Sociology

Applied Eugenics

At the First Race Betterment Conference held at Battle Creek, Mich., many methods were suggested by which it was believed that the people of America might be made, on the average, healthier, happier, and more efficient. One afternoon the discussion turned to the children of th...

Chapters

3. Chapter 3

Every living creature was at some stage of its life nothing more than a single cell. It is generally known that human beings result from the union of an egg-cell and a sperm-cel...

19. Chapter 19

Nearly every law and custom of a country has an influence direct or remote on eugenics. The eugenic progress to be expected if laws and customs are gradually but steadily modifi...

7. Chapter 7

Man has risen from the ape chiefly through the action of natural selection. Any scheme of conscious race betterment, then, should carefully examine nature's method, to learn to...

22. Chapter 22

In addition to these fundamentals, there are numerous extensions and corollaries, some of them of a highly speculative nature. The reader who is interested in pursuing the subje...

21. Chapter 21

Emphasis has been given, in several of the foregoing chapters, to the desirability of inheriting a good constitution and a high degree of vigor and disease-resistance. It has be...

11. Chapter 11

From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution. This has been used since the beginning of the race, very probably, although rarely with a...

12. Chapter 12

"Love is blind" and "Marriage is a lottery," in the opinion of proverbial lore. But as usual the proverbs do not tell the whole truth. Mating is not wholly a matter of chance; t...

14. Chapter 14

Imagine 200 babies born to parents of native stock in the United States. On the average, 103 of them will be boys and 97 girls. By the time the girls reach a marriageable age (s...

8. Chapter 8

"Eugenics," wrote Francis Galton, who founded the science and coined the name, "is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of...

23. Chapter 23

[59] While most physicians lay too great stress on the factor of infection, this mistake is by no means universal. Maurice Fishberg, for example (quoted in the _Medical Review o...

18. Chapter 18

Human genealogy is one of the oldest manifestations of man's intellectual activity, but until recently it has been subservient to sentimental purposes, or pursued from historica...

16. Chapter 16

There are now in the United States some 14,000,000 foreign-born persons, together with other millions of the sons and daughters of foreigners who although born on American soil...

15. Chapter 15

"A young white woman, a graduate of a great university of the far North, where Negroes are seldom seen, resented it most indignantly when she was threatened with social ostracis...

13. Chapter 13

No race can long survive unless it conforms to the principles of eugenics, and indisputably the chief requirement for race survival is that the superior part of the race should...

6. Chapter 6

We have now established the bases for a practicable eugenics program. Men differ; these differences are inherited; therefore the make-up of the race can be changed by any method...

5. Chapter 5

We have come to the climax of the eugenist's preliminary argument; if the main differences between human beings are not due to anything in the environment or training, either of...

2. Chapter 2

measured, that the coefficient of correlation between parent and child was a little less than .5 and that the coefficient between brother and brother, or sister and sister, or b...

1. Chapter 1

At the First Race Betterment Conference held at Battle Creek, Mich., many methods were suggested by which it was believed that the people of America might be made, on the averag...

17. Chapter 17

War always changes the composition of a nation; but this change may be either a loss or a gain. The modification of selection by war is far more manifold than the literature on...

20. Chapter 20

Man is the only animal with a religion. The conduct of the lower animals is guided by instinct,[186] and instinct normally works for the benefit of the species. Any action which...

9. Chapter 9

In a rural part of Pennsylvania lives the L. family. Three generations studied "all show the same drifting, irresponsible tendency. No one can say they are positively bad or ser...

10. Chapter 10

Before examining the methods by which society can put into effect some measure of negative or restrictive eugenics, it may be well to decide what classes of the population can p...

4. Chapter 4

While Mr. Jefferson, when he wrote into the Declaration of Independence his belief in the self-evidence of the truth that all men are created equal, may have been thinking of le...