Eugenics
and consanguineous marriages *
by
Anthony M. Ludovici
The Eugenics Review 25, 1933–34, pp. 147–155
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We live in an age in which
science is extremely powerful, almost as powerful as religion once was. But a
free-lance scientist like myself is sometimes left wondering whether science is
not often a mask behind which the old powers of magic and religion may still be
seen grinning. One piece of magic which I propose to divorce from my science is
the gratuitous segmentation of the human organism into body and mind (soma and psyche);
and contemplating the problem of culture on this basis, I find, a
priori, that culture, in so far as it is social harmony and order, must be
the product of an ordered, harmonious man. If, moreover, I turn from the social
chaos of to-day back to the origins of the most harmonious and orderly
cultures, I suspect, without inquiry, that the people who created these
cultures must have been unlike us at least in this, that they were harmoniously
constituted.
Inbreeding
in earlier civilizations
Turning
from these a priori conclusions to fact, we find not only that
these early cultures were extremely harmonious, but that their power and
influence have been so great that our own culture owes what little beauty and
harmony it possesses entirely to them. A further interesting fact is that all
these early cultures arose in naturally or artificially confined areas — in
islands like Crete and Japan, peninsulas like India, Greece, and Italy,
naturally enclosed areas like Peru, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and more or less
artificially enclosed areas like China and Palestine — where broad-mindedness,
the universal brotherhood of man, the love of one's neighbour, and other
superior forms of claptrap were unknown. Furthermore, we know that where
intercourse with the outside world, with the neighbour, is checked, the
secluded people are condemned to inbreeding and close inbreeding; indeed, in
the only cultures that have left a permanent mark on the world, we find not
only inbreeding, but also a strong conscious tendency to keep apart, to
segregate. This tendency caused not only a frontier of prejudice to spring up
between the secluded nation and the world, but also a series of frontiers
within the nation itself, dividing off classes and castes, so that within the
inbred mass, smaller inbred classes were formed.
It
would seem as if men who had acquired a set of special qualities possessed an
instinct to keep aloof from anyone who could adulterate these qualities. In
healthy cultivated man, this instinct is so pronounced as to be a matter of
common knowledge. Even among the primitive peoples, it has been noticed by
scores of observers. Among the peoples principally responsible for civilization
— the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Greeks — the abhorrence of the stranger was
so great that the very word for stranger was a term of opprobrium. And each of
these peoples was not only inbred but incestuous.
Can
there be any connection between these sets of facts — the fact that these
peoples created our civilization, the fact that they lived in enclosed areas,
and the fact that they were closely inbred and incestuous? There is a marked
prejudice against consanguineous and particularly against incestuous matings in
the modern world. Is it possible that like other superstitions, like the belief
in the superiority of the psyche over the soma, it
is based on ancient magic? If it is, it is important to get rid of it, because
the people who were responsible for civilizing the world were probably greater
than a people like ourselves who have left no stone unturned in order to
decivilize it.
*
The substance of a paper read before the Eugenics Society on July 18th, 1933.
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Genetics of breeding
Breeding
is the process of producing a new individual by the conjunction of two germ
cells, male and female. In random-bred stocks, the hereditary equipment of the
couple is different. Each contains factors or developmental determiners of a
kind different from the other. In mixed breeding, therefore, one can picture
the process of their conjunction as an intermingling of wools not only of
different sets of colours, but of different quality; and, as in random-bred
stocks there is always latent in the germ plasm much that is deleterious, we
must imagine some of these wools as being diseased or morbid.
Mixed
breeding from a pair taken at random in an unstabilized stock has three
principal results. It may, by a stroke of luck, produce a new individual who is
harmonious, i.e. who presents a symmetrical pattern, and who is free from
morbid manifestations; it may, and usually does, produce an individual who is
inharmonious; and if, by a similar chance conjunction to that which united the
health-determining factors in the lucky individual, the ill-health determining
factors happen to unite, it may produce an individual with some more or less
grave morbid manifestation. It should, however, always be remembered that even
the lucky individual who looks healthy and sound in a random-bred stock, bears
in his hereditary equipment the deleterious elements common to the stock which
produced his less-fortunate brothers.
In
inbred stocks the hereditary equipment of the breeding pair is the same — i.e.
except probably for sex, each has the same factors for determining the
characters of the progeny. Moreover, since inbreeding favours the mendelizing
out of determiners for developmental defects, and since, in an inbred stock
which has reached stability or become completely homozygous,
morbidity-determining factors have been eliminated, the new individual, except
in the case of a morbid mutation, is unlikely to be morbid. He is likely to be
harmonious and healthy, his morphological characters afford some definite
indication of his hereditary equipment, and the health and physical harmony of
his offspring become a more or less calculable certainty if he is mated with
his like.
If,
however, inbreeding occurs in a stock hitherto random-bred, it must be obvious
that, since deleterious factors are always latent in the germ-plasm of such a
stock, similar morbid factors may be brought together by joining a male and
female of the same family. This, it is true, quickly eliminates the
"unlucky strokes," and purifies the stock. But the process may be
expensive. Its expense will be proportionate to the amount of latent morbidity
in the stock.
It
is important to remember, however, that random-breeding and mixed breeding do
not eliminate bad hereditary factors from a stock, but merely cover them up.
While inbreeding does not create bad hereditary factors, but merely tends to
bring them out.
This
is roughly what science has to say about the two methods of breeding. It was
all perfectly plain eighty years ago. If the biologists of the nineteenth
century had looked at history and life, they would have seen that Nature was,
as far as we can tell, almost everywhere striving by inbreeding to produce the
desirable state of homozygosity, and had implanted instincts in Man and most
beasts to that cited.
Consanguineous
mating in animals
What
about the actual practice of Nature and the breeder of animals? In the first
place, we know that the closest inbreeding occurs in some plants — for example,
the common blue violet, garden beans, the many species of the small evening
primrose — in which the egg-cells are fertilized by pollen produced by the same
individual. Self-fertilization is also the rule in wheat, oats, and the
majority of other cereal crops — the most important of cultivated plants. The
process cannot, therefore, be attended by evil results, at least to these
plants, otherwise they would not be with us to-day.
Turning
to animals, we find in them no instinctive safeguard against incestuous mating.
Reproduction in rats, mice, rabbits and other rodents, according to Dr.
Briffault, takes place without any regard for relation-
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ship, and these animals are
notorious for their fertility and vigour. Among antelopes incestuous matings
are the rule. The African reedbuck, for instance, has two young at a birth,
male and female, which mate together when mature. Only when one happens to die
by accident does out- or cross-breeding occur. Brehm Strassen says this is true
of the smaller antelopes also, and MacDonald says it is true of the red deer.
Lyddeker claims brother and sister mating for the tiger. Among African
buffaloes, Seton says, breeding occurs mainly among the immediate offspring of
the same cow. The cattle from La Plata in the Falkland Islands, not only
quickly multiplied from a few individuals, but also broke up into smaller herds
according to colour, and the close inbreeding out of which the race sprang was
thus intensified by the animals' own instincts. Rengger reports the same conditions
of horses in Paraguay and Circassia. Darwin himself, after enumerating a number
of cases of close consanguineous mating in cattle, sheep, and antelopes, says
"almost all the animals as yet mentioned are gregarious, and the males
most frequently pair with their own daughters, for they expel the young males
as well as all intruders."
According
to Dr. A. C. Brehm, the nature of the troop among monkeys makes constant
matings between the head of the horde and his daughters, sisters and other
close relations wholly inevitable, and in fact among all polygamous animals,
whether gorilla, wild boar, or elephant, the leading male must enjoy the
favours of his daughters, grand-daughters, and great-grand-daughters, so long
as he is able to keep other males away. Nor, as Huth points out, does the
incest cease when he is at last turned out; because the first in the field will
most probably be his own sons and grandsons.
A
new, and recently authenticated, case of naturally determined incest, appears
to have been discovered by the British Museum Expedition to the Gobi Desert in
1929, when a bird, the Eörnis Pterovelox Gobiensis, was found,
which hatches twins at each birth, a male and a female, and these same
individuals later mate and are monogamous. We also know the rabbits of
Australia, the pigs of New Zealand, the cattle of South America — all offspring
of a few individuals let loose on the soil. According to Harnady a classical
example of a stock of animals bred from only three ancestors is afforded by the
red deer of New Zealand. The original three specimens were introduced from
England in 1864, and only ten years ago the herd numbered 5,000. Yet they show
no signs of disease but are indeed superior in vigour and constitution to the
original parent stock.
The
experience of breeders
The
evidence from the practice of experienced breeders conclusively points to the
best results being obtained from the closest inbreeding.
But,
just as natural selection eliminates individuals which are the outcome of two
polluted streams becoming confluent in consanguineous unions, so the wise
breeder, imitating Nature's way, carefully weeds out unhappy specimens. If
morbid or lethal factors still exist in the stock's germ-plasm, and they happen
to come together from both sides in the mating of close relatives, then instead
of a confluence of rivers of pure water, a confluence of impure streams occurs,
which results in a stream doubly contaminated.
But
it is remarkable that owing to the ethico-theological superstition against
inbreeding and incest, bad and ignorant breeders have, until recently, always
ascribed to close inbreeding per se, and not to the pollution of
the continent streams, the disappointing results of their methods — so much so,
indeed, that not only Darwin, who consulted many such ignorant breeders, but
countless other authorities, took it for granted that inbreeding must be bad,
particularly as it was forbidden by the Table of Affinities.
Settegast,
in 1868, in Germany, took an even stronger stand than Darwin against
inbreeding, with the result, as Kronacher shows, that for fifty years nobody
ever heard of a reputable breed of German cattle or horses. And it was only
when de Chapeaurouge and Lehndorff reversed Settegast's
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theological prejudices that
Germany began once again to produce reputable strains of animals.
Apart
from all theorists, however, knowledgeable breeders all over the world have
from time immemorial practised inbreeding, accompanied by careful selection. As
long ago as 1823, N. H. Smith, a famous breeder, long resident among the Arabs,
wrote: "I cannot say how often an incestuous breed may be carried on
before degeneracy occurs, as I am not aware of that being the case in any
instance, and experience is in favour of breeding from son and mother, fattier
and daughter." And it is this incestuous stock that has given our
race-horses some of their finest qualities. The Clydesdale breed of horses, as
Calder shows, is also closely inbred, 80 or 90 per cent. of the horses in the
recent volumes of the Shire Stud Book going back in direct
line to three stallions, living 60 or 70 years ago — William the Conqueror,
Lincolnshire Lad, and Matchless. Among dog-breeders, de Chapeaurouge produced a
closely inbred stock of pugs with complete success. N. H. Gentry reports from
America a successfully inbred stock of Berkshire pigs, while a Dutch landowner
recently reared a stock of middle white breed without any evil
results from one imported boar and two sows. Kronacher, starting with one male
and three females (a mother and two daughters) bred a stock of ordinary goats,
in and in for eight generations, without any loss of size, physical
development, milking capacity, fertility or vitality. Indeed their fertility
tended to increase. And he declares that in this case he practised no selection
whatever.
In
cattle the success of close inbreeding is so startling that Darwin felt
compelled to suggest that some exception to Nature's supposed law against
incest must have been made in their favour! The famous cow Restless came of the
most persistent inbreeding. The bull Bolingbroke, with his half-sister Phoenix,
produced the bull Favourite. Favourite, with his mother, produced the cow Young
Phoenix, a celebrated animal. With his daughter, Favourite then produced the
famous bull Comet. He was then put to his daughter's daughter, and again to his
daughter's daughter's daughter. The product of this last union had 93.75 per
cent. of Favourite's blood in her, and was put to the bull Wellington, who had
62.5 per cent. of Favourite's blood. This union produced Clarissa, an admirable
cow, who with the bull Lancaster (having 68.75 per cent. of Favourite's blood
in his veins) produced the celebrated cow Restless.
Further
experimental data
Such
was the practice of Nature's experienced breeders when Darwin wrote the first
authoritative book on breeding, and yet so great was the ethico-religious bias
of the day that, although he recognized crossing as a cause of degeneracy, he
concluded that too close consanguinity must lead to weakness, sterility and
greater susceptibility to disease.
Overlooking
a good deal of what experienced breeders said, and all the historical and
anthropological evidence, other nineteenth-century scientists seem to have been
influenced by the cases where the inbreeding of tainted stocks had, of course,
led to bad results. Moreover, they performed experiments of their own, which,
astonishing as it may seem, without exception proved that inbreeding was
harmful, thus confirming the following of Darwin's findings:
(a)
That the consequences of close inbreeding were loss of size, constitutional
vigour, and fertility.
(b)
That the crossing of animals and plants not closely related was highly
beneficial and even necessary.
Recently
these conclusions began to be doubted. In 1916 Professor Castle stated that he
had successfully bred Drosophila, brother and sister, for 59
generations, without obtaining any diminution in either vigour or fertility.
Moenkhaus crossed the same fly, brother and sister, for 75 generations, without
harmful consequences. Hyde and Schultze achieved the same result with mice.
Castle tried rats, and Popenoe guinea-pigs, and both concluded that no
deleterious effects could be ascribed to the system of mating. King
experimented with white rats, mating brother and sister regularly for 22
generations, and
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among these inbred rats some
were obtained which proved actually superior to the stock rats from which they
had sprung. The males were 15 per cent. heavier, and the females 3 per cent.,
while the fertility was nearly 8 per cent. higher.
Commenting
on these experiments, Rice says: "These results lead to the very definite
suspicion that the earlier investigators unconsciously selected the animals in
such a way as to lead to the diminished fertility and vitality, or else even
used defective Strains in their experiments." According to Crew,
"Consanguinity itself is no bar to mating. If inbreeding results in
disappointment, all that has happened is that that which previously was hidden
in a heterozygous stock has now been brought to the surface. Inbreeding is only
disastrous if the ingredients of disaster are already in the stock. If inbreeding
exposes the undesirable, it equally thoroughly emphasizes the desirable, and
the desirable will breed true when complete homozygosis in respect of these
characters is attained." Thus to be successful, inbreeding must be
attended with the most rigorous selection.
As
a formula for the respective effects of inbreeding and out- or cross-breeding,
I suggest the following:
Inbreeding
canalizes and isolates health and desirable qualities, just as it canalizes and
isolates ill-health and undesirable qualities. Cross-breeding conceals and
spreads ill-health and undesirable qualities, and thus contaminates desirable
stocks. But it also tends to improve poor or degenerate stocks at the expense
of sound stock.
Incest
in man
In
discussing the problem in relation to Man, it is interesting to recall how far
the endogamic instincts of cultivated human stocks led to intensive inbreeding
within certain groups. In Egypt, in addition to the national endogamy which
forbade mixing with the foreigner, incestuous unions prevailed both among the
people and within the ruler groups. In the golden age of the Theban Empire,
seven kings in the Eighteenth Dynasty married their sisters; in the Nineteenth
all but three did so; in the Twentieth every king married his sister. Kings
married their sisters in the Sixteenth, Thirteenth and Twelfth Dynasties, and
as early as the Fourth. And when the Lagidae ruled Egypt, they could not afford
to disregard this ancient custom. Thus Cleopatra, whose wit, beauty and intelligence
are proverbial, was the daughter of a brother and sister, great-grand-daughter
of another brother and sister, and a great-great-grand-daughter of Berenice who
was both cousin and sister to her husband. Egypt declined only when her
endogamic fences broke down.
Persia,
strictly endogamic, had an incestuous royal house, and the Magian aristocracy
married their mothers, daughters and sisters. According to Robertson Smith, the
Phoenicians, and according to Périer the Assyrians, were regularly incestuous,
as were also the Scythians and the Tartars. The Jews, also an endogamic people,
were surrounded by nations who were all mating consanguineously for the sake of
purity, and probably health, too. It is likely, therefore, that at least the
aristocrats among the Jews also practised incest, in spite of the table of
prohibited degrees. Incestuous practices are known to have been common in the
Siamese aristocracy, among the Arabs who allowed them down to Mahomed's time,
and among the Burmese, Cambodians and Mongols.
In
Britain, as late as fifth century, we find Vortigern marrying his own daughter.
Nor could the practice have been condemned, since the issue of this sinful
union was none other than St. Faustus. According to Strabo, the ancient Irish
married without distinction their mothers and sisters, and Heineccius tells us
it was customary for the ancient Germans to marry their sisters. There is
overwhelming evidence that the Peruvians were strictly endogamic. The proud
Incas, refusing to mix their blood, married their sisters; and it is said that
the soldiers and nobility customarily followed the royal example.
As
to more recent instances of incest among human beings, I have collected
accounts of no less than thirty primitive communities in which incest was
practised
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when they were first visited,
but here I can do no more than refer to them, as also to the monographs of
authorities like Shapiro, Rodenwaldt, Fischer, and Voisin on such closely
inbred, though originally crossed stocks as the Pitcairn islanders, the Kisar
Hybrids, the Bastards of Rehoboth, and the people of the island of Batz, all of
whom are examples of almost contemporary experiments in human breeding with
close consanguinity without harmful results. Concluding his study of the
hybrids of Kisar, Rodenwaldt says: "We are surely entitled to conclude
that men in the past have been too hasty in ascribing to the consequences of
consanguinity what were really the result of environmental influences."
Thus
we have seen that Man, like some of the animals, seems to have an instinct
impelling him to canalize qualities acquired with pains. It seems as if it were
a law of Nature, not, as Darwin thought, to have crosses, but to avoid them.
Even in those tribes and races where incest is illegal, we often find the
rulers or chiefs deliberately infringing the prohibited degrees to keep their
blood pure. For instance in Burmah, marriage with half-sisters is forbidden,
but the King always marries his half-sister. In Siam the people may not marry
nearer relatives than third cousins, but the King may marry his sister and his
daughter. The same is true of the higher classes in Cambodia, of the chiefs of
the Marianne and Ladrone Islands, in Hawaii, Nukuhiva, Tahiti and Madagascar,
and it was also true of the Northern American Indians of New England. In fact,
as the Kalmucks say, "Great folk and dogs have no relatives." Nor are
the people addicted to these practices degenerate or diseased; on the contrary,
all travellers comment on their great vigour and beauty.
There
is even a case of a people living, more or less in a state of Nature, who,
according to Sir Basil Thomson, are actually benefited by inbreeding. Among
this people — the Fijians — those stocks which have adhered to the ancestral
custom requiring first-cousin marriages, are very much the superiors from every
physical point of view of those who no longer practise, or else forbid,
first-cousin marriages, and the latter are even said to be dying out, while the
former have a higher birth rate and greater vitality.
According
to Junghuhn the Bataks of Sumatra, who also habitually marry their
first-cousins, are the finest people in the Indian Archipelago. The chiefs in
Polynesia and New Zealand have all been noticed for their superior height,
looks and vigour. And throughout Polynesia the closest consanguinity occurs in
mating among the chiefs.
There
can, therefore, be but little doubt that Man is as capable as some of the
animals of thriving on close consanguineous matings, if the streams that become
confluent are pure; in fact that when once a human stock has become quite pure
close inbreeding is the only means of maintaining it so.
Biological
effects of miscegenation
I
cannot enter now into the history of the controversy that has raged between the
advocates of inbreeding and their opponents. I cannot do more than affirm that
none of the ancients had the faintest notion that it could be condemned on
biological grounds. Even to-day hardly any two authorities agree as to why
inbreeding and incest were condemned among many peoples, at least for the
populace, and profound students, like Sir James Frazer, Ernest Crawley,
Malinowski and Freud, account for the condemnation, each in his own way.
The
moment, of course, that men began to think biologically, it is easy to see why
they were prompt in ascribing to divine wisdom a rule which, when broken by
badly tainted stocks, appeared to lead to havoc. They reasoned that the havoc
was due to the consanguinity, and did not know it was due to the confluence of
two tainted streams. And thus, arguing backwards, they justified
pseudo-scientifically a rule that had once arisen for no biological reason
whatever.
What
do inbreeding and outbreeding or cross-breeding respectively mean to the health
of a people? It is impossible to separate the psychological from the
physiological; but Charles Darwin and many others, who contrive to do so, agree
that outbreeding,
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cross-breeding and
miscegenation are injurious to the mental and moral qualities of a race or
variety.
Random
breeding may destroy mental harmony by combining in one individual emotional
reflexes which may be, and often are, conflicting. In this sense, the extreme
random breeding of to-day is probably not unconnected with the increase in
mental instability and possibly, too, with the increase in insanity and mental
defectiveness. In fact, it is probable that to-day not one of us knows the
supremely exalted and exhilarating feelings of a being who is thoroughly
harmonious and healthy because he is inbred.
The
chief effects of miscegenation on the constitution are: firstly, degeneracy, by
the reversion that is induced; secondly, dysfunction and disease owing to the
production of individuals whose bodies are discordant jumbles of parts from
various unlike stocks; and thirdly, increasing morbidity, owing to the fact
that there is no canalization of disease, none of health, and deleterious
hereditary factors are spread even among sound stocks. Let me take these in
their order.
Darwin
and others have shown that outbreeding and cross-breeding lead to reversion, or
at least to the loss of acquired characteristics, which is the same thing. This
has been demonstrated in pigeons, ducks, horses and other animals. Darwin
claimed that it was so in Man. It may, as Otto Seeck maintains, have caused the
rapid decline of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But I think I have said enough
to show that culture and civilization have been almost exclusively the creation
of inbred stocks, and therefore to lead to the view that the present age of
extremely random breeding must or should be an age of disintegration and decay.
The
fact that out- and cross-breeding must lead to ill-health often of the most
obscure and undiagnosible kind, by producing discordant individuals — or to put
it moderately, the fact that miscegenation and random breeding cannot lead to
such perfect health as inbreeding and incest — has not yet been recognized by
medicine, but it soon must be. And here I suggest an enormous amount of fresh
light remains to be shed on the etiology of dysfunction.
Any
intelligent man facing the facts could have come a priori to
the conclusion science is reaching to-day. For, if breeding is the conjunction
of two cells and their production of a new individual can be pictured, as I
pictured it in the opening, as the intertwining of two sets of wools, then it
seems elementary that, if harmony and beauty are to be the result, the wools
should come from parents who, apart from sexual differences, have at least the
same hereditary equipment. Otherwise something inharmonious must result,
something in conflict with itself not only in the morphological sense, but also
in instincts and impulses as well; and in a living organism, discord and
disparate parts mean ill-health, mental instability, degeneracy.
"Disharmonies"
due to outbreeding
The
evidence confirmatory of these views is very disquieting. For example,
Professor Lundborg tells us that in the lower jaw alone two parts can be
inherited independently: the angle of the jaw from one parent and the chin from
the other. He further declares that there are at least four different parts of
the nose that can be inherited independently, and that cross-breeding, or
out-breeding, frequently leads to defects in the endocrine balance of the body.
Davenport and others have found that the size of the jaw and of the teeth can
be independently inherited. But, as Davenport points out, and as was obvious to
me twenty years ago, if parts of the jaw and nose can be inherited
independently, why not other parts of the body, so that when the parents are
unlike, or display any disparity in build, size, or constitution, there may
follow all kinds of disparities in the organs — a heart too small or too large,
a liver out of all proportion to the intestine, and so on. And Davenport, in
studying the miscegenation in the North and South of America, says that this is
what actually happens. In this population there are tall men with internal
organs too small, or circulatory system inadequate, and short men with similar
disharmonies.
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In
Hirschsprung's disease, which leads to stubborn constipation, the colon is out
of all proportion to the size of the sufferer; in congenital dislocation of the
hip, a condition which, according to Bryn, is unusually common among
miscegenated stocks, there is a disproportion between the ball of the femur and
the socket in the pelvis. Dr. Kathleen Vaughan and others think that the
fundamental cause of obstetrical difficulty is lack of accord between the
foetal head and the maternal pelvis; while the condition known as heterochromia
also gives rise to trouble in one eye.
But
these are extreme cases. How much of the subacute and chronic dysfunction we
see to-day may not be due to less pronounced disharmonies of this kind, because
of our rooted bias in favour of mixed and random breeding?
Although
to-day in England and Europe, we may be no longer concerned with actual races,
but only with populations, within these populations the utmost confusion of
types prevails. There is complete confusion of different sizes, shapes and
symmetries. And this "biological proletariat," forbidden incest, and
led by magic prejudice to avoid even cousin marriages, cannot help producing
generation after generation of people who must inevitably suffer from all the
consequences of mental and bodily disharmony. True, Rodenwaldt discovered that
there appeared to be a limit to the independent inheritance of psycho-physical
characters. He says that he was led to ask the question whether a limit did not
exist to the characters which remain correlated in crossing, and to the
characters which crossing allotted at random.
But
even if, on his authority, we conclude that psycho-physical characters are as a
rule handed on in groups which prevent a too frequent occurrence of lethal
combinations, on his own showing, an enormous number of psycho-physical characters
are inherited independently, and can therefore combine in the child of
disparate parents to produce all kinds of mental and physical maladjustments —
a fact confirmed by Lenz, Lundborg, Fischer, Ruggles Gates and others.
A
further reason for condemning out- and cross-breeding is that they disseminate
taints; they do not get rid of deleterious factors. Darbishire's experiments
have clearly shown that a recessive gene, although it may be associated with
its dominant allelomorph for generations, and made inactive, is not influenced
by this long association and loses none of its effectiveness. So that random
and mixed breeding, in addition to causing psycho-physical disharmony, merely
covers up tracks and hands on deleterious factors. In a biological proletariat
like the population of modern England, in which most stocks possess the utmost
variety of morbid factors, mixed breeding merely conceals taints until the
cumulative effect produces total degeneration or lethal disease. As Professor
Castle says: "Continuous crossing only tends to hide inherent defects, not
to exterminate them, and inbreeding only tends to bring them to the surface,
not to create them."
Practical
proposals
I
suggest, therefore, not only that we are in need of a purification of our
stocks, but that by prolonging our present method of random and mixed breeding,
we are merely living on, and destroying, the health capital still represented
by our uncontaminated stocks. While there is yet time we must canalize our healthy
streams and canalize our morbid streams. And if we cannot compel the unhealthy
not to breed, and cannot guarantee the healthy spouses worthy of them, let us
at least encourage both lots to marry their like or else make them do so.
The
simplest way to accomplish this end is not to found research councils and then
to wait patiently until endless experiments at last provide the criteria for
artificial human selection — for this process may last so long that at the end
of the work we may be too degenerate to wish to avail ourselves of the
knowledge derived from it. The simplest way is to break down the barriers now
preventing the mating of close relatives, to make it plain to all that these
barriers are based on magic, and to spread a new feeling and a new prejudice
through the world, which will be
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against the marriage of unlike or unrelated people.
This
policy would have the effect of immediately canalizing desirability and
undesirability, and would straightway separate the sheep from the goats. True,
the deaths from disease and the incidence of insanity in the unsound stocks
would be heavy, and it would require the utmost courage to go on. But English
people do not usually lack the courage to pursue the things they want. The question
is, do they really want health and sanity? Or are they already too debilitated
to care?
Between
1925 and 1930, 29,132 people were killed in England and Wales by motor vehicles
of all kinds; 5,319 of these were children under ten. In spite of this high and
utterly futile death rate from cars, there has been no national protest. Why?
Because English people want cars, and are quite prepared to see 30,000 other
people sacrificed in five years in order to get what they want. But do English
people want health and sanity to the same degree? Are they prepared to
sacrifice constructively and usefully more people than they now sacrifice
uselessly for the motor car? It may be doubted.
There
is no reason, however, to suppose that it would necessarily be an expensive
experiment in the healthy stocks. The investigations of G. H. Darwin into the
results of first-cousin marriages, even among random-bred and deeply
contaminated stock, revealed a surprisingly low incidence of morbidity. In
fact, he discovered that the percentage of offspring from cousin marriages to
be found in asylums is no greater than the percentage of offspring from
non-related persons; and as regards fertility, he found that the balance was
slightly in favour of cousin marriages.
Truth
to tell, from the point of view of sound eugenic policy, while incestuous
mating might immediately be encouraged among tainted or morbid stocks, so that
disease and deleterious hereditary factors should become canalized as soon as
possible, it would probably be wise to delay for a generation or two an
immediate recourse to the closest consanguinity in sound stocks, because of the
fear of over-rapidly isolating strains with a too limited set of desirable
qualities; and for such stocks it would probably be advisable to be content
with using pressure to obtain as many first-, second-, and third-cousin
marriages as possible for a little while. But for both schemes, a new and very
enlightened attitude will have to be adopted by modern mankind, and much latter-day
magic will have to be axed. For it is probable that a scheme of canalization of
disease and health would not be practicable without artificial selection
accompanied by legalized infanticide for the worst products of the diseased
stocks.
Many
years ago, long before a number of the facts I have laid before you were known
to me, I read a paper before the British Society for the Study of Sex
Psychology, in which I answered affirmatively the question: Would a revival of
incest not be the salvation of modern man? I was, of course, jeered at. But it
may interest you to know the views of an eminent biologist on this very point.
Writing in 1927, Professor Crew of Edinburgh said: "Inbreeding is only
disastrous if the ingredients of disaster are already in the stock. Inbreeding
will purify a stock, but the process may be most expensive. It would seem to be
a fact, sufficiently secure for the foundation of sociological practice, that
incest between individuals of undoubtedly sound stock is a sound biological
proposition."
But
it may be a long time before mankind, in these democratic times, so hopelessly
under the sway of magic, will see the wisdom of this course.
