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Updated: June 28, 2025
La Chevalerie. 850 pp. C. Delagrave. Paris, 1890. Taboo survivals act dysgenically within the family under present conditions; Conventional education of girls a dysgenic influence; Prostitution and the family; Influence of ancient standards of "good" and "bad." The illegitimate child; Effect of fear, anger, etc., on posterity; The attitude of economically independent women toward marriage.
War is the greatest of dysgenic forces, and undoes the effect of a hundred eugenic laws. The vast and increasing expense of war is a very serious matter for the moralist, because it means a drain of the resources that might otherwise be utilized for the advance of civilization. The cost of a modern war goes at least into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and any great war would cost billions.
In primitive groups, a "moral" control which kept all women at reproduction was neither eugenic nor dysgenic unless accompanied by systematic destruction of the least fit children. By "moral" control is meant the use of taboo, prejudice, religious abhorrence for certain acts and the like.
In its neglect or ignorance of the significance of artificial modifications of the emotions, it has permitted certain dysgenic influences to continue in the psychic life of generation after generation, regarding with the utmost placidity a process of sexual selection determined by irrational and irresponsible motives.
The biological thinker undertakes to refute the theory that war is selective. He counts the cost of war in terms of human life and of racial vitality, and produces a condemning document. That war indeed selects but selects unfavorably and in an adverse direction is the conclusion of many, among them Savorgnan in his book "La Guerra e la Populazione," in which he calls war dysgenic.
Recorded history is one succession of barbarous races, under strong, primitive breeding conditions, swamping their more civilized, individualized neighbours, adopting the dysgenic ways of civilization and then being swamped in their turn by barbarians.
Yet it is a fact so obvious that it is hardly worth stating that the most fertile classes who indulge in the most dysgenic type of procreating the feeble-minded are almost totally unaffected by marriage laws and marriage-ceremonies.
The notion that frequent war is a healthy tonic for a nation is scarcely tenable. Its dysgenic effect, by eliminating the strongest and healthiest of the population, while leaving the weaklings at home to be the fathers of the next generation, is no new discovery.
The most potent dysgenic influence in the present phase of the sex problem is the conflict between the interests of the individual and the group regulations. The traditional type of marriage and family life has a cramping effect upon the personal ambitions which lessens its attractiveness materially.
If society is to successfully meet the present situation it must utilize its psychological insight to remedy conditions which are obviously dysgenic and detrimental to the welfare of the race.
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