Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
gifted young women and attractive houses at low rents to “exception-
ally promising young couples” made to encourage “the best to marry the
best” and procreate.
14
Were appropriate measures taken, the average
standard would be raised to the level necessary for the operations of a
modern society and, through the intermarriage of those with the same
rare and similar talents, a whole new race, superior to us in physical,
mental, moral, and temperamental qualities, would ultimately develop.
“Men and women of the present day,” Galton predicted, “are, to those
we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets
of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties.”
15
Unlike the politically conservative Galton, Alfred Russel Wallace con-
sidered himself a socialist. Denouncing eugenics as officious meddling
by a “scientific priestcraft,” he initially counted on selection, working on
groups, to transform human nature.
16
Reasoning that tribes and nations
with the most intelligent, foresighted, and altruistic individuals would
prevail in intergroup struggles, humans would ultimately become so
perfect in their mental and moral faculties that the earth would be con-
verted from a place of misery to a new Eden. In 1864, a year before
Galton published “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Wallace wrote that
while the human physique will probably not change, human mentality
“may continue to advance and improve until the world is again inhab-
ited by a single homogeneous race, no individual of which will be infe-
rior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity.” He went on to
describe the resulting paradise:
Each one will then work out his own happiness in relation to that of his fellows;
perfect freedom of action will be maintained, since the well balanced moral fac-
ulties will never permit any one to transgress on the equal freedom of others;
restrictive laws will not be wanted, for each man will be guided by the best of
laws; a thorough appreciation of the rights, and a perfect sympathy with the feel-
ings, of all about him; compulsory government will have died away as unneces-
sary (for every man will know how to govern himself).
17
A few years later, Wallace concluded that natural selection did not
after all operate on humans, whose evolution must therefore be guided
by a higher power. But he never abandoned his vision of a transformed,
biologically rooted human nature. He instead promoted a different
mechanism to bring this about: an equalization of resources (including
the abolition of inheritance) that would unleash the power of sexual
