The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

But where Maudsley proposed caution, others urged speed. H. G. Wells, the novelist, was no stranger to eugenics. In his book The Time Machine, published in 1895, Wells had imagined a future race of humans that, having selected innocence and virtue as desirable traits, had inbred to the point of effeteness—degenerating into an etiolated, childlike race devoid of any curiosity or passion. Wells agreed with Galton’s impulses to manipulate heredity as a means to create a “fitter society.” But selective inbreeding via marriage, Wells argued, might paradoxically produce weaker and duller generations. The only solution was to consider the macabre alternative—the selective elimination of the weak. “It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.”