"The New Decalogue of Science," by Albert Edward Wiggam (8)

1357. [section symbol] 5 The fourth warning of biology is that medicine, hygiene, sanitation, and your efforts to call mental and physical soundness out of the vacuum of nowhere, instead of upbuilding by selection the boundless health, energy, and sanity that are already in the stream of human protoplasm, are weakening and will weaken the human breed. Who uses your hygiene? Who frequents your doctor's offices? Who fills your hospitals? Who swallows your medicines? The strong or the weak? Your wise men are searching for a cure for tuberculosis, for insanity, pneumonia, flabby hearts, brittle arteries, recalcitrant livers, and abridged kidneys - some panacea which will conceal instead of cure the weak spot in the human armor. Bless them in their efforts! But, if you apply that panacea and do nothing else, you will again wreck the very race you have saved. A race that would save its life must lose it; must lose, I mean, its unfit instead of coddling them, as you do, for reproduction. If a race goes downhill long enough, it will find itself at the top. That is to say, its survivors will be the biological "darlings of destiny." Vice and disease purify the race because they kill the weak and vicious. They leave the strong, robust and virtuous to hand the torch of heredity to men unborn. You intentions are good, but in the end nature, herself, will damn you judgment. [section symbol] 6 The fifth warning of biology is that morals, education, art, and religion will not directly improve the inborn righteousness, educability, or artistic and religious capacity of the human breed. This is a dark saying to you. You have spent untold millions in improving your plants and animals by the only method by which they can be improved - selection of the fit for parentage. But the more you "improve" the environment of plants, animals, or men without this selection, the more 8 [end]