20Section II,F, Houssay.
defective parents or other close relatives. The denial of marriage between
races has this justification, that most other races have not, through selection,
attained the social status of the Caucasian. In such cases the socially
inadequate should be sterilized or segregated in other races as well as in the
Caucasian. EUGENIC SELECTION AND THE ORIGIN OF DEFECTS.
(Abstract.)
By Frederic Houssay,
Professor of Science, University of Paris.
Eugenics, which is a social application of biological science, cannot yet
be judged by its results; it must be judged by its tendencies. To deter
mine these, we must adjust them to principles generally admitted.
And inasmuch as it advocates practical rules and seeks to check the
propagation of the unfit, by isolation or sterilization (voluntary or enforced),
it is an artificial selection.
Its justification lies in the fact that, without intervention, the descendants
of defectives or degenerates would, in a few generations, eliminate them
selves by early death of children or by natural sterility. This would pro
duce a natural selection which Eugenics simply proposes to anticipate by
social economy.
It seems that, by applying Darwinian principles, the group of defectives,
considered at a given moment, could be rapidly extinguished. But this
group is continually reinforced by fresh degeneration of healthy stocks which
become tainted.
Hence the need to keep our eye on the re-formation of the group as well
as its elimination, and to keep in touch with Lamarckian principles. The
study of the origin and hereditary conservation of defects points already
as essential factors, to alcoholism, syphilis, and more generally every
chronic ailment and diathesis, among which gout must be put in a lead
ing position. Everything which will tend to restrain the action of these
factors is of capital importance from our present point of view, whether
it occurs in the ranks of rich or poor.
The questions, thus, which Eugenics seeks to answer would be on this
view reduced to questions of hygiene and morals.
So that the different biological principles, which sometimes seem in
mutual opposition, would become convergent, and would find in Eugenics
a ready reconciliation and a field of useful co-operation.
