The Social Direction of Evolution: An Outline of the Science of EugenicsKellicott, William E. (William Erskine)
Science
The Social Direction of Evolution: An Outline of the Science of Eugenics
Kellicott, William E. (William Erskine)
Eugenics
We have here a result that has very important bearings upon the value
to the race of the large family and of the danger of the small family.
The small family of one, two, or three children contributes on the
average much more than its share of pathological and defective
persons. No matter just now what the causes are, they seem to be more
or less beyond remedy. The result for the future, however, must be
reckoned with. This relation has important bearings upon the custom of
primogeniture as well as upon the eugenic values of the large family.
In conclusion let us give a few sentences only slightly modified from
Pearson's "Grammar of Science." The subject of differential fertility
is not only vitally important for the theory of evolution, but it is
crucial for the stability of civilized societies. If the type of
maximum fertility is not identical with the type fittest to survive in
a given environment, then only intensive selection can keep the
community stable. If natural selection be suspended there results a
progressive change; the most fertile, whoever they are, tend to
multiply at an increasing rate. In our modern societies natural
selection has been to some extent suspended; what test have we then of
the identity of the most fertile and the most fit? It wants but very
few generations to carry the type from the fit to the unfit. The
aristocracy of the intellectual and artizan classes are not equally
fertile with the mediocre and least valuable portions of those
classes and of society as a whole. Hence if the professional and
intellectual classes are to be maintained in due proportions they must
be recruited from below. This is much more serious than would appear
at first sight. The upper middle class is the backbone of a nation,
supplying its thinkers, leaders, and organizers. This class is not a
mushroom growth, but the result of a long process of selecting the
abler and fitter members of society. The middle classes produce
relatively to the working classes a vastly greater proportion of
ability; _it is not want of education, it is the want of stock which
is at the basis of this difference_. A healthy society would have its
maximum of fertility in this class and recruit the artizan class from
the middle class rather than _vice versa_. But what do we actually
find? A growing decrease in the birth rate of the middle and upper
classes; a strong movement for restraint of fertility, and limitation
of the family, touching only the intellectual classes and the
aristocracy of the hand workers! Restraint and limitation may be most
social and at the same time most eugenic if they begin in the first
place to check the fertility of the unfit; but if they start at the
wrong end of society they are worse than useless, they are nationally
disastrous in their effects. The dearth of ability at a time of crisis
is the worst ill that can happen to a people. Sitting quietly at home,
a nation may degenerate and collapse, simply because it has given full
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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