Darwinism and Race Progress

by John Berry Haycraft

With a certain amount of sacrifice, humanity by selection might free itself from those types who are a drag upon the resources of the community, and who suffer themselves, certainly in the melancholic cases, to a degree which it is impossible for an ordinary individual to experience.

[Marriages of Insane Persons.]

While there has so far been no organised effort to bring about this selection, for we have not yet turned our attention with sufficient interest to the race as a whole, yet there is a popular and widespread feeling against the marriage of those with a distinct family history of insanity. This feeling has had in the past an undoubtedly selective influence, and has in some measure diminished the number of marriages with neurotic families; and the strengthening of this feeling in the future is the only thing we have to look to, as matters stand, as a means whereby the race may free itself from an inherent weakness of a most distressing kind.

[Alcoholism a Habit, and Alcoholism a Sign of Mental Instability.]

Not unfrequently we hear of the hereditary tendency to alcoholism, and it is generally understood that a specific tendency to drink alcohol is transmitted. To me it appears that the facts at our disposal seem rather to warrant the conclusion that most of those cases which are supposed to be examples of transmission, are really due to the permanence of intemperate habits in the same family or district perhaps for generations, and that in these cases the children drink from the force of imitation. In other cases I would rather infer that unbalanced vicious temperaments are transmitted, but that as to the way in which these will manifest themselves it depends much upon the circumstances and surroundings of the individual, who may become a drinker, an opium eater, or a profligate, or perhaps a combination of all three.

[Drink is a Selective Agency.]

Among the lower classes at the present day there are, no doubt, whole families who generation after generation have had a bad name for drunkenness; but it would appear that in these cases the drunkenness is but one manifestation of the same careless or vicious temperament, which shows itself also in idleness and crime. Among the middle and upper classes a generation or two ago families of hard drinkers were often known. In these cases, as one may learn nowhere better than from Barrington’s “Sketches of Irish Life,” the drinking was a part of a general devil-may-care temperament, or was even in many cases associated with a pride in the accomplishment itself. At the present day, when drunkenness is looked down upon as disgraceful by the better and more educated classes, excessive drinking has vastly diminished. It is fair, therefore, to conclude that, while what we may term unbalanced temperaments and instincts of self-indulgence are inherited, the actual way in which these instincts will manifest themselves depends upon the surrounding conditions which may happen to prevail. Such unbalanced persons would under certain surroundings of training and education fall a prey to drink, as when they are associated with drunken parents or friends; under other surroundings they may be guilty of crime or debauchery and tend in any case to avoid the quiet, orderly routine of citizenship. While, therefore, we can hardly say that the tendency to drink is hereditary, yet we may affirm that certain type variations, running, no doubt, in families, are especially liable to drink and other forms of vice. It follows, too, that drink may be looked upon as a selective agency—one constantly thinning the ranks of those who are weak enough by nature to give way to it, and leaving unharmed those with healthy tastes and sound moral constitutions.

[Parents who drink from Habit may have Debilitated Offspring.]

In a former chapter we have suggested that the alcohol circulating in the parental veins may affect the germinal cells, not in such a manner as to make those cells develop into individuals with a tendency to drink, but rather with the result that debilitated offspring are often thereby produced. It is quite conceivable that this latter effect may be brought about, although our study of the infective diseases has indicated to what lengths the whole system may be affected without the production of any permanent change in the germ cells; but it is, I think, greatly over-stating the case to adduce examples such as one brought forward by Galton, in which we are told of a man who had begotten children of the ordinary type becoming a drunkard, and afterwards having imbecile children. This seems to me to be very questionable evidence indeed. We can seldom ground any general rule on the basis of a few isolated cases, and just as one may support almost any argument by means of a text of Scripture, so one might bring forward isolated cases to support almost any view of heredity. Amongst the some forty million instances of transmission to be seen at the present day in the British Islands and the many thousands of imbeciles and drunken parents, one hardly wonders at what may after all be only a coincidence. That this is a coincidence, and that the production of the imbecile children had no necessary connection with the drunken habits of the parent will seem to us very probable when we reflect that in the Scottish Lowlands, large English towns, and in parts of Germany, habitual heavy drinking is exceedingly common; therefore, did such startling cases of transmission occur, they would occur frequently, and be matter of common observation and comment. While refusing to accept this case in evidence, it is still probable on general grounds that the offspring of habitual drunkards suffer hereditarily, but definite evidence on this score appears still to be wanting.