealing kindly with an
abnormal, possible parent, will not continue long to stupidly overlook
the weighty rights of unborn children. Human selection of the socially
unfit will be dominated more and more, as social evolution unfolds
its fruits, by those minds that are advancing to the highest goals of
evolution, viz.: large minds of high character—widely informed minds, of
strong will and broad sympathies. And under these circumstances we may
hope that unborn generations will not be given over to total oblivion.
Well may we repeat, before concluding this little book, that man is not
only a creature of the present, but profoundly a product of the abysmal
ages of a bygone eternity. He is not only a composite chip of many old
human blocks, but of innumerable geologic ancestral blocks. He has in his
constitution simian, reptilian, piscine, and innumerable other chips,
so to speak, and is indeed of the earth earthy; for studies in heredity
not only illustrate the continuity of the human race, but also clearly
indicate the continuity of this race with more lowly animals. Man has
in his structure the indelible impress of the handiwork of these lowly
relatives. Upon him, as upon them, and upon all living creatures, the
forces of heredity and variation, of use and disuse, of environment and
Natural Selection, have been and are perpetually playing, evolving him in
one direction and innumerable creatures in other directions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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