Pessimist

"Unfortunately," said Harvard's famed Anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton (Up from the Ape) last week, "I am, unaware of any marked improvement of man's evolutionary status since the end of the glacial period."

For eight years, while he has sat in Cambridge ruefully pondering man's fate. Dr. Hooton's assistants have gone out to make anthropometric measurements of some 20,000 criminals in ten states. From their data he finds not only that criminals are physically marked off from the general population--chiefly by inferiority of bodily dimensions--but that there is "well nigh incredible relationship of body build to nature of offense." An example: First-degree murderers differ from other criminals in being older, heavier, taller, with bigger chest and head circumferences, narrower foreheads, longer and narrower noses, broader jaws.

In Pittsburgh last week during the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting (see p. 50) Dr. Hooton delivered a tart ultimatum : "What we must avoid is a progressive deterioration of mankind as a result of the reckless and copious breeding of protected inferiors. We have not the knowledge to breed supermen, but we can limit the reproduction of criminals and mental defectives. Let us cease to delude ourselves that education, religion or other measures of social amelioration can transform base metal into gold. Public enemies must be destroyed--not reformed.''

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