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All through the Middle Ages and indeed up to the middle of the eighteenth century, the
population of Europe remained fairly constant, with a slight progressive increase. The birthrate was high, but this was counter balanced by an equally high infantile mortality.During the years of the Industrial Revolution, when industries carried on by hand in homes gave place to machines and factories, the population of England more than doubled. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the birthrate suddenly dropped, and there was much concern at what was considered to be a serious threat to the welfare of the nation.
At first this fall in the number of births was largely restricted to the well to do and was far less pronounced among the workers, who were thought to be inferior from the point of view of heredity. Following the theories of potent Francis Galton and fame Charles Darwin, men agreed that the best stocks were to be found only in the upper strata of society , and that members of the latter, therefore, must be encouraged to breed more while the working class must be urged to breed less.
The assumption was that those who belonged to the proletariat were less intelligent than those of superior social station. The mistake made was the failure to distinguish between intelligence and education, the poorly educated were assumed to be of low intelligence. In more recent years special tests have been devised to measure the intelligence. These measure the educability rather than that general culture by which intelligence was wrongly gauged in the past.
The remarkable thing is that, no matter how many times these tests are applied the person tested gives much the same results, provided that the environment the general conditions and surroundings still remains approximately unaltered. If the environment
is changed, however, this no longer holds true. The food shortage which came with the latter stages of the World War provided ample evidences. The intelligence score the I.Q or Intelligent Quotient, as it is called of children of the upper classes, whom the
shortage affected least did not show much variation. But below a certain social level, as for instance among manual laborers, children were permanently injured by poor nutrition.
This goes to indicate that if environment were generally favorable, there would be a
fairly uniform distribution of intelligence. As today environment varies greatly with
social circumstance, those with the best environment appear to have the best intelligence. Investigation on twins shows that in the matter of intelligence identical twins are very much more alike than fraternal twins or ordinary brothers and sisters. It follows from this that genetically factors those of descent and relationship also is involved. The various combination of these factors show different grades of intelligence in different people,whatever their class.
We have already seen the complicated mechanism by which two independent gene factors such as albinism and waltzing in mice are transmitted. Only one in sixteen, it will be remembered, of the offspring combine the original factors, albinism and waltzing, introduced involves more than two factors.
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