Evolution In Reverse

By intelligent and watchful selective breeding (that is, by carefully and steadily weeding out the culls and by making wise use of the seed from the best), Western man has brought forth countless marvels in the way of improved strains of all his domestic animals, and likewise of every manner of grain, vegetable, fruit and flower. But in regard to himself, to his own kind, he has long followed, and is following now, a course directly opposite to all this. He has been like a gardener who would neglect his tallest, sturdiest, most luxuriant and fruitful specimens to nurse along and try to make something of his diseased, deformed and sterile runts.

Instead of taking humane and practical measures to stop the multiplication of human life so botched and broken that it can never, by any agency known to man, come to have any value or meaning (and thus gradually eliminate such defectiveness altogether), we levy an absolutely enormous tax on all the rest of the nation to feed it, doctor it, nurse it, and try to “educate” what can only slowly catch on to the idea that 2 plus 2 equals 4. In fact, our whole welfare and social security program, intended primarily to raise the standard of living of the masses, tends actually to increase the birth rate of the part of our population that at the best is only mediocre in its endowments, and whose procreation should be kept within limits. On the other hand, the tax to support all this falls so heavily on our most richly endowed stock that it is handicapped and crippled, and instead of having large families—which is what we need from them, even very large families—it commonly settles down to having one child or two, not enough even to perpetuate itself.

In short, our present social setup is steadily producing, and as long as it lasts cannot fail to produce, a literal degeneration of our kind, of the caliber of our national and racial stock. Our good and our best are being outbred by our mediocre and by our worst, and to be outbred means to be replaced, as surely as if they had been conquered by bombs and bayonets and then massacred. They are removed from the Earth. The masses multiply like rabbits, and our best—such best as we still have, though no longer the equal of our best of 50 or 100 years ago—are shoved into oblivion. We are steadily becoming a people of average lower intelligence, feebler character, and reduced stamina. What we are witnessing is retrogressive evolution, an evolution in reverse, backward and downward. But any people long subjected to such a process must sooner or later fall to pieces from internal weakness and decay, or become the victim of a foreign conqueror. This is precisely the fate that has removed one nation after another from the pages of history, simply because it failed to give constant and intelligent heed to the quality and the state of its breeding stock.

–William Gayley Simpson “Which Way Western Man”