Efforts To Evolve Super-Race

Hawera Star, Volume LII, 19 November 1932, Page 14

Efforts To Evolve Super-Race

T EGISLATION far the compulsory sterilisation of the misfit and the defective M in the United States “is just around the corner,” a gathering of the Ithaca Rotary Club was told at a luncheon by DrClarence C. Little, former president of,, the Universities of Maine and Michigan, and general secretary of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics. Several hundred prominent geneticists from several parts of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Continental Europe arrived to attend the congress, at which several hundred papers covering the range of recent advances in the researches on the transmission of characteristics by heredity were presented by many eminent authorities in their fields. Reviewing the progress made in the study of the laws of heredity in the thirty years following the first discovery by Mendel, ail Austrian monk, of the famous law of inherited characteristics which bears his name, Dr. Little declared that science and humanity must and will work together to create a, race that will ensure the happiness and well-being of the people of the future, says the “New York Times.” One of the important steps to ensure that end must be the prevention of the unfit from propagating their kind. Mendel’s law, Dr. Little said, has-been found to he universal in the entire realm of living things, plants, animals, and men. As the result of this Austrian monk’s discovery, from Iris studies of peas and weeds, one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, the laws of heredity are now absolutely predictable. All predictability, everything that can he measured and defined in the characteristics of plant or animal as regards future generations is due to inheritance. What is not predictable is due to environment and other factors. Since Mendel’s discovery Nature lias been unrolling a tremendous panorama before our eyes. Little by little we have been finding out, how it works in the transmission of certain definite traits from generation to generation. We have.learned to know that the individual characteristics such as features, colour, hair, shape of the head, stature, and many others, are all inherited. Mendel’s law furnished

science with a. definite formula by which we can predict the inheritable characteristics of future generations. The same law that applies to the pea and the lowly weed applies also to man. AVe must make use of this knowledge for the benefit of future generations, Dr. Little declared. “AVe in America,” he .said, are now carrying on the greatest biological experiment in human history. AVhether we like it or not, it is going on- AVe have now put a stop to immigration, but never before in the history of civilisation has there been a human melting pot on such a gigantic scale. The stop to the indiscriminate flow of immigrants caused the economist to feel relieved because it put a stop to the influx of cheap labour. But the biologist feels relieved because it makes it possible for us to regulate the mixture in the melting pot. AVhatever combination of future Americans results from this melting pot we must do everything within our power to eliminate all.elements that we definitely know to-dav will cause harm to the ultimate product. “AVe biologists,” Dr. Little added, “are not interested in the question of racial superiority. An individual six feet tall may be superior over the five feet six inches individual. Ayhen it comes to picking a hat off a high shelf. But place the same two individuals in a trench and the taller one would not need the liat that he picked off the shelf. “But the biologist is interested in stopping the perpetuation of bad heredity at its source, and it is high time that effective measures were taken to this end. AVe are now spending more money on defectives than we are on school children, and conditions will grow worse unless we take advantage of the benefits of our knowledge of the laws of heredity. “When a sink is stopped up we shut off the faucet. AVe favour legislation to restrict the reproduction of the misfit. A\ r e should treat them as kindly and as humanely as is, possible, but we must segregate them so that they do not perpetuate tlieir kind. “A r oluntary sterilisation already exists in many States, but compulsory sterilisation is just around the corner.”