Genetic principles in medicine and social science / by Lancelot Hogben.

  • Hogben, Lancelot Thomas, 1895-1975.
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetic principles in medicine and social science / by Lancelot Hogben. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    There is also a sociological significance in the very strong bias to adopt an extremist attitude towards the relative significance of genetic and extrinsic factors contributing to different modes of social behaviour. In the latter half of the eighteenth century the concept of genetic similarity and dissimilarity was irrelevantly con fused with equality and inequality of social privilege and political responsibility. Few social theorists have undertaken the task of analysing this juxtaposition of ideas in its modern biological setting. The idea that they are closely connected persists, and prejudices which pertain to one context are readily transferred to the other. Among English social philosophers Robert Owen is one of the few who early recognised the need to formulate the distinction explicitly. Forty years before The Descent of Man appeared, Owen's views had a peculiarly biological bias. In The System of Education in New Lanark he wrote, although everything you will hear about yourselves does really belong to zoology, yet there is so much of it and it is so different from the natural history of other animals that it is generally found convenient not to include it under zoology. ... Owen expressly repudiated the mystical egalitarianism of the eight eenth century. The organisation of no two human beings is ever precisely the same at birth, he writes in The New Moral World, nor can art subsequently form any two individuals from infancy to maturity to be the same. ... He adds, nevertheless, the consti tution of every infant, except in case of organic disease, is capable of being formed or matured either into a very inferior or very superior being, according to the qualities of the external circumstances allowed to influence that constitution from birth. In the language of his own time this was an optimistic way of saying that the existence of genetic differences does not entitle us to set any future limit to the educability of the individual. We may correlate observed genetic differences with limits of educability in response to existing methods of education. We cannot say how far those limits may be altered by an extensive change in our methods of education. So soon as we do so we commit ourselves to what Jennings calls the fallacy that showing a characteristic to be hereditary proves that it is not alterable by environment. Experiment alone can reveal whether Owen's optimism was justified. At present biologists with a genetical training tend to be prejudiced in favour of a pessimistic attitude. On the other hand, biologists of Professor Watson's school, trained in the physiological analysis of behaviour, are of a more cheerful persuasion.