Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition) — page 119: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

BRASS TACKS 117 the incidence of inborn diseases. How- which may be called congenial, but ever, as such a development is very are at present impossible to define.” unlikely, and would in any case mean Incidentally, in certain “Golden the end of our civilization (!), genetical Ages” immediately following an ad- considerations in such circumstances ance in travel method which opened would probably not be important.” up isolated territories, heterosis or In all fairness, a person with a fam- =F, hybrid vigor may have had some- ily predilection for hemophilia would thing to do with ‘human greatness.” probably not be allowed to ship out Or so say I.—Howard Bodger, 1713 for colonizing. One could hardly re- Illinois Street, Whittier, California. fuse an Irish-American, however, even if his ancestors on both sides came 4nq on top of that, we'd have the fact from isolated hamlets noted for an that a new planet would make useful occasional homozygous sample with some characteristics that, on. Earth, negative survival value. Travel has might have been harmful! On a high- increased the size of the mating group , oer id tremendously in the last sixty gravity world, dwarfs would prosper: years, but that’s still only two genera- tions. Dear John: Of course, the identical argument Your “The Villains Of The Piece” can be used to support the desirability | Was very good. As you point out, a lot of a heterozygous population for col- Of writers misuse statistics to put onization: The possibility of acolonist Over their pet ideas—and quite often homozygous for a survival characteris- they do so knowingly and intention- tic peculiar to the new planet is much lly. I don’t like that. For example, I greater than with a genetically ho- read recently that Nevada is almost mozygous population, which would certain death for consumptives. Sta- change only as a consequence of cur-__ tistics showed that more people, for rent mutation. the population, died of TB in Nevada than any other state. The writer failed to mention how many TB “Galactic Empire” colonization cov- deaths were of people who pe brought — ering many generations. Although the TB with them, from ott er states. there has been an occasional story | And, of course, statistics prove revolving around eugenics, my posi- that the most dangerous thing a tion on that is identical with Mr. person can do is to lie down on a bed. Kalmus’: | More people die in bed than anywhere. (After pointing out that elimination | On the other hand, it is not at all of a homozygote would still leave dangerous to do a hand-stand on top hundreds of heterozygotes to spread Of a lighthouse during a hurricane. the gene) ‘Aven less can be said for Statistics would be almost certain to positive eugenics. Even if it were de- show that nobody was ever killed or Sirable to produce more geniuses, injured while doing a hand-stand on a whatever that may mean, there is no _ lighthouse during a hurricane. recipe for their production at present. How about some screw-ball form of Peculiar qualities which make for government that decided to be very human greatness are probably due to logical and methodical and let all the mixture of many genes and de- governmental operations and decrees velop only in particular circumstances, be in obedience to statistic data? My point is simply that there would be a problem present in any COMIGCDOOK<S.CORN