 The problem is genetics and the future of man. Man exists in a society, or at least most men live in a society. And I doubt that we would find our problem as interesting in the context of the individual man as in the context of the social man, man in a society. Society functions through the combination of the talents, energies, and limitations of many men. My own amateur's guess is that a functioning society depends even on the limitations of some men. This afternoon, we will, therefore, hear from a sociologist who will put our, at this time, our wide genetic learning into the context of a society. Kingsley Davis is a son of Texas with a Texan sense of independence, which has marked his work as a sociologist. Unlike Mr. Johnson, he left Texas after graduating from the University of Texas to study for the doctorate at Harvard University, where he received the PhD degree in 1936. If I stop to think of that sentence, I'm not sure whether Johnson or you have this degree. He is a challenging thinker on the sociology of reproduction and, generally, of high repute as a sociologist. His status is reflected in his election as president of the American Sociological Society in 1959 and as president of the Population Association of America in 1962. I have an understandable interest. As a matter of fact, my interest has been more than satiated in the last three days. Nevertheless, I have an understandable interest in first names and I expect Kingsley Davis to be an angry man thanks to the fact that his name brings to mind that of Kingsley Amos, one of Britain's early angry young men. Perhaps I also expect Professor Davis to be an angry man because he must be continually confronted as a professional with the evidence of lack of wisdom and foresight that led to one of the most urgent of modern problems that of an exponentially increasing population. Kingsley Davis is professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has also held this title at Pennsylvania State University and Columbia University. A remarkable feature of his career is that he has made two complete traversals of the academic ladder from assistant professor to professor. I was going to ask you how that happened. Very odd and rather unusual. He has served or serves on a large number of commissions and committees that concern themselves with various aspects of the population problem. It is a pleasure to introduce Professor Davis, an alumnus of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the institution which is this year my host. He will speak on the sociological aspects of genetic control. Professor Davis. Thank you, Professor Polly Carpecouche. President Carlson, ladies and gentlemen, it's always easy to introduce me as a speaker. All the introducer has to tell the audience is that I'm from Texas and it gets an automatic laugh. I don't know whether President Johnson gets such an automatic laugh or not when he's introduced. But in addition to the honor of being from Texas, President Johnson does not have the honor of a PhD. I feel distinctly uncomfortable about being the last on this program. First, I don't see how in the world I can serve to bring things together. I'm terribly afraid I shall bring them to a head. Second, the geneticists and other speakers have had a terrifying advantage. The geneticists have had a full day to parade their wares, a full day. I can't give a full introductory course in sociology in the three hours I have at my disposal. Also, I noticed that the geneticists have been passing the buck in a sly way. Mainly by definitely, definitely ignoring the issues. Now, Professor Ramsey, on the other hand, has confronted some of the issues. I might say he ran head on into them. But notice what he did. He did that in the chapel. And with God on his side, you can understand why I approach my assignment with some trepidation and due humility, even though I'm from Texas. The organic world represents, as the previous panelists have made clear, a compromise between stability and change. On the one hand, the continuity and segregation of the germ cells insulate each species from temporary environmental disturbances to a considerable degree. On the other hand, enduring environmental shifts gradually alter the species through natural selection. You have stability, but the possibility of some change. A comparable, but less recognized reconciliation of stability with change is achieved in human society. These are composed of generations of individuals who have not only the genetic constitution and hence the biological stability of the species, but also a culturally transmitted system resistant itself to alteration. The mechanisms by which these societies minimize social change are numerous and pretty well known. They include restraints on aberrant individuals, indoctrination of the young and the traditions and myths rather than the realities of existence, use of the conservative members of society, such as housewives to rear the next generation, and antipathy to strange customs and languages, interpretation of loyalty to the group as agreement with its ways and so forth and so on. We're pretty familiar with these mechanisms of social control and stability. Now they do not preclude social change, but they certainly slow it down. The degree of stability they achieve tends to be overlooked because people mistake the short run swings and shifts of their milieu for the alterations of social structure. Fads and fashions, the circulation of the elite shifts in governmental regimes, these generally have little effect in societal evolution. Indeed, I'm always surprised that descriptions of political behavior by Plato and Aristotle, our accounts of family life are religious cults in stone age societies. Demonstrate how little human society has changed over thousands of years. The main changes have been in the instrumentalities, and dazzling as these have been, it is amazing to what extent they're used for human goals that have undergone little or no change. Once it's granted that homo sapiens participates in these two distinct systems of compromise between stability and change, several implications can be drawn. One inference, for example, is that attempts to improve mankind, that is to thwart stability and maximize desired change, can deal with either system. They can alter the biological capacities and traits of the human organism by artificial selection, or they can reform the culturally transmitted institutions through social movements. Interestingly, only one of these methods, the second, has ever been tried. The genetic approach, though sometimes discussed, has never been tried on human beings on a significant scale despite its success with plants and animals. We thus come to a puzzling scientific problem. Since the two methods of human reform are not mutually exclusive, why is it that only one has been utilized? Each method rests on a distinct and effective principle. Beyond doubt, the inherited makeup of a species can be altered by planned intervention. Beyond doubt, a social system can be changed by deliberate effort. It follows that any proposed improvement in man's condition could theoretically be pursued by both methods at once with no conflict, unless, of course, the improvement excludes one or the other by definition. You can define a social improvement in such a way that it could be only one or the other. Let me give you an instance where both could be used. Those who seek to eliminate warfare in human society could try to get an international language adopted on the assumption that differences of language lead to wars. And, of course, we would want to adopt our language, but outside of that, everything would be all right. But second, in pursuit of the same change, he could try to breed individuals who are less innately aggressive on the theory that human temper and passion lead to armed conflict. What this would do to some other aspects of life, I don't know, but it's a possibility. Similarly, those who wish to strengthen human health could try to institute new health practices and medical practices, change the environment, or to reduce the reproduction rate among carriers of genetically transmitted diseases and susceptibilities. So there's not, not only is there no logical conflict between the two principles of human improvement, but the possibility needs to be faced that in the long run, they're mutually dependent. Obviously, in the short run, they are not mutually dependent. They have considerable independent variation. Some social change is possible without genetic change, and probably the reverse is true. There has apparently been very little human evolution during the last 30,000 years, according to Mayer's book on species. And I might say that Mayer seems to think that our ancestry 30 to 35,000 years ago was about as bright as it is now. This shows that even in scientific circles there can be differences of opinion, Mayer would not regard him as having a, would not regard an and a tall man as having an intelligence of only 30, say, but maybe 125, at least he had the good sense not to invent New York City. But it does appear that there's been relatively little organic evolution of human beings during the last 30,000 years, which has been the greatest period of sociocultural change. And in addition, two peoples as phenotypically different as the Japanese and the Northwest Europeans now have social systems more like each other than either is like its own prior feudal system. So you can certainly see the independence of social and genetic change to a considerable degree. But one would have to be sanguine indeed to maintain that there is no limit whatever to the independent variation of the two principles governing the human species. The evolution of an ever more complicated technology, for example, may reach an eventual plateau due to the limitations of the human brain or some other genetic limitation, whether you take it in its average or its extreme expression. Again, the genetic damage from nuclear weapons in the next war may prove so great that present civilization can be maintained. I didn't say extinguish the human race, I simply said it might extinguish our present civilization. I think Professor Glass was conservative in his estimate of how severe the bombing itself might be, could be worse. Now, if both means of human change are affected and if they're not mutually exclusive, then the question of why one has been used to improve life and the other has not, does need an answer. Why, for instance, has eugenics movement never left the ground? It's been in existence a long time, it was started in the last century. People have been talking about eugenics ever since. It's all talk and very little doing. A possible answer is that genetic improvement is a long, slow process, whereas social reform promises quick results. Well, in keeping with what was said above, we must remember that the speed of social change is generally exaggerated. A high proportion of what passes for social reform tends to prevent rather than to induce long-run social change. Social reform efforts are like mutations. Most of them are dysfunctional and therefore lethal or short-lived. Since the parts of a society like an organism are interlinked, even a successful solution of one social problem often ultimately defeats itself by creating one or more unforeseen and unendurable new problems. One of the great examples of modern life is, of course, what Dr. Shockley talked about. We brought down death rates very successfully and as a consequence, we were getting the population explosion which was not part of the intention of bringing down the death rates. On the other hand, the slowness of induced genetic change, I think, is commonly exaggerated, especially in the popular literature now. Some of the quickest results of scientific breeding seem to me, if I read the genetic literature correctly, to be achieved in the first generation, which can hardly be said of most successful social reforms or revolutions. It's therefore not certain that as a general rule, social reform is speedier than genetic reform. The relative speed, doubtless, depends upon the particular goal or case. We are entitled to suspect then that the use of the alleged general rule of relative slowness as an argument against eugenics is a rationalization. The real source of antagonism to genetic control of human beings may lie elsewhere. Other common explanations of why genetic control has never been seriously tried may be dismissed as patent rationalizations. It's alleged, for example, that the science of genetics is not sufficiently developed to make genetic control feasible. But animals and plants were successfully bred long before Mendelian genetics was born. Again, it's alleged that human beings cannot agree on the traits they consider desirable. This is true, but they can't agree on anything. Failure to agree doesn't prevent human beings from getting things done. They disagree on practically every matter of policy that comes up, and yet policies are carried out. Sometimes religion helps get agreement. Sometimes it doesn't help. Or sometimes it just helps in the face of no agreement. For instance, there was a schoolboy who wrote a dissertation on the Quaker religion. He said, Quakers are meek and mild. They turn the other cheek and they do not talk back. He said, my father's a Quaker, my mother's not. Well, my view is that the main reason why human genetic control has never been seriously tried lies in the stability factors of the sociocultural system. It does not lie in the slowness of genetic change in the paucity of genetic knowledge or in the lack of consensus. It lies rather in the stubborn resistance to change inherent in human societies. In other words, eugenics itself is a social movement. Before it can be effectively, effective genetically, it has to be effective socially. It has a double barrier to cross. And I take it this is what Professor Ramsey meant when he said this morning that had to be a movement. Not just the science, but also a movement. There has to be a social movement. But it has as a social movement a double barrier to cross. It combines in a peculiar way the two systems of transmission in the human spaces. The changes in society that would be required to succeed in a program of human genetic control would be so fundamental that they would tend to dwarf all previous social revolutions. The socially transmitted sentiments and behavior patterns that would have to be disturbed are so deep in the minds of all of us here that any imagined escape from them seems according to your particular temperament, horrible, paradoxical or ridiculous. And again, you can always get a laugh if you're not born in Texas by advocating some wild eugenics scheme. Well, why are these so paradoxical? Because they tend to turn into pure means what we conceive to be ultimates. Professor Ramsey this morning was trying to delineate some of the ultimates. Professor Muller has a knack for turning ultimates into means and evoking various kinds of horrified or disturbed responses of one kind or another. Now, I can't prove my argument completely. I'm sorry, I don't have the biochemical evidence for my particular argument. But certain lines of evidence and inference can be brought to bear, I think, which to me at least seem convincing of the general thesis presented. And I think adequate consideration of the matter must proceed by analyzing the interrelations between the social system on the one hand and the system of genetic stability and change on the other. Since men live in a sociocultural environment their genetic makeup is inevitably shaped by the long run continuities and discontinuities in this particular environment. Overwhelmingly, however, the results are not foreseen in the human species. They're not only unforeseen, they're unrealized. They're the consequences of behavior patterns of which people are either oblivious or which they construe as being for purposes having nothing to do with heredity. This point has been made several times in the symposium. It's worth keeping in mind, I think. People are not normally aware of statistical regularities, for example, in their mating patterns. When marriage is mentioned, usually people think of the legal age, not the actual distribution of ages at which people marry in the population. When selection of partners is mentioned, they think of their personal tastes, whether the girl is a blonde, brunette, or albino. When selection of partners is talked about, they don't realize the degree of homogamy, of traits that's present in the population or geographical propinquity, which somebody else has to figure out. So the great book of social influences on genetic change have to be sharply distinguished from deliberate genetic control. Indeed, the regular social influences are so unconscious that, like the grammar of language, they have to be studied carefully before people can be brought to realize what these people themselves are doing genetically. However, it is precisely these social influences which bring about most of the problems which make us feel that genetic control may be desirable. And here I would like to enter an argument. It has sort of been in the picture, but not too much brought out than the previous discussions and questions. The geneticists, like everybody else, even like sociologists, have a jargon. And they talk about a fitness factor, fitness ratio, something. And this is a little confusing language, like a lot of jargon. Because it implies that the observer judges that this indicates fitness, we are perfectly privileged to say that one group may be reproducing faster than another group, and that we think this is an undesirable circumstance. That is, from the point of view of whatever criteria we want to introduce into the situation, we don't like it. Thus, if there is constant selection for increased myopia, I happen to be myopic myself and don't think that's so bad, but if there is selection in that direction, we're perfectly privileged to say we don't like people with glasses and we think that there should be an end of this continual, culturally propping up of ever more degenerate organisms as time goes on. So we would judge fitness in terms of our criteria and what we would try to do is to bring fertility into relation to our criteria of fitness. This is exactly what we do in any other form of social planning. Social planning is pointless. If that is where we're going anyway. If New York City is going to double in the next 30 years and become 32 million people instead of 16, and that's what we want, gun help us, why then, there's no policy needed. It's if we want to keep the New York metropolitan area down to its present level, when every indication is that it's going to double in the next 30 years, if that's what we want, then we have to take action. So it's no truer in genetics than in any other field that we have to take what comes as this is the only thing that could come. So a typical argument for genetic control is that a given social practice is giving rise to genetic selection that may prove unfortunate. Therefore, special effort has to be made. Some control measure adopted to overcome the practice in question. This of course is not the only kind of argument. There are utopian arguments that do not refer to specific new problems, but see a eugenic paradise. And I might say this has been one of the favorite hunting grounds of utopians. A eugenic paradise ahead, if appropriate action is but taken. But for the most part, it's the social environment seen as generating certain undesirable patterns of selection. It takes our attention in addition to the specific diseases from genetic factors of large effect. Now, if what I've been saying is true, look carefully at the implication. If a part of the social system is bringing about a result felt to be deleterious, then another part, some control apparatus, will have to be created to correct it. But the fact that the deleterious practices form a part of the existing social system indicates that they control the behavior of the very population which presumably is to change them. In India, for example, the forces motivating a parent to marry off his daughter is at any cost. Regardless of their condition, blind, deaf, dumb, whatnot, these forces help to keep defective traits in the gene pool in India. They get 98. something or other percent of all girls married in India. Now I would suggest that if any of you girls contemplate a hard time in this society, you go to India. It's almost as good as Alaska. But since this parental obligation is an integral part of a wider social order, it cannot be changed overnight. The individual parent will not change his behavior towards his daughter's marriage, simply because of its genetic effect on the population. He's not worried about the gene pool. He's worried about his neighbors, relatives, and castmates and what they think of him. He's worried about meeting his religious and kinship obligation. And getting his daughters married as a religious and a kinship obligation as well as a caste obligation. The whole thing focuses on it. In the same way, the obligation of a husband in the United States to prevent his wife from committing adultery, the stipulation of adultery is a ground for divorce. I believe every state in the union has this as its ground. Some states that's the only ground like the civilized state of New York. And the rest of the control apparatus for discouraging adultery, even I note from this morning's address and from certain proceedings of the House of Lords in Great Britain that I have read, even to discouraging AID, are not likely to be set aside in the interest of genetic improvement. I would like to introduce my own personal moral feelings with reference to this AID business, artificial insemination from Donner. I think that if it's going to be called adultery, it should be called a lesser form of adultery. Too often the obstacle to some recommended social change is thought of as simply an attitude. People are said to be prejudiced. Now you know what? Their attitudes differ from yours, they're prejudiced. Or to have some irrational fear or a religious belief. The remedy of this is the case is equally simple. It's to change people's attitude by suitable propaganda, advertising or education. This is what is known now as the Madison Avenue approach. It's being widely used around the world, has millions of dollars behind it to induce people to take up birth control on the assumption that the only reason they don't do so is because they have a prejudice against it. And all you have to do is remove the prejudice. But unfortunately, battles are not generally won by psychological warfare alone. The motivation for conduct is determined by economic interests, social rewards and penalties, political pressures, organic needs, group loyalties, and I regret to say force and the threat of force. All structured in an ongoing and complex social meure. It follows that no fundamental change in social behavior will be accomplished simply by changing the attitude or to put it more correctly. No change of attitude, of any importance and depth will prove possible unless the social and economic conditions causing the attitude are changed. In the case of genetic control, it's obvious that the most relevant parts of the social system are those having to do with health and medical practices on the one hand and with marriage and the family on the other. These govern respectively the two processes involved in genetic selection, mortality and reproduction. In both cases, extremely strong motivation is encountered. In the first, because good health and physical survival are at stake. And in the second, because the institutions governing sexual expression, pregnancy and child rearing are involved. On the medical side, for instance, it is precisely the success of the social controls tending to maximize survival. It is producing genetic trends that many people find alarming. In India in 1911, 21, the death rate was sets that only 38% of the males born would survive to age 20. This was in 1911, 21. This was after the British had been in for a long time and had civilized the country. The death survival of males was only 38% to age 20. Now, if we come to another level of mortality, the United States in 1840, these were the white males born in 1840. This is a cohort life table. 61% survived to age 20. Whereas it is estimated that among those born in 1960, over 96% will live to that age. In other words, here's a span within a half century of human experience. It's diversified as the area, of course, but you've got a shift from 38 to 96% surviving to age 20. In other words, there are practically no males in the United States from now on who are going to die before the reproductive age. There is no mortality selection there to speak of. Now, not long ago in human history, mortality prior to the age of reproduction was a principal mechanism for positive genetic selection in human populations. I think there's no question about it. It was the remarkable constitution built up by this selective process that forms a genetic inheritance that the majority of human species is coasting on at present. We have to thank our hardy ancestors. I'll put it this way. We have to thank our hardy non-ancestors of the past for dying so fast. Jacobson estimates that among the white females born in 1960, 96% will survive to age 45. 96% will survive even to the end of the reproductive period. Now, the social controls yielding such complete success in non-selectivity are so strong that there appears no possibility whatever of changing them. Not a soul here in this long discussion has suggested increasing mortality in order to get better selection. And I think Professor Ramsey should have taken note of that. It shows that at least in one respect, the geneticists are pretty moral. The state laws of this nation, for example, do not even permit abortion in order to prevent a genetically damaged child from being born. It seems unlikely that permitting death after birth will be tolerated. Instead, we can confidently expect that the proportion of defective phenotypes in the population will continue to be swollen, swollen because the excess mortality once characterizing such defectives is tending rapidly to disappear. If this conclusion is correct then, the entire burden of eugenic policy is thrown onto the reproductive side. This is all we have left apart from biochemical interference of the kind Dr. Tatum mentioned, which seems a little remote as yet. And that being the case, if it's on the fertility side, it's the only side where we have now the possibility of any selectivity and where hence policy, eugenic policy, if it takes place must occur. Then we encounter the rather formidable system of religious and moral control over sexual and family relations that I have preferred to and that we've had already some evidence of in this session. Now, let's examine a little bit some of the interrelations between our institutional system for reproduction and genetic selection. I suppose you might say that the fundamental problem is that the human species has retained in scarcely any altered form the primitive mode of organizing reproduction. It has retained a system in which people are connected socially by birth, kinship, and in which responsibility for the rearing of children is primarily settled on those who biologically engendered them. Well, this seems very natural to us, but in a sense it's quite crazy and you can look around you and see the evidences of how crazy it is. The very fact that somebody happened to get pregnant, well, married first. Let's give it as it's supposed to be organized in society. The very fact that a couple happened to get married and then have a child is no indication whatever that they're competent to rear the child. We stress the importance of the social environment, especially the early environment of the child. And yet we are turning the rearing of those children over mainly to amateurs and not professionals, the people who happen to engender them biologically. And there is a difference sometimes that happens that the people who engender a child biologically are not the ones to rear it and vice versa. In some ways this system in modern society is more elementary than is in primitive society. For in primitive societies there is often a highly institutionalized and fictional quality in extended kin relations and frequently a lack of concern with whether or not a child is biologically one's own. In other words, I might put it this way, in primitive societies they often seem more relaxed and more civilized on this matter than we do. In civilized society the elementary unit, the reproducing pair and their own offspring stands out as a separate social cell. And it's about as elementary and simple as it can be made. And yet it stands out in modern society as a normatively mandatory reproductive unit. And what civilization especially of the recent type has done is to put this unit into a social order which makes it function in a dysgenic way, at least in certain respects. In a primitive situation, for example in a hunting and gathering economy, the cultural apparatus is not elaborate enough to mediate greatly between the individual organism and its physical environment. So they develop the keen eyes, the swift legs and so forth. Mortality before reproduction was highly selective so that that too, a great burden didn't fall on the reproductive selection. But even with respect to reproduction, under primitive conditions, the thing tended to be structured in favor of some selection. And one of the institutions was polygyny which is widespread and seems to be very ancient in human groups and which of course had the effect of giving more wines to the more successful males and hence more progeny to the more successful males. And polygyny has persisted, did persist with amazing tenacity in human societies. It's found in most agrarian societies today, including, I hate to say this, in view of President Johnson's campaign to win friends south of the border, but including our countries in Latin America. However, as the Neolithic Revolution gained dominance and the human species began to elaborate the cultural technology that it imposes between itself and the non-cultural environment with the investigation of plants and animals, the selective value of polygyny itself began to change character. The successful male was not necessarily the keen-eyed and swift one, but the myopic schemer, the social manipulator, sort of a maybe a dean type, and also the inheritor of property. Furthermore, the second and third mates began to be drawn from the lower strata and began to cancel out the good genetic qualities of the successful male and occasionally these second and third mates were not called wines, but called concubines, from a genetic point of view, a concubine and a wife are equal. The distinction is purely sociological. With industrial society, plural mating has doubtless increased, but the development of technology again, in this case, contraception and abortion has freed plural mating from its reproductive and hence its selective implications, to the extent that it now has no genetic significance, particularly. What has happened, apparently, is that in industrial societies, this is a lecture within a lecture, you see. I've been interested in the law for a long time as a male in why it was a polygyny disappeared in urban industrial societies, and I've been trying to figure it out and I'm giving you the benefit of my figurines. Industrial societies have a tendency to shear off kinship bonds beyond the nuclear family in general. They also, this is connected with vertical mobility and geographical mobility in a competitive social system. And this shearing off has applied to extra mates in a stable sense as well. Furthermore, the entry of women into the wider occupational and educational sphere and the decline of their economic role within the family itself as the locus of production shifted from the home to the factory made her preferences as well as that of the male important. In other words, women began to assert themselves. They didn't particularly, in a sense, establish their preferences. The availability of women to enter a stable union with a man as a second mate and the willingness of a wife to accept the second woman and decline. At the same time, the utility of a second stable mate for the male dropped because numerous children were of no great help in the economic struggle in an industrial society. Wives were very not very productive. In fact, rumor has it that they are not productive at all in some cases and sexual gratification was possible without durable legal commitment or reproduction. So the marginal utility to put it in economic terms of a second mate in relation to the cost and trouble was nailed. Now, I realize that all of you believe that the disappearance of polygyny was due to some realization of higher values and the installation of better ethics. Well, I think the disappearance of polygyny and the higher ethic justifying it were brought about with the same causes, but this just happens to be my sociological bias. Now, under polygynous conditions, a successful male not only sired more children, but more of them survived as well. Now, the latter is true of monogamy under near subsistence conditions, but with the improved control of mortality, the tendency of families to be greater called for another innovation in our reproductive system. It called for birth limitation. Put it this way, as long as you have a death rate, which means that out of each eight children born, about three or four will die, then you must have a higher fertility. You're gonna count on the living family. But once practically all eight live, then you're going to have bigger living families than you ever had before. So in the evolution of modern industrial society, it was in my estimation, the main factor was the decline of the death rate, which called for a decline of the birth rate, or fertility control. And another way of putting it is that this especially was true in view of the divorce of economic production from the home and the consequent disutility of children in an economic sense. They remain valuable as pets, play things, and ego surrogates, but not in an economic sense. This has meant that the successful man and woman, since mating tends to be class endogamous in industrial society, the successful man tends to have fewer children because his aspirations are higher for himself and his children. And his knowledge and use of birth control techniques are better. Now the differentials and fertility among socioeconomic classes in Western society increased during the latter half of the 19th century. There are British data, for example, giving fertility by class which show you visibly the spread between the classes as the century wore on, as the upper classes adopted birth control and it slowly filtered down to the others. It reached the plateau around the turn of the century and remained at a sort of a plateau level. And then with and after the depression, the class differentials began to decline. This has led some people to believe that there is either now or eminently a reversal of the socioeconomic differentials and fertility. Well, nobody can predict the future. We can only venture opinions. My opinion is hopefully the difference of fertility by social clients is going to reverse itself unless a lot of other conditions change as well. I would expect it to retain the present U-shaped character, fertility tending to be somewhat higher in the extremely upper groups. The ones who can afford to have two Cadillacs in the garage and in the lower groups. My reason for this opinion is that I think one of the two conditions has not and probably will not change. And this is the matter of aspiration and vertical mobility. Even though birth control techniques become so simple that anybody, no matter how inefficient can control births, it will still remain true that those who count on getting ahead in life and having their children do so will on the average have fewer children. In general too, the family allowance schemes that many countries now have, Canada, France, Belgium, Sweden, to mention only a few, and if they increase fertility at all, some of them are specifically there for that purpose, they tend to have more effect upon those in the poorer strata than on those in good circumstances because the size of the allowance tends to be greater in relation to income. Melfair schemes, the increased prevalence of premarital conception among juveniles have the same effect as also to subsidize housing for the poor and the stepped up efforts and newer techniques in venereal disease control. All of these would tend on the whole to maintain an inverse relation between socioeconomic status and fertility. There are other factors favoring reproduction among the more successful, such as the role of children as consumption items which the better off can afford. The lesser burden that children present to people who can afford to live in spacious suburbs and the greater possibility among middle and upper income groups of withdrawing the wife completely from the labor force and having her tend to the children. Now as I say, no one knows for sure what will happen but I look for a continuation for some time of a somewhat U-shaped distribution as far as differential fertility is concerned. Curiously in contemporary urban industrial societies, life has become polarized. In most primitive and archaic agrarian systems there's a great deal of economics in the family and in kinship groups because these are still productive organizations and a great deal of companionship in other work groups because these are stabilized and traditional. In our type of society however, the economic and professional world is so much involved with rapidly changing technology that relationships are not stable. Instead individuals are competitive and mobile. They must be emotionally prepared to break bonds easily in the professional economic world to start life again in a new neighborhood or community to deal with a new boss and so forth. These are not traits which it makes sense to praise or condemn. They're simply traits of the society. You say it's a competitive society. Well, and some previous speaker has pointed out that it's competitiveness is part of the function of the reason for its success. Advanced productive technology requires an appropriate social organization but they do throw the burden of strong and continued companionship, of mutual trust and personal dependence upon the nuclear family. Male friendships tend to be superficial and ephemeral. A man confides his personal feelings to his girl or his wife. The word intimate has come curiously to be a euphemism for sexual relations. The husband wife bond is therefore given tremendous strength in our society. So it is also the parent-child bond because children are the only human beings that parents have personal command over and for the child, the parents are the only stable personal anchor in a world of changeable relationships and impersonalized procedures. As a consequence, contemporary society powerfully motivates people to want to get married and to have children. Ethically, this tends to get expressed as an inalienable right to do so. And because the complex of ideas about one's own child, some of them derive from the popularization of science, the emphasis is on the right to get children oneself if one is physiologically capable of doing so. Thus we reach a result surprisingly like the past. In the medieval system or any agrarian society, the institutional structure is such as to motivate a high rate of reproduction. This reflects past millennia in which a high death rate had to be overcome. But the family and reproduction were so intertwined with the economic and class systems that marriage and childbearing were not considered an inalienable right of every person regardless of his condition. Now, with the democratic individualism of industrial societies, the peculiar and unique benefits of the family are felt to be everybody's birthright. Birth control is taken for granted, but it is not used to produce only enough children to replace the population or to adjust reproduction to desirable genetic or emotional traits. Dr. Shockley referred to the studies around the world of desires for children. It turns out in these studies that in the agrarian countries, people desire fewer children than they have. In industrial societies though, from one continent to another, people want more children than they have. Nowhere in the world do people want only on the average, want only enough children to replace the population. This I regard as one of the major tragedies of the world. This signifies the significance of the role which the family has a unique personal grouping in modern society plays. Well, Mr. Chairman, I had a lot more to say, but from the expression on your face when I mentioned the three hours, I realized that I better not try to say it all. Thank you. Fellow panelists are lazy men and they don't look forward with pleasure to having to work tonight. Why don't we both gentlemen that he continue for another hour and a half this evening? You see what I mean? Yeah, I see what you mean. And I see that physics has all kinds of training in it. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Would you write your, any questions you wish to ask Professor Davis on the little cards and the usher will pick them up as before. I must confess that I think that Texans are perhaps even more subject to being kidded if they lack the good taste who appreciate the delight of New York City. I mean, did all the real evidence that you have come from the hinter want if you will. Professor Policarpoche. I would appreciate the delights of New York City if I could find one. Oh, I see, yes, yes, yes. When I return to New York, I'll take you for the best dinner you can get out of the American continent. It's a date. Usually people in New York take me for a ride. Oh, I see, questions. There's an interesting question for you. How can we prevent the better birth control measures from increasing the immorality of today's youth? Well, I would rather try to increase the immorality with better birth control methods than with worse birth control methods. And I will have to give a reply to this that I gave to the Planning Commission in India once. I once wrote a book on the population of India and shortly thereafter I went to India and was... Well, what I went over to see was whether it was as I had described it in the book. Well, anyway, I was asked by the Planning Commission to come and meet with it for an afternoon because at that time India was contemplating its present birth control, governmental birth control policy. And these gentlemen were very sincere and very probing. They felt a deep responsibility and they wanted to find things out as much as they could. And one of the first questions they asked me was if we have birth control in India, will our girls be immoral? The way Kinsey has shown your girls to be. Well, I swallowed my American patriotism and said, well, I believe that in India you are proud of your morality. I said, yes, they were. I said, do you think it rests on such externalities as that? Or is it a matter of the Indian mind and spirit and ethics? And they had to admit that they thought it was a function of the Indian mind, spirit and ethics and we got off of that issue and went on to another and now they have second to demand the most thorough government policy for birth control of any country in the world. And I don't think this question has really come up anymore. At least I've gotten in the literature about Indian or repercussions from that. If a human trait was pronounced undesirable by fitness, wouldn't Americans actually prolong this trait because of their social sympathy for the underdog? That is the person who had the undesirable trait. Well, this is in a sense partly what I was saying. There's a tendency to feel. And Professor Ramsey faced up to this issue, very nicely I thought this morning, there's a tendency to feel that one has a God given right to have children regardless of what the probabilities would be for these children's genetic status. And obviously it seems to me this is one of the first steps in a gradual movement towards eugenic policy. I happen to think that we're not gonna have any actual great overwhelming eugenic policy short of a genetic crisis. A genetic crisis might well provoke us to a comprehensive eugenic policy. Short of that, I think what we'll do is gradually substitute scientific discoveries and devices to get in there through the interstices of the institutional structure to make little change. But in the meantime, we are up against an ideology which in a sense is rooting for the poor person who has some difficulties and you certainly, after all, if he has some difficulties, it seems grossly unfair to take away from him this one right that he might otherwise have or to put it another way. Most of us cannot be terribly successful in more than one or two narrow ways. We're always exceeded and bettered by other people. But practically all of us can be successful in reproduction. We can have children and this is regarded as a very fundamental human right and it's gonna take a little pressure I think and some what you might call social engineering to get around that particular thing. But why is it so difficult to conceive that adoption can serve these people but who cannot have genetically adequate children just as it can serve those people who can't have any children at all? And the testimony of adopted parents is that they soon come to love their children as their own and in fact, probably a little easier to do that than if the child was genetically named. Sure. I'm sure they would ask the State Department an expert on reading these big cards right now. What kind of a genetic crisis could you conceive of? This is the first time that that word has been injected. Oh, simply thinking in terms of what Professor Glanis mentioned, if you get 10% higher of a dangerous mutation in the population, I would think however your way of putting it is then I think this is going to begin to look bad. People are going to worry about it. They're gonna see what they can do and especially in the next generation because this has an economic as well as social and educational side to it. Actually, we're running up the cost considerably of asymptocastodial care in terms of the improved mortality of people like Mongolian children before but the thing could be very fantastic for those who survive. You use the word crisis in an odd sense. This obviously a crisis which doesn't have a crisis quality, it builds up slowly and I don't think people are socially too crisis if the crisis goes like that, people will respond to crisis if it does this. I don't think they're going to get the response to the kind of crisis you have described. Well, I don't think I would necessarily agree that this would not have the sudden aspect. After all, a third world war with a few bombs dropped, this can be done overnight and it's not that people are going to remain completely ignorant of what this means. And the policy comes from the knowledge of what it means not solely by being presented with the question. For instance, now we worry about depression. Before the depressions come and we try to get our economists and bankers to do something to prevent the possible coming depression. So we have a healthy condition of perpetual inflation. Now, this is a good question. Is there a correlation between socioeconomic group and quality of genotype? Well, obviously this is a very old question. There is not a perfect correlation. It's perfectly obvious that many talented people don't get very far in the social system. Partly, I would say mainly now from lack of aspiration and knowledge of the opportunity. A number of sociological studies have shown that children from the lower strata do not have opportunities to point it out to them, do not take advantage of those things that would be available to them as much as children in the upper group. I've watched this myself in various kinds of educational situations. And it's not only that they don't take advantage because they don't know about them, it is also because it's not their kind of value. They have pitched their life at one level because everybody around them has pitched it like that. They distribute their leisure time in that way. And so they do not take advantage of the opportunity. On the other hand, it seems undeniable that so far as constitutional capacities are concerned, especially in a mobile society where there is circulation downward and upward both, that you will get some superior genetic trait in the upper class. And this is all unique. It doesn't have to be a 100% correlation, be very significant in the genetic point of view. Since our government not only condones but urges by lessening the tax for every child, large families, many children, shouldn't sociologists first begin genetic control by educating those in governmental control? Well, that's a triple barrel question and there's a triple barrel answer. I have found governmental people very hard to educate. Most of them are well beyond the learning and maximum learning curve. Second, I don't think that it's up to any particular group, this is a matter of the entire population and it is simply not true that any particular scientific body is in a position to determine policy for the population at large. Now, the third part of this question relates to large families, what is a large family? We have just gone through the era of large families. The era of large families was when mortality was reduced and birth rates were high. Now, we never knew families as large as those that are now being had in the underdeveloped countries today because the underdeveloped countries today have got their lower death rate all of a sudden and it's just about as low as ours in many of these countries. Well, they have retained a birth rate that looks to be higher than it ever was in Northwestern Europe even in the feudal period. In that situation, their rates of population grow, their size of family, it's another way of putting it, are much higher than ours ever were. They're the ones that really have the big families today. But unfortunately, what we call a small family, a family of three children for married couple is more than enough to replace the population. This is the tragedy. And yet a family smaller than three children is not in a sense adequate for a family. And especially in these days of great longevity. You realize now that the way it is if you have only two children, the part of your total lifespan you spend with young children around in the house is very slight. Woman lives well past 70 now on the average and by the time she's a mother, her life expectancy has gone way beyond that even. So that in a sense, a family of the size to simply replace the population is too small for sociological purpose. It's one of the, I think one of the, so the tragedies of the modern situation is a species. That's how much more time. Well, I think to find your duty, don't believe. All right. However, let's see. Well, that's a fine question. Oh, would you please define a professional rear of children? Well, let's define a professional doctor first. He's a man fully and adequately trained for the work he does in return for living. That's a fine to give them. In case the MDs, they get them a very good living, but he has a very adequate training. Now, the work of rearing a child is somewhat more complex than that for the physician does and I would regard a professional child rear as one who has adequate training for the job. Now, I realize that what's in the back of your mind is that there's no way to train people to rear children. I have not to agree with them. I think that's a prejudice, a rationalization. That people mouth in order to bolster and make them feel comfortable with the present situation. But I think one of the great wastes in our society is the very miserable job that parents are doing in rearing children. And this is done with the best intentions in the world. I've seen mothers who followed their children all around the house, plucked over them all day long. We're very solicitous about everything, their noses being blown and being safe, not on the street, not on the stairs, not anywhere they can have any fun. Those mothers are well-intentioned. There's no question about it. And boy, what they can do to making some of those children neurotic is terrible. Well, I'll end on that pleasant note. Well, let me answer one. What I by all means. Hey, my prologue says as a moderator, you see, I expect to use the question. Since anyone who ever had the experience of raising a child would never undertake to do so again, who besides amateurs are going to do it, I find it difficult. I would simply like to support your remarks about the sociological desirability on children. I have had young children over a period of more than a quarter of a century. And, you know, I keep on doing it if I weren't getting old. So the premises of the question are all wrong. And the sociology of having young children around is extremely agreeable. I would like to make one further announcement. Once more, I am not going to discuss again in St. Peter the origin of my name, the question turns up systematically. In fact, yesterday I was amusingly or presently irritated by it. By now I find it just plain dull. Will you please leave it alone, drop it. Thank you.