Two comprehensive attempts have been made in recent years to study the
inheritance of mental abnormality, one in England at the Eugenics Laboratory
of the University of London, the other in this country under the leadership,
more or less immediate, of the Eugenics Record Office. Both the English and
the American school of workers agree that different grades of mental
ability, mental defect and insanity are strongly inherited. But the two
schools have reached very different conclusions as to the manner of
inheritance of mental traits and mental defects. Each school entertains
profound disrespect for the scientific methods and conclusions of the other
and with the frankness and honesty which devotion to truth demand has freely
criticised the other. By this criticism, at the bottom friendly though
sometimes caustic, science has undoubtedly profited. The later work of each
school begins to show the chastening influence of adverse criticism.
The English school has leaned backward in its devotion to the inductive
method of accumulating inheritance data, ostensibly without prejudice for or
against any particular theory but in reality with an ill-concealed bias
against anything savoring of "Mendelism." The American school recognizing
in Mendelism a great advance and an important instrument for the discovery
of new truth, has ignored the possibility that other undiscovered laws of
heredity may exist and has cast aside as superfluous the valuable biometric
tools wrought with much patient toil by Galton and Pearson. It will be the
part of wisdom for students of genetics to imitate the hostile attitude of
neither school, but to utilize the positive results of both. This is what
Dr. Goddard has done in the work under review.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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