Science and Citizenship
XXVIII
The favourite recourse of the ill-informed members of a community to escape the penalties of nescience, is to normalise their own defects and to postulate a universal ignorance. This protective device of the cunning animal is no where more frequent than in discussions of the problem of heredity. It is frequently asserted that we know nothing at all of heredity with precision and certainty. It is quite true the biologists and psychologists have a great deal still to learn about heredity. But it is equally true that they have a great deal to teach. And the citizen as well as the student can only escape the charge of hopeless obscurantism by promptly putting himself to this school. One of the first things he will learn is the deep significance and the practical importance of the distinction between organic inheritance and social inheritance. The former is concerned with the heritage that comes to us in organic descent from our family stock, i.e. the pre-natal influences which condition our life. The latter is concerned with the qualities and aptitudes that come to us through training and education, through tradition and experience—in a word, through the post-natal and therefore social influences that condition our life. Small or great as may be the ordered and verified knowledge accumulated by the students of organic inheritance, there can be no question of the mere massiveness and quantity of our knowledge of
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