Word: kallikaks
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With seven months still left before the California Republican primary, the gubernatorial contest between Richard Nixon and Goodwin Knight had already achieved the social level of a Juke-Kallikak picnic...
Deriding the claims of old-fashioned sociologists and asking "What's wrong with this picture?" (see cut), Mr. Sheinfeld points out that the differences between the "worthy Quakeress and the feeble-minded slattern" cannot account for the differences between the two Kallikak clans. For Old Horror, who was presumably feebleminded, could not, by the law of genetics, have inherited his feeble mind from one parent alone. Only "recessive" genes are involved in feeblemindedness, "which means that such genes must come from both parents for the effect to assert itself." Hence "the worthy Martin Kallikak Sr., himself...
...sociologists discovered two family clans living in New Jersey. "One branch comprised upright, intelligent, prosperous citizens; the other abounded in degenerates, mental defectives, drunks, paupers, prostitutes and criminals." Both clans were descendants of Martin Kallikak, a soldier in the Revolution. After the war, Kallikak, who was of good stock, married a Quakeress, had seven respectable children. But before his marriage he had fathered a child of a feeble-minded servant girl. This roistering son, known to the neighborhood as "Old Horror," sired ten worthless offspring, who in turn were responsible for several generations of notorious Kallikaks...
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