Richard Dawkins TV - Paul Dudley White - G Stanley Hall - Lord Willoughby de Broke - Wilhelm His - Thomas Hardy - George Orwell -
Once you’ve got on a planet anywhere in the universe high-fidelity replication of coded information, I think everything else follows. Richard Dawkins
We know from our clinical experience in the practice of medicine that in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, the individual and his background of heredity are just as important, if not more so, as the disease itself. Paul Dudley White
7The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity. G Stanley Hall
I have been brought up in the midst of stock-breeding of all kinds all my life, and I am prepared to defend the hereditary principle in that or any other animal – whether the principle is applied to Peers or whether it is applied to foxhounds. If you desire to ennoble the blood, shall we say, of any particular foxhound, to place him on your book, you look in him for a mixture, a combination, of sagacity and good looks, having made due inquiries into the same qualifications in his immediate progenitors. I am perfectly aware of the unsoundness of the hereditary argument as it is applied to the scientific breeding of hereditary legislators; but, at the same time, although the scientific breeding of Peers may have been, to a certain extent, lost sight of, that is the very reason why the hereditary families who have taken an interest in the government of this country are as strong in the estimation of their fellow-countrymen as they are to-day. It is the very influx of fresh blood through marrying from what I believe are called ‘the people’, whoever they may be – through marrying from outside – that has saved us from the weakness and debility that attach to a caste, and I do not think that any analogy can possibly be drawn between the nobility, or country gentlemen, or aristocracy, or whatever you like to call it, of 150 and 120 years ago and the French aristocracy. Any such analogy cannot possibly be regarded with anything except a feeling almost of resentment. The French aristocracy were weak, selfish, and tyrannical and I believe they richly deserved the fate they got. Lord Willoughby de Broke, address House of Lords, debate to reform the House of Lords 16th March 1910
Heredity is the general expression of the periodicity of organic life. All generations belong to a continuous succession of waves, in which every single one resembles its predecessors and its followers. Wilhelm His, ‘On the Principles of Animal Morphology’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1888
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance - that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die. Thomas Hardy, Heredity
He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived. George Orwell, 1984
A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same. ibid.