The Black Man's Place in South AfricaNielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
History
The Black Man's Place in South Africa
Nielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
Black people -- South Africa
But though man became almost emancipated from the direct servitude of
natural selection, he still is, and always will be, subject to the law
of heredity. Man is made up of a group of innate characters inherited
from a very mixed ancestry, these characters, being innate, are
transmissible to his offspring, but such characters as are acquired by
the parent through the direct influence of education or other
environment, not being innate are not transmissible to his children. But
in so far as a new development of latent and innate characters, through
the influence of the environment, may help or hinder certain types in
propagating themselves, the race may, perhaps, be modified through such
influence by the process of gradual elimination of the types that lack
the characters that prove to be of survival value in a particular
locality. This we may suppose might happen where a number of Europeans,
composed half of blondes and half of brunettes, come to live in a
tropical country, if it be proved that the comparative darkness of the
brunettes afford them better protection against inimical light and heat
than the fair skin of the blondes, so that the former would on the
average, enjoy better health and live longer, and therefore have more
children than the latter, whereby, in course of time, the appearance of
these people would be modified in respect of the general complexion of
their skin. This, it is easy to see, would not mean the acquisition of a
new and heritable means of protection, but only a development in each
individual of an already present innate character that happened to be
well fitted for survival in a certain climatic zone.
In order, therefore, to obtain any direct modification of the race in
the way of mental improvement the physical effect of education must be
such as to ensure longer life and with it, the concomitant chance of
greater fertility for those who are educated against those who are not,
so that the latter would tend to die out while the former would continue
to increase their numbers. In other words, education must prove to be
of survival value. Seeing that where education has increased most the
birth-rate has tended to decrease it seems clear that we cannot regard
continuous mental training as a favourable factor in the competition of
propagation of human varieties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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