Genetics and eugenics : a consideration of the relation of animal experimentation top human inheritance and infant conservation / by Raymond Pearl.

  • Pearl, Raymond, 1879-1940.
Date:
[1912?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Genetics and eugenics : a consideration of the relation of animal experimentation top human inheritance and infant conservation / by Raymond Pearl. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    manner the substantial truth of the above propositions are to be found in recent Mendelian studies on man. Here we see the data of human inheritance being analysed and co-ordinated by the application of certain fundamental general principles worked out by the student of genetics. Human eye colour and hair colour have been shown by Dr. and Mrs. Davenport, Holmes and others to be inherited in general accordance with simple Mendelian principles. Work on human skin colour is yielding interesting if not wholly conclusive results. The fruitfulness of this method of attacking the problem of human inheritance is particularly evident in the case of disease. Nowhere is infor¬ mation of an average ” character more unsatisfactory, both for the individual and for society. To find, as has been done, that certain pathological conditions and abnormalities of structure and function in man are inherited definitelyand clearly along Mendelian lines is an achievement of great value. Such a result is of significance both for the race and for the individual. If there is a definite and clear-cut segregation of the abnormal and the normal within a tainted stock, it means for the race the conservation of the useful energies of the progeny of those germinally segregated, normal individuals who, under the sweeping condemnation of tainted stocks which a purely statistical eugenics advocates, would be prevented, if possible, from reproducing themselves. To the normal individual who segregates out of a tainted stock it means a life of normal, hopeful usefulness, in the place of that haunting fear or dread of ‘‘ heredity,” of which the extreme manifestation has been so vividly portrayed in the Fall of the Houseof Usher. It is the writer’s opinion that the same general considera¬ tions as have been developed above in regard to the relation of biological experimentation to human inheritance apply to infant conservation as well, though here there is perhaps not so directly pertinent a body of organised biological knowledge to draw upon at once. But fundamentally the problem of infant conservation is the problem of fostering and maintaining a normal ontogenetic development of the individual human being, both ante-natal and post-natal. Here again direct scientific experimentation on the human subject is out of the question. Because of this the basic