Applied Eugenics

by Paul Popenoe; Roswell H. Johnson

As G. Archdall Reid has pointed out,[18] men drink for at least three different reasons: (1) to satisfy thirst. This leads to the use of a light wine or a malt liquor. (2) To gratify the palate. This again usually results in the use of drinks of low alcohol content, in which the flavor is the main consideration. (3) Finally, men drink "to induce those peculiar feelings, those peculiar frames of mind" caused by alcohol.

Although the three motives may and often do coexist in the same individual, or may animate him at different periods of life, the fact remains that they are quite distinct. Thirst and taste do not lead to excessive drinking; and there is good evidence that the degree of concentration and the dosage are important factors in the amount of harm alcohol may do to the individual. The concern of evolutionists, therefore, is with the man who is so constituted that the mental effects of alcohol acting directly on the brain are pleasing, and we must show that there is a congenital variability in this mental quality, among individuals.

Surely an appeal to personal experience will leave little room for doubt on that point. The alcohol question is so hedged about with moral and ethical issues that those who never get drunk, or who perhaps never even "take a drink," are likely to ascribe that line of conduct to superior intelligence and great self-control. As a fact, a dispassionate analysis of the case will show that why many such do not use alcoholic beverages to excess is because intoxication has no charm for them. He is so constituted that the action of alcohol on the brain is distasteful rather than pleasing to him. In other cases it is variation in controlling satisfaction of immediate pleasures for later greater good.

Some of the real inebriates have a strong will and a real desire to be sober, but have a different mental make-up, vividly described by William James:[19] "The craving for drink in real dipsomaniacs, or for opium and chloral in those subjugated, is of a strength of which normal persons can have no conception. 'Were a keg of rum in one corner of the room, and were a cannon constantly discharging balls between me and it, I could not refrain from passing before that cannon in order to get that rum. If a bottle of brandy stood on one hand, and the pit of hell yawned on the other, and I were convinced I should be pushed in as surely as I took one glass, I could not refrain.' Such statements abound in dipsomaniacs' mouths." Between this extreme, and the other of the man who is sickened by a single glass of beer, there are all intermediates.

Now, given an abundant and accessible supply of alcohol to a race, what happens? Those who are not tempted or have adequate control, do not drink to excess; those who are so constituted as to crave the effects of alcohol (once they have experienced them), and who lack the ability to deny themselves the immediate pleasure for the sake of a future gain, seek to renew these pleasures of intoxication at every opportunity; and the well attested result is that they are likely to drink themselves to a premature death.

Although it is a fact that the birth-rate in drunkard's families may be and often is larger than that of the general population,[20] it is none the less a fact that many of the worst drunkards leave no or few offspring. They die of their own excesses at an early age; or their conduct makes them unattractive as mates; or they give so little care to their children that the latter die from neglect, exposure or accident. As these drunkards would tend to hand down their own inborn peculiarity, or weakness for alcohol, to their children, it must be obvious that their death results in a smaller proportion of such persons in the next generation. In other words, natural selection is at work again here, with alcohol as its agent. By killing off the worst drunkards in each generation, nature provides that the following generation shall contain fewer people who lack the power to resist the attraction of the effect of alcohol, or who have a tendency to use it to such an extent as to injure their minds and bodies. And it must be obvious that the speed and efficacy of this ruthless temperance reform movement are proportionate to the abundance and accessibility of the supply of alcohol. Where the supply is ample and available, there is certain to be a relatively high death-rate among those who find it too attractive, and the average of the race therefore is certain to become stronger in this respect with each generation. Such a conclusion can be abundantly justified by an appeal to the history of the Teutonic nations, the nations around the Mediterranean, the Jews, or any race which has been submitted to the test.

There seems hardly room for dispute on the reality of this phase of natural selection. But there is another way in which the process of strengthening the race against the attraction and effect of alcohol may be going on at the same time. If the drug does actually injure the germ-plasm, and set up a deterioriation, it is obvious that natural selection is given another point at which to work. The more deteriorated would be eliminated in each generation in competition with the less deteriorated or normal; and the process of racial purification would then go on the more rapidly. The fact that races long submitted to the action of alcohol have become relatively resistant to it, therefore, does not in itself answer the question of whether alcohol injures the human germ-plasm.

The possible racial effect of alcoholization is, in short, a much more complicated problem than it appears at first sight to be. It involves the action of natural selection in several important ways, and this action might easily mask the direct action of alcohol on the germ-plasm, if there be any measurable direct result.

No longer content with a long perspective historical view, we will scrutinize the direct investigations of the problem which have been made during recent years. These investigations have in many cases been widely advertised to the public, and their conclusions have been so much repeated that they are often taken at their face value, without critical examination.

It must be borne in mind that the solution of the problem depends on finding evidence of degeneracy or impairment in the offspring of persons who have used alcohol, and that this relation might be explainable in one or more of three ways: