No longer content with a long perspective historical view, we will
scrutinize the direct investigations of the problem which have been made
during recent years. These investigations have in many cases been
widely advertised to the public, and their conclusions have been so much
repeated that they are often taken at their face value, without critical
examination.
It must be borne in mind that the solution of the problem depends on
finding evidence of degeneracy or impairment in the offspring of persons
who have used alcohol, and that this relation might be explainable in
one or more of three ways:
(1) It may be that alcoholism is merely a symptom of a degenerate stock.
In this case the children will be defective, not because their parents
drank, but because their parents were defective--the parents' drinking
being merely one of the symptoms of their defect.
(2) It may be that alcohol directly poisons the germ-plasm, in such a
way that parents of sound stock, who drink alcoholic beverages, will
have defective offspring.
(3) It may be that the degeneracy observed in the children of drunkards
(for of course no one will deny that children of drunkards are
frequently defective) is due solely to social and economic causes, or
other causes in the environment: that the drunken parents, for instance,
do not take adequate care of their children, and that this lack of care
leads to the defects of the children.
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