ENVIRONMENT & HEREDITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 July 1939, Page 6

ENVIRONMENT & HEREDITY

A PROFESSOR’S OBSERVATIONS. We flend everywhere that human communities are giving expression to their resolve to remove by their own efforts the disabilities that now disfigure the world, writes Professor F. A. E. Crew, an expert on animal genetics, in the “Listener.” On all sides you can hear the loud insisted cry for human and social betterment, and it is to this end that the sciences have been harnessed. A good many people hold the view—and with much reason —that if we were to provide a better diet, better education, a better faith, our successors would necessarily be better men; and no geneticist would seriously dispute this contention. But the geneticist holds the view that mankind is not essentially different from his own experimental mice and flies, his flowers and crops, in these matters, and he has to express the firm opinion that the limit to improvements of any animal or plant stock through the manipulation of the environment alone is reached pretty quickly, and that you can onlj’ get a lasting betterment through improvements in the inborn qualities of the animals and plants themselves.