PRODUCTION v. REPRODUCTION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 663, 21 March 1952, Page 12

PRODUCTION v. REPRODUCTION

HUMAN FERTILITY: THE MODERN DILEMMA, by Robert C. Cook; Victor GolIancz. English price, 21/-. FOUR THOUSAND MILLION MOUTHS, edited by F. Le Gros Clark and N. W. Pirie; Oxtord University Press. English price, 12/6. HESE books are not complementary, as their titles may suggest they are. The first certainly deals with the prob-

lem of the ever-increasing world population and diminishing food- resources, describing the familiar example of Puerto Rico as a "condensed object lesson" and applying the warning to’ Japan. But the author, who is editor of the American Journal of Heredity, is even more concerned with the decreasing level of innate intelligence and of other desirable genetic qualities which is being brought about in the United States and in the United Kingdom by the relatively lower rate of reproduction among ‘people in the more highly skilled and educated occupational groups. "Today, in the United States, the intelligent get degrees, and the diligent and competent get houses and bank accounts and stomach ulcers: But it is the poor and unschooled who beget." Considerable space is given to accounts of the early arguments about evolution, the HuxleyWilberforce duel, and the more recent Scopes trial in Tennessee and the Lysenko controversy-all very interesting but relevant chiefly as illustrating the slow growth of informed public opinion. The second book is a series of twelve essays by leading British authorities under the sub-title "Scientific Humanism and the Shadow of World Hunger." Each deals with some aspect of the restoration of "that uneasy balance between food and population which the angineer and the doctor have upset." One of the most interesting is that on the circumvention of waste of products both animal and vegetable, and the pro-

cesses now being developed for the direct extraction of human _ food materials from, for éxample, grass.

L.J.

W.