PROBLEMS OF HEREDITY.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 11461, 20 December 1902, Page 6

PROBLEMS OF HEREDITY.

In a letter which appeared in our comepdndence columns yesterday, Dr. Symeg, arguing .on the assumption that criminal instinct an hereditary, advocated the use of "reasonable means to protect the next "ganeration from such an evil legacy." There is much to be said in favour of the plan advocated by Dr. Symee for dealing with a particular class of offence which ha* been very much under discussion of late On the general question of the birth supply and the improvement of the race by a mote " scientific" system of breeding than that which at present obtains, however, the case is not by any means co clear as w usually imagined. Granted that the elimination of the degenerate* would tend to raise the standard of the race, it has yet to be proved that "criminality," or any specific criminal tendency, is a simple inheritance, and not & complex to wMoh a variety of causes have contributed Theoretically it ie eminently desirable, in order to improve race, that the better sort of people should be encouraged to marry, and the inferior discouraged; and the question ie often raised why men thould be at Buch paans to improve tlte standard of cheep and horses and cattle by selective* breeding, and yet should! set so little atore by the same principles in the propagation of the human race. But there are two fddes to this question, which ie not by any means so simple as it looks at first eight. Mr H. G. Wells, in one of his papers on " Mankind in the Making," deals with the "other side," and present* a case so hedged with difficulties and complexities that a solution of the problem, in the present state of human knowledge and human sentiment, aeems well nigh hopeless. In his closely-reasoned and forcible argument Mr Wells essays to show that the main difficulty to be overcome is neither popular ignorance, public stupidity, religious prejudice ox superstition, but eoinething totally different. Stated in its briefest form, hie line of argument is that neither the advocate* of selective breeding, nor anyone elee, are at all clear what pohsta to breed for, and what points to breed out. A breeder of cattle may breed for beef, or calves or milk, but when we come to gualitiee desirable in a human being the problem ie vastly more complicated. Beauty, capacity, health, canity — these, Mr Welle points out, are not simple, uniform things like height or weight, but ore qualities each of which embraces a varying number of elements in dissimilar proportioDß. "It is quite conceivable," he goes on to cay, ''tbat you might select and "wed together all the most beautiful " people in the world, and find that in nine " cases out of ten you had simply produced "mediocre offspring or offspring below "mediocrity. Out of the remaining tentn

"a great majority would be beautiful "simply by 'taking after* one or other "parent, eimply through the predominant "the "prepotency, , of one parent ovfr th* " other, a thing that might have happened "equally well if the ottier parent wee "plain." The truth is that human elementa and characteristics are not sufficiently understood to enable us to >ay with any certainty at all that any of them— even "health"—are transmittable intact. When we come to the points to eliminate by selective breeding, the same difficulty confronts us. "Criminality," "madnee," " dipsomania," and so forth are cot specifls simple 6tates or tendencies. If criminal* are bom, not made, then every man is at heart n criminal, for "original Bin" is mii herent in human nature. "No man," urge* Mr Wells, "is born with an instinctive re"ssjeot for the rights of any property but [ "bis own, and few wfth a passion for i " monogamy. . . A criminal is no doubt I "of lees personal value to the community "than a law-abiding citizen of the same " general calibre, but it'does not follow for " one moment that lie is of less value ac "a parent. His personal disaster may be " due to the posses*ion of a bold and enterprising character, of a degree of pride " and energy above the lwede of the poei"tion his social surroundings forced upon " him. , ' This view, at any rate, ig. quite as justifiable as that which regards the criminality of the wrong-doer as a fatal necessity inherent in hie being. In the same way the drink-craving which leads to alcoholism may quite as reasonably depend on habit and general disposition as upon an hereditary tendency to wards drink. To those who would, make the taint of insanity a. bar to marriage, Air Well* replies that, if great wits are indeed nearly allied to madness, it is just as reasonable to encourage as to check its reproduction— just as reasonable, in fact, to marry a lunatic- info a "dull, stagnant respectable family," as to prevent him from marrying at all! Certainly the world would have been the poorer by many of its most gifted men had consumptive peopl* been debarred from marriage, and who can gay that a strain of insanity has not been responsible in same cases for the development of what is called genius? Who ia to decide, moreover, where sanity ends and madness begins? For it does not follow that every man who has not been placed under control in a lunatic asylum or elsewhere k, ipso facto, sane. In dealing wkfe problems oj thk are really groping in the dark, and untU we arrive at what Mr Welle terms "abeolntely certain knowledge, "proved and proved again up to the hili," j mankind will go on marrying and giving in" marriage in the old haphazard way, following their peraonal inclinations and leaving the race to develop uncontrolled by the theorke of the anthwmolo^etfl