Rick, Andrew: While you both say true things, and I’m working from vague & remote memory here, not having Chesterton’s eugenics book to hand, and its not being on Gutenberg, I’ll put in a word in G.K.’s defense. For all his quirks, and for all (Rick) that he undeniably wrote more than he ought to have done, sometimes at book length on topics where his actual understanding would not have supported anything longer than a 200-word comment–for all THAT, he was keenly intelligent & often had a way of getting to the nub of things. In the eugenics book (again, this is from distant memory) he actually nails the main objections to eugenics, viz. (a) You are shrinking the gene pool & thus reducing overall human adaptability (he didn’t say it like that, but he got the main idea), and (b) You will get “tolerance creep”– i.e. start by wanting to eliminate gross abnormalities, & eventually progress to wanting to eliminate left-handedness. G.K. was also a darn good poet.