Heredity, race, and society.

  • Dunn, L. C. (Leslie Clarence), 1893-1974.
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Heredity, race, and society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    does not mean that the heredity can not be changed by the environment or by human effort. The hereditary endowment of any organism, including man, is an out come of an evolutionary development controlled by natural selection (see Chapter 4). Now, natural selec tion is an agency of the environment, which changes the heredity by a subtle but nonetheless very effective method: by letting the well-adapted organisms survive and reproduce, and by failing to perpetuate the genetic endowments which are out of tune with their environ ment. Man has followed the example of nature when he changed, by artificial selection, the heredity of his do mesticated animals and plants to serve his needs or fancy. And the obstacles in the way of the application of similar methods to the control of man's own hered ity are chiefly sociological, not biological, in origin.