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
nurtured and controlling social class. Was this direction of social
reform really capable of effecting any substantial change? Nay, by
lessening the selective death rate, may it not have contributed to
emphasizing the very evils it was intended to lessen? These are the
problems which occur to the eugenist and call for investigation and,
if possible, settlement.... It is conceivable that the relation
between children's physique, for example, and parental occupation is
an indirect result of the inheritance of physique and a correlation
between parents' physique and their occupation. In other words, what
we are attributing to environment may be a secondary influence of
heredity itself. A weakling may have no option but to follow an
unhealthy trade, a man is a tailor or shoemaker, because he has not
the physique for smith or navvy. His offspring may be physically
inferior because he is a weakling and not because he follows an
unhealthy trade. Clearly, to solve our problem, we must know if there
be any correlation between the same character in the parent as we are
observing in the child and the environment we are correlating with the
child's character. Unfortunately data enabling us to determine the
relationship of any mental or physical character of the parent with
the environment which is supposed to influence the child is rarely
forthcoming."
Just to suggest one further train of thought, we might point out that
several movements apparently of high social value have been attended
by a curious and largely unforeseen back action. Thus the enforcement
of certain forms of Employer's Liability laws has led to
discrimination against married persons by large employers of labor and
a premium thus put upon nonmarriage. The result of Child Labor
legislation has been in some cases an enormous rise in the death rate
of young children among the classes concerned, indicating that the
children receive less care, now that they have ceased to be a
prospective family asset and have become chiefly a burden for many
years. In other cases the result has been so serious a limitation in
the birth rate that communities are dying out and factories are
closing for want of sufficient help. Such problems are not only social
but economic and eugenic, and they cannot be seen squarely from any
single point of view. It is doubtless shocking to the cultured mind
that the chief reason for bringing children into the world should be
their economic value as contributors to the family income. But in
reality does this point of view differ fundamentally from that very
commonly taken of the value of a large family except in the nature of
the standard by which their value is measured? May there not be a
difference of opinion as to whether children are better or worse off
when brought up with some degree of care to be employed under humane
conditions of labor, than when left uncared for to die in large
proportions of disease and neglect?
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