Our scientists in eugenics gather hosts of facts, showing by
elaborate statistical figures that the family history of neurotics
reveals stigmata of degeneration in the various members of the
family. The eugenic inquirers do not stop for a moment to think
over the fact that the same sort of evidence can be easily brought
in the case of most people. In fact, the eugenists themselves,
when inquiring into the pedigree of talent and genius, invariably
find somewhere in the family some form of disease or degeneration.
This sort of “scientific” evidence leads some eugenic speculators,
without their noticing the _reductio ad absurdum_, to the curious
conclusion or generalization that degeneration is present in the
family history of the best and the worst representatives of the
human race.
The so-called scientific method of the eugenists is faulty, in
spite of the rich display of colored plates, stained tablets,
glittering biological speculations, brilliant mathematical
formulae, and complicated statistical calculations. The eugenists
pile Ossa on Pelion of facts by the simple method of enumeration
which Bacon and the thinkers coming after him have long ago
condemned as puerile and futile. From the savage’s belief in
sympathetic, imitative magic with its consequent superstitions,
omens, and taboos down to the articles of faith and dogmas of the
eugenists, we find the same faulty, primitive thought, guided by
the puerile, imbecile method of simple enumeration, and controlled
by the wisdom of the logical _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_.
What would we say of the medical man who should claim that measles,
mumps, cholera, typhoid fever, yellow fever, malaria, tetanus,
and various other infectious diseases are hereditary by quoting
learnedly long tables of statistics to the effect that for several
generations members of the same family suffered from the same
infectious diseases? What would we say of the medical advice
forbidding marriage to individuals whose family history reveals
the presence of exanthemata? We stamp out epidemics not by eugenic
measures, but by the cleansing of infectious filth, and by the
extermination of pathogenic micro-organisms.
Every human being has a predisposition to smallpox, cholera,
tetanus, bubonic plague, typhus fever, malaria, and to like
infectious diseases, but there is no inherent necessity for
everyone to fall a victim to the action of pathogenic organisms,
if the preventive and sanitary conditions are good and proper. No
one is immune against the action of bullets, cannon balls, shells,
and torpedoes, or to the action of various poisons, organic and
inorganic, but one is not doomed by fate to be killed by them, if
one does not expose himself to their deadly action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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