Class and Race

NATHANIEL WEYL

Ever since the time of Darwin, social scientists have feared that deficient fertility on the part of the well-educated and intelligent was causing deterioration in the quality of the population throughout the Western world. Modern contraceptive methods, it was thought, accentuated this development. Writing in Daedalus in 1961, the late Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine, Hermann J. Muller, speculated that, with birth control available, the people with “the largest retinue of children” might be those who “are most lacking in perspective, . . . are unduly egotistical, or heedless of others’ needs, or shiftless, or bungling in techniques.”

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NATHANIEL WEYL

Ever since the time of Darwin, social scientists have feared that deficient fertility on the part of the well-educated and intelligent was causing deterioration in the quality of the population throughout the Western world. Modern contraceptive methods, it was thought, accentuated this development. Writing in Daedalus in 1961, the late Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine, Hermann J. Muller, speculated that, with birth control available, the people with “the largest retinue of children” might be those who “are most lacking in perspective, . . . are unduly egotistical, or heedless of others’ needs, or shiftless, or bungling in techniques.”