Nature Against Nurture

OUR knowledge of the way in which living things have come to be what they are, and of the means by which they may be made something else,— bionomics, as we are learning to call it, — has come a long way since 1902. The changed aspect of the science appears, not unstrikingly, in the two excerpts which follow: one by an English man of science, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius; the other by an Illinois farmer writing in a farm paper. Both are by men who have themselves done the things they write about.

“Less than two years have passed since the first edition of this little book appeared, yet so rapid has been the progress of Mendelian studies, that part of what was then written is already out of date. Why the dwarf pea sprung from tall ancestors breeds true to dwarfness; why the progeny of a black and a white rabbit are in one case all black, and in another all of the wild gray color; why the ‘pure’ blue Andalusian fowl must ever remain a mongrel — these and other seeming paradoxes were clear two years ago. But why two white sweet peas should give a purple, and why two hairless stocks should revert to the hairy form — these were questions that were then unsolved. That experiment would give us the solution we were confident, and our confidence has been justified by the event. The sweet pea and the stock have yielded up their secret, and we are at last able to form a clear conception of the meaning of ‘reversion’.”

“You may with these laws [of Mendel] make a breed with these combinations: Black Angus with horns; same with white face; same with white face and no horns; you can put the Hereford white face on the buffalo (as has Colonel Jones); you can obtain any character you desire from any breed and graft this character on to your favorite breed, and at the same time eliminate all the other heredities gotten from the borrowed breed.”

Ten years ago, organic evolution was one of the speculative sciences. To-day, the farmer has only to specify that his wheat must ripen by such and such a date; stand up under a certain wind velocity; thrive in this, that, or the other soil; bear in its seeds so much protein or so much starch; and the United States Department of Agriculture or the SeedGrain Society for Sweden builds him the plant to order. What was but lately the solicitude of the theologian has now become the concern of the market gardener.

How such things are done, and the theory which underlies their doing, appears in a group of books whose number attests the world’s perennial interest in the topic. A few of the group, to be sure, are more readable than fresh or important.¹ Yet even among these, Mr. Trumbull’s brief work is noteworthy for the unaffected sincerity with which it sets forth, as to a boy just getting too old for Sunday-School, the evolutionary basis of morality. De Vries ² is as always — De Vries, the world’s first authority in his field, an investigator who writes with the clarity of one who sees his subject steadily and whole. Of his three general works, this is much the briefest and least technical. The two Californians lecture each year to their university public; and the inevitable book,³ skillfully made as befits two such practiced uniters, brings to an old topic enough that is new and Western to commend itself even to the hardened evolutionist. In much the same fashion, the junior author ⁴ alone treats a single aspect of the larger problem. Both authors, in controverted matters, follow the middle way; each book, though too condensed for easy reading, is on the whole the best of its kind.

A zoölogist at Columbia surveys a field in which he has himself done much sound and not a little brilliant work.⁵ Professor Morgan was one of the first in this country to take up zoölogy from the experimental side, and few men in the world are better equipped to write a general work on the subject. In addition, since the passing of the group of which Hyatt and Shaler were the bestknown figures, he has been the most important American opponent and critic of Darwinism. Of the two Englishmen, both students at first hand of the topics they discuss, Lock⁶ covers the wider field; while Punnett,⁷ from whom comes my first quotation, seems to me to have achieved the best simple exposition yet in print of Mendelism and the Mutation Theory.

From the University of Aberdeen comes an orderly summing-up of all that is known and much that has been guessed concerning natural inheritance.⁸ The well-known Evolution of Sex of the same author has for years been the one book to which the lay student turns first; this newest work, strikingly like the older in method, may well attain the same high repute. Inevitably, since all bionomic roads now-a-days lead to the same Rome, Professor Thompson’s book overlaps others of the group whose nominal subjects are quite different. Of them all, however, his is aimed most frankly at the general reader; his in consequence deals most fully with man.

Yet while Mendel and Mutation bulk large in all these books, they have for the three Britons a significance deeper than any scientific or economic interest. England, more perhaps than any other civilized nation, has realized that high social development and rapid material progress are not of necessity accompanied by any improvement of the stock itself. Thanks in no small part to Mendel, we can to-day distinguish pretty clearly between those qualities of men which, not being inherited, perish with their possessors; those other qualities which, by continuous selection, can be brought to a fixed pitch, only to deteriorate again, the moment selection ceases; and those other qualities which, less dependent on selection, remain as long as the race endures. With a sound and workable theory of heredity at last established, it is inevitable that English men of science should wish to apply that theory, to stop the degeneration of one of the finest of human stocks.

To this important topic are devoted also the latest Boyle ⁹ and Spencer ¹⁰ lectures. The two men who made modern biometrics have for years been pointing out just where the nation’s efforts to better itself have been based on a fundamental misconception of the nature of living things. At last, suddenly, the nation has found ears to hear. The two printed lectures and Mr. Pun nett’s essay are, all three together, but an evening’s reading — but they are tracts for the times.

The making and unmaking of men is also the burden of a larger work. Unfortunately, it seems to be the fate of sociologist and educator, when they attempt to found their conclusions upon more fundamental sciences, to select only the wilder theories of science, and to build their special doctrines upon some principle which the scientific world promptly repudiates. Witness, for example, Spencer’s belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, or that ancient myth, still dear to the heart of the childstudent, that the young animal repeats in its life-stages the history of its adult ancestors. Mr. Chatterton-Hill does not altogether escape the common failing. An ardent disciple of Weismann, he has chosen to put special stress upon precisely those parts of Weismann’s teaching — “ids,” namely, “determinants” “germinal selection,” the whole fanciful theory of inheritance — which biologists have allowed to drop quietly out of sight. Mr. Chatterton-Hill’s science, good so far as it goes, belongs to the last decade of the nineteenth century rather than to the first decade of this.

Nor is Mr. Chatterton-Hill altogether sound in passages like the following, in which he expresses pretty completely an opinion, fundamental not only to himself, but also to the entire group to which he belongs.

“But cannot human reason put an end to this state of conflict, cannot it bring about, for the higher forms of human society, a cessation of strife? The reply must be negative. Only through the medium of conflict can selection operate; and if conflict be suppressed, the action of selection is rendered impossible. What must be the result? Stagnation and consequent extinction. By the suppression of conflict human society would suppress itself.”

The facts are, of course, quite the contrary. The most rapid evolution that we know anything about appears in polled cattle and rustless wheats — in precisely those organisms, in short, which, most completely removed from the struggle for existence, are being selected in accordance with an ideal. A domesticated species in the hands of Nilsson makes more progress overnight than nature, with her free-for-all competition, can effect in a hundred years. Now, civilized man is not a wild species but a domesticated species. His immediate problem is not so much how the tiger acquired his claws and the ape lost its tail, as how Burbank’s cactus lost its spines and Webber’s oranges learned to withstand frost. One may indeed learn from the sociologists all that he cares to know concerning the causes of racial decay; he must look to the biologists if he would learn the possibilities of racial advance.

There really are two different problems confronting a modern state. One, to hold its population up to the standard of fitness which it has already reached, as nature holds a wild species up to its survival level. The other and quite different task is to transform and improve a population with every advance of civilization, as a domesticated race is moulded to follow the demands of the market. The first of these might have been begun at any time within the last twenty years; the second has awaited precise knowledge which has come only within the last five.

Given that knowledge, there is little that a nation might not do for itself. It took Biffin at Cambridge University only three seasons to fix immunity to yellow rust in one of the worst rusting of English wheats. It took Castle at Harvard less than a year to put another toe on the hind foot of a guinea-pig. In hardly longer time, Tower at Chicago turned out a race of Colorado beetles, so much hardier and more prolific than the common potato-bug, that he was constrained to put them all to the sword lest they devastate half a continent. Thanks, among others, to the authors of several of the books now before us, a benevolent and all-powerful despot backed by a scientific commission could “Burbank” the soberness of Jew or Chinaman into the most drunken of races, and make the saloon as innocuous as the public library. A free people, who realized in full their duty to their children and the state, could make of themselves a race of able men who should do with ease and pleasure the tasks which they now perform with toil and pain. Either could solve the problem of the unemployed by having no more unemployable.

The general case of domesticated man against wild nature is put most uncompromisingly by a distinguished anatomist too little known on this side of the water.¹¹ We might, if we only would, say various men of science, work diverse profitable miracles. We must, says the former director in the British Museum, whether we will or not. Civilized man has long ceased to take unresistingly what nature gives him. Now he comes to a parting of the ways, where he must either go forward to a complete conquest of nature — and himself; or else “perish miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs.” Man has defied nature, and one or other of them must take the consequences. Once more, this time in a Romanes lecture, an English naturalist calls upon science for a new kind of Englishman.

The same living faith in the power of science to transform humanity and thereby to make men happy, explains, I think, the vogue of Elie Metchnikoff ¹² among thoughtful people. The ideal for which the man of to-day is to strive is not the harmonious development of all his powers. Those powers nature made, haltingly and blunderingly, to fit another environment than ours. Civilized man has remade the earth — and seen that it is not good. It now remains for him to transform himself into the kind of man who will be happy amid his own handiwork. “Human nature, which, like the constitution of other organisms, is subject to evolution, must be modified according to a definite ideal. Just as a gardener or stock-raiser is not content with the existing nature of the plants and animals with which he is occupied, but modifies them to suit his purposes, so also the scientific philosopher must not think of existing human nature as immutable, but must try to modify it for the advantage of mankind.”

Much of this could be begun now. All of it will have to be done sooner or later. The world is the heritage of that nation which does it first.