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increase in the general intelligence and a decline in intelligence that was
extraordinary).
Russell also notes that eugenicists in any case have more ambitious
aims—not just eliminating the undesirable types but increasing the
desired ones. This is the more serious worry, for in the end, individuals
will be bred for characteristics that appeal to officialdom rather than to
the geneticists themselves. When scientists imagine that one exceptional
man might sire a legion of children by many mothers, they commit the
fallacy of imagining that the program “would be administered as men
of science would wish, by men similar in outlook to those who have
advocated it,” and Russell remarks that women who advocated female
suffrage similarly envisaged that “the woman voter of the future would
resemble the ardent feminist who won her the vote; and socialist leaders
imagine that a socialist State would be administered by idealistic reform-
ers like themselves.” But these are all delusions, since any reform, once
achieved, is administered by ordinary people. Hence, if eugenics ever
reached the stage where “it could increase desired types, it would not be
the types desired by present-day eugenists that would be increased, but
rather the types desired by the average official,” and these would likely
be “a subservient population, convenient to rulers but incapable of ini-
tiative.”
29
Russell later elaborated this critique in his longer 1931 topic,
The Scientific Outlook
, a key source for Huxley's 1932 profoundly pes-
simistic
Brave New World
, which links Haldane's ectogenesis to a system
of mass production.
30
Interestingly, many years later Haldane himself
echoed these points, warning in
New Paths in Genetics
that what counts
as a desirable trait is shaped by the environment and “so far eugenical
propaganda has been written almost entirely from the point of view of
the well-to-do class,” and in the section on “Difficulties of Positive
Eugenics” in
Everything Has a History
, that “if we try to control our
own evolution, we may choose the wrong path.”
31
For the geneticist H. J. Muller, who (then) greatly admired Haldane,
ectogenesis represented an ideal solution to the problem of improving
the human race, but he was not willing to wait for the procedure to
become practical. Like Galton, Muller considered the need for improve-
ment dire, given that life was becoming ever more complicated, requir-
ing “an intelligence ever higher, a cooperation ever more whole-souled,
thoroughgoing, and better organized.”
32
(Muller was even more con-
