The Future Revisited

Abstract

Ten years ago I wrote a factually based biological fantasy in which the rulers of the USSR undertook by selective human breeding to create an intellectual elite through whose scientific power they hoped to dominate the earth. I called the story Weapon because other nations were culturally bound not to use it (McConnell, 1961). The breeding began at the end of World War II. The setting of the story was two generations later in 1975, by which time the genetic success of the original plan was assured and more sophisticated eugenic techniques were in prospect. Among the half-hundred scientific papers I have published in a lifetime, Weapon has been by far the most successful. In the first year after it appeared, I sent out more than 1000 reprints. At that time I concluded that biologists had an unsatisfied professional interest in eugenics. Today, no one doubts that the quality of our gene pool is a topic of paramount concern to a growing sector of the biological community. I still have a supply of reprints and recently have found a use for them. When I write to psychologists on other matters, I usually enclose an Absolute Weapon plus a note calling attention to an essay by Arthur Jensen on the inheritance of intelligence (Jensen, 1969). After the Jensen paper appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, I spent a month analyzing it and could find no significant weakness in its presentation. My judgment was confirmed by the 250 pages of critical discussion that appeared in the next two issues of the same journal.' What concerns me as much as the