Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
is given up for the best interests of the community. The law of mutual
give and take, of sacrifice for the common good, is seen everywhere. This
should teach us, as we come to take our places in society, to be willing to
give up our individual pleasure or selfish gain for the good of the com-
munity in which we live. Thus the application of biological principles will
benefit societ y.
36
This might sound well intentioned, even noble, were we not so famil-
iar with the odious social policies that these idealistic-sounding ideas sup-
ported in the 1920s. The two chief lessons that biology teaches, we soon
learn, are that regnant notions of fitness have an evolutionary basis and that
state-sponsored oversight of human reproduction is therefore an exercise
of public goodwill. Evolutionary science reveals a biological
scala naturae
in
which “animal forms may be arranged so as to begin with very simple one-
celled forms and culminate with a group which contains man himself. ” In
the human part of this spectrum, “Causasians, represented by the civilized
white inhabitants of Europe and America,” are the “highest type of all.”
37
The social policy demanded now that science has uncovered the biological
bases of these hierarchical structures was eugenic selection, which proposed
to make the practices of animal breeding already familiar to Hunter's rural
readers a model for the “improvement of the future race.” To demonstrate
the urgency of such programs, Hunter summarizes two genealogical case
studies of his day that show the widespread “mental and moral defects”
that have followed from the unregulated breeding of the Jukes and Kal-
likaks. “Margaret, the mother of criminals,” began a Jukes family that in
seventy-five years “has cost the state of New York over a million and a quar-
ter of dollars” besides “giving over to the care of prisons and asylums con-
siderably over a hundred feeble-minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal
persons.” The descendants of Kallikaks include “33 . . . sexually immoral,
24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143
feeble-minded
,” who, like the
defective progeny of hundreds of other families, “have become parasitic
on society.” They not only “do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or
spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state
out of public money.” Were such people “lower animals, we would probably
kill them off to prevent them from spreading.” But since “humanity will not
allow this,” policies must be put in place that will “have the remedy of sepa-
rating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing
intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degener-
ate race.” Hope for the adoption of such policies was growing. Hunter notes
