“No,” Mordan said softly, “no, Felix, you are not a cull. You are the star line.”
“Huh?”
“I mean it. It is contrary to public policy to discuss these things, but rules were made to be broken. Step by step, back to the beginning of the experiment, your line has the highest general rating. You are the only zygote in the line which combines every one of the favorable mutations with which my predecessors started. Three other favorable mutations showed up after the original combinations; all of them are conserved in you.”
Hamilton smiled wryly. “That must make me still more of a disappointment to you. I haven’t done very much with the talents you attribute to me, have I?”
Mordan shook his head. “I have no criticism to make of your record.”
“But you don’t think much of it, do you? I’ve frittered away my time, done nothing more important than design silly games for idle people. Perhaps you geneticists are mistaken in what you call ‘favorable characteristics.'”
“Possibly. I think not.”
“What do you call a favorable characteristic?”
“A survival factor, considered in a broad sense. This inventiveness of yours, which you disparage, is a very strong survival factor. In you it lies almost latent, or applied to matters of no importance. You don’t need it, because you find yourself in a social matrix in which you do not need to exert yourself to stay alive. But that quality of inventiveness can be of crucial importance to your descendants. It can mean the difference between life and death.”
“But — ”
“I mean it. Easy tunes for individuals are bad times for the race. Adversity is a strainer which refuses to pass the ill equipped. But we have no adversity nowadays. To keep the race as strong as it is and to make it stronger requires careful planning. The genetic technician eliminates in the laboratory the strains which formerly were eliminated by simple natural selection.”
“But how do you know that the things you select for are survival factors? I’ve had my doubts about a lot of them.”
“Ah! There’s the rub. You know the history of the First Genetic War.”
“I know the usual things about it, I suppose.”
“It won’t do any harm to recapitulate. The problem those early planners were up against is typical — ”
The problems of the earliest experiments are typical of all planned genetics. Natural selection automatically preserves survival values in a race simply by killing off those strains poor in survival characteristics. But natural selection is slow, a statistical process. A weak strain may persist-for a time-under favorable conditions. A desirable mutation may be lost-for a time-because of exceptionally unfavorable conditions. Or it may be lost through the blind wastefulness of the reproductive method. Each individual animal represents exactly half of the characteristics potential in his parents.
The half which is thrown away may be more desirable than the half which is perpetuated. Sheer chance.
Natural selection is slow-it took eight hundred thousand generations to produce a new genus of horse. But artificial selection is fast, if we have the wisdom to know what to select for.
But we do not have the wisdom. It would take a superman to plan a superman. The race acquired the techniques of artificial selection without knowing what to select.
Perhaps it was a bad break for mankind that the basic techniques for gene selection were developed immediately after the last of the neo-nationalistic wars. It would be interesting to speculate whether or not the institution of modern finance structure after the downfall of the Madagascar System would have been sufficient to maintain peace if no genetic experiments had been undertaken. But pacifist reaction was at its highest point at this time; the technique of para-ectogenesis was seized on as a God-given opportunity to get rid of war by stamping it out of the human spirit.
After the Atomic War of 1970, the survivors instituted drastic genetic regulations intended for one purpose alone-to conserve the Parmalee-Hitchcock recessive of the ninth chromosome and to eliminate the dominant which usually masks it-to breed sheep rather than wolves.
It is wryly amusing that most of the “wolves” of the period-the Paramlee-Hitchcock island is recessive; there are few natural “sheep” — were caught by the hysteria and co-operated in the attempt to eliminate themselves. But some refused. The Northwest Colony eventually resulted.