Race Decline and Race Regeneration

For a large part of the inhabitants of the world today, wars and rumors of wars will be considered the greatest threat to life in peace and happiness. The urge for the preservation of life and liberty, including a source of food supply, has dominated all human behavior. Fundamentally, wars have had their chief origin in a disregard for one of Nature’s primary laws of life; namely, the necessity for maintaining a balance between population and the capacity of the soils to produce foods in adequate quantity and quality for supporting it. Modern methods of food production, including agriculture, are primarily adapted to maintaining and increasing the food supply.

While wars are threats that ebb and flow with the struggle for control of land and sea areas, a dilemma has often developed in a progressing severity that expresses itself in a decline of human physical qualities associated with mineral depletion of the soil. These are recognized primarily as individual and group degeneration.

Many modern students of human welfare have emphasized that a dire threat to the continued existence of our modern civilization is expressed in the increasing evidence of degeneration.

Carrel¹ has strongly emphasized the significance of the data indicating that modern man is delicate, and that while the number of deaths from infectious diseases is greatly diminished, man still must die in a much larger proportion from degenerative diseases.

Without quoting at length from many authors, each of us is familiar with the almost daily parade in the press of crime and degeneration. We of the dental profession are directly concerned that approximately four-fifths of the entire population of the United States receive no dental service and that the operations for those that do receive attention are primarily limited to repair and restoration. While the evidence is clear that the percentage of school children in our cities suffering from lost immunity to dental caries remains at approximately 100, a great mass of the population living in districts where the economic stress has been particularly severe have experienced an increase in the severity of dental caries. This is emphasized frequently in my correspondence. For example, a dentist in West Virginia has recently written as follows in discussing the question of increase in dental caries:

“I do general practice and caries is what I have to deal with the most of my time. I have had patients in the past few years as young as 14 years where both upper and lower teeth had to be extracted. I made a denture this week for a patient 19 years old. It seems to me the depression has produced a great increase.”

Similarly, a dentist in Kansas has written:

“My patient is a boy about 15 years old. All of his teeth are through except the third molars and they are all decayed, a majority of them into the nerve. The only thing I can see to do is take them all out and make plates.”

Failure of Repair Programs

Man’s habitats on the earth as established by Nature have provided controlling factors for the rise and fall of human quality, and a study of the reaction of the human species in various types of environments throws important light on the nature of the forces determining the level of physical excellence and mental and moral advancement. Nature has been maintaining a world-size biologic laboratory in which animal life, including human, has responded to the varying environments of the different locations. Whereas most of the previous deductions have been based on the premise that the controlling forces are not subject to influence, the new approach reveals that the whole process is a biologic one and that man is an expression of the reaction of his body to his environment. In other words, degeneration as well as acceleration are biologic processes.

Of the many cultural expressions of mankind in various parts of the world, a few racial stocks have persisted through tens of thousands of years, while others have risen and fallen in a limited number of centuries. The ability to persist has been largely an expression of that group’s capacity to adapt itself to that part of the environment which could not be controlled. Our modern civilizations as expressed in various parts of the world today are primarily the expression of the accumulated wisdom of their tribes or groups in regard to their capacity to adapt themselves to their environment; in other words, to learn Nature’s laws and have both the courage and the strength to obey them.

It is very important that in our efforts at evaluating our boasted modern civilization, we compare our culture with that of many other races of mankind, instead of thinking of culture as a progressive march of humankind up to its zenith of perfection as expressed in modern white civilization. We should think relatively. Fortunately, there is an important movement in this direction at the present time.

M. F. Ashley-Montagu, distinguished anatomist and anthropologist, has done this excellently in the June issue of Scientific Monthly under the title “The Socio-Biology of Man.” After asking what man is as a biologic being and what he is as a social being and discussing these considerations in detail, he traces man’s development as expressed in many of the primitive races and emphasizes the importance of quality over quantity of knowledge or experience. He writes:

“In spite of our enormous technological advances we spiritually and as human beings are not the equal of the average Australian Aboriginal or the average Eskimo–we are very definitely their inferiors. We lisp noble ideals and noble sentiments–the Australians and the Eskimos practice them–they neither write books nor lecture about them. Theirs are the only true democracies, where every individual finds his happiness in catering to the happiness of the group, and where any one who in any way threatens the welfare of the group is dealt with as an abnormality.”

The general approach to interpreting this phase of the problem has assumed that those individuals who suffer from contact with the European civilization have done so because of something that was added to the local environment and brought about by the foreign contact. Similarly, in the interpretation of physical degeneration among the white races, the basis of the interpretation has been that something like an infective process has been a chief factor in producing physical injuries as expressed in lowered organ function as modern degenerative disease. This has been the chief explanation for the diseases of the oral cavity which held that dental caries and the breakdown of alveolar tissues were primarily infective processes and that changes in facial and dental arch form were the result of faulty breathing habits, thumb sucking, etc. On this basis of approach, little advance has been made in preventive procedures during the past hundred years. Because of evidence of universal failure, I have been impressed with the fact that our fundamental problems are related to the absence of essentials for maintaining physical normality rather than invasion of new forces such as infection.

In order to throw light on this phase of the problem, I have gone to fourteen primitive races in many parts of the world to study typical groups in various stages of modernization, from those that are primitive because of isolation and protection from modern influence to groups in various degrees of modernization through commerce with the white races. I have reported these various studies in articles and elsewhere.²

While I shall not review here in detail those findings, it is important in connection with this broad approach to the problem of race decline and race regeneration to emphasize briefly some of the outstanding findings in these field studies. Of particular significance is the fact that these various primitive racial stocks, though living in vastly different environments, ranging from the Arctic to equatorial jungles and from sea level to high mountain areas, the physical changes have not only been similar in each of these different locations when contact is made with modern civilization, but also, in many instances, the individuals have taken on the physical characteristics of the white race of Europe and America. This strongly emphasizes the similarity of the forces at work and their intensity, since the results have been similar in spite of all the inherent resistance due to the long existence of those racial stocks in their particular environment.

The problems that relate directly to the oral cavity concern particularly the dental profession. Whereas the average incidence of dental caries in the isolated primitive groups regardless of location or tribal characteristics involved, on the average, is approximately one tooth per hundred teeth examined, within a relatively short time after contact was made with the white race, this factor increased to an average of thirty teeth of each hundred teeth. In many groups, the primitive stocks showed as few as one tooth per thousand teeth attacked by dental caries before the contact was made with modern civilization, and an increase for the highly modernized groups to 400 and even 600 per thousand. On the basis of individuals affected, the change in some of the groups was from only one in thirty having even one tooth that had been attacked by dental caries to nearly every individual in the group after modernization. Similarly, the health of the supporting tissues, as expressed in loosening of the teeth or so-called pyorrhea, often changed from a very high immunity to an exceedingly low immunity in a short time after a group had made contact with modern civilization. Particularly significant has been the fact that facial and dental arch form as well as body form often changed relatively quickly after the new contact was made.

Tribal facial and body patterns have been assigned by anthropologists to forces of heredity that are almost immutable and that would therefore prevent any rapid change in body pattern. Strikingly, in all of these primitive groups, these patterns changed rapidly in even the first generation after the parents had come sufficiently under the foreign influences. This strongly emphasized that the changes were not due to heredity. Figure 1, above, shows a father and son, both pure blood Indians, living on the coast of South America at Talara, an oil refinery town. The father was the product of the environment in which his parents lived before establishment of the refinery. Here, the International Oil company has a large staff of workers. They and their families live on the coast, where the refineries are located, a district which is arid. These Indians are descendants of the Chimu tribe, a culture that has left a vast number of well preserved burials along that coast. The district between the Andes range and the coast has been almost completely rainless for thousands of years. Burials, accordingly, have been well preserved in the dry sand. In an examination of 1,276 skulls from the burials of this district, I did not find a single skull with typical deformity of the dental arches–not as much deformity as would be present in more than 25 per cent of Americans and Europeans of the highly modernized districts. The boy in Figure 1 represents a change in the development of the facial bones resulting in crowding of the teeth. The impact of a new force has completely prevented repetition in this new generation of the normal processes of heredity. To demonstrate that this is not purely a question related to the coast of Peru, Figure 1, below, shows a father and son representing a similar facial change in the high Andes. The forces that can divert normal transfer of ancestral patterns not only must be very great, but also must operate on the carriers of the architecture for facial and body pattern.

Fig. 1.–Disturbed heredity. The father is the product of the primitive nutrition. The son, also of full blood, is the product of foods of commerce used by the parents. Above, coastal Indians, Peru; below, high Andes Indians, Peru.

 

This problem of rapid change in racial types as expressed in facial design and body form is demonstrated in tens of thousands of our American homes by the difference in the architecture of American-born children of European parents throughout the entire United States. The new generation often knows that something has happened to make them different from their parents. A young woman of Italian parentage living in Cleveland came to me to ask why it was that the boys and girls in the Italian community in Cleveland were not so good looking as their parents. This problem is also emphasized in a large number of American and Canadian homes where there are several children in the family and is expressed as a greater change in the later born children than in the first born.

Figure 2 shows two boys, the one to the left the seventh child and the one to the right (two views) the eighth child, both of whom have marked narrowing of the face including narrowed dental arches.

Figure 2, right, shows the eighth child with his upper dental arch exposed to show its very marked narrowing and distortion. It is significant that this striking expression of modern degeneration in the white race under its present method of living apparently had not been appreciated or discovered until I found it occurring in even the first generation of the primitive races coming under the influence of the modern white race and its commerce.2

 

Fig. 2.–Progressive lowering of reproductive capacity of parents. At left, seventh child; middle and right, two views of eighth child.

 

The forces that cause these changes are now demonstrated to be related to defects in the carriers of life of one or both parents, due to deficient nutrition prior to fertilization and, in some phases, to faulty diet of the mother during the formative period of the child. While deformities of the body, including the face and dental arches, have formerly been. assigned to heredity through the mixing of racial blood and to faulty habits in the early growth period, these new data clearly relate much of this type of injury to defective germ cells. That it is not heredity is clearly demonstrated by the fact that by depriving female pigs of vitamin A for some weeks before mating and for thirty days after mating and then adding vitamin A liberally to the food, serious defects have already been established. Fifty-nine young from six pigs so treated were all born without eyeballs or optic nerves, in addition to which many of them had cleft-palate, harelip, club feet, spinal bifida and deformed ears. Four typically deformed pigs are shown in Figure 3: upper right, eyeless and deformed ears; upper left, cleft palate; lower right, spinal bifida, and lower left, harelip and cleft palate. In future litters from the same sows under favorable conditions of nutrition, there were no deformed offspring. Similarly, the offspring of matings between these blind and deformed pigs when on an adequate nutrition were entirely free from defects. This was also true of the offspring of one of the sows that had given birth to a litter of defective pigs. When she was mated with one of her own defective offspring, eleven normal pigs were produced. The latter condition, according to the laws of heredity, would have required that some defective offspring be produced.

 

Fig. 3.–Gross defects due to vitamin A deficiency of female pigs before mating.

 

Similarly, I have the record of a female dog that has produced five litters, the first four litters by the same sire. In the first three litters, with both parents on an excellent diet, no deformed offspring were produced. In the fourth litter, the diets of both mother and sire were deficient in fat-soluble vitamins, particularly A. From this mating, there were ten pups, eight of which had cleft palate. One had both harelip and cleft palate and two were normal. In the fifth litter, this dog was mated to one of her own offspring, in which case, if there had been an hereditary basis for these defects, they should have appeared in the offspring, which were all perfect. In Figure 4 are shown three typical defects in dogs due to the nutritional deficiency of parents: upper left, cleft-palate; upper right, cleft-palate associated with spinal deformity shown below. That the responsibility may be related to either parent is established by the development of the two latter striking defects involving cleft-palate and spinal deformity in five pups in four litters born about the same time and all by the same sire.

Fig. 4.–Gross defects due to vitamin deficiency of male dogs before mating.

 

It is of special importance for the members of the dental profession that in various types of deformities, disturbed development of the facial bones, particularly the maxillary bones, was a common occurrence, tending to be present in association with most other defects.

A striking illustration of facial injury will be recognized in the faces of mongolian idiots. These have usually proved to be the last child in the family, born after the mother was 40 years of age. In this case, the mental injury associated with the physical is very conspicuous. The members of this group present a uniformly severe association of physical deformity and personality change due to brain defects. It is now recognized that we have a large group of border-line individuals with varying degrees of mental deficiency, usually spoken of as backward or retarded persons. It is of great importance that the members of this group quite regularly show either marked or moderate physical injury in the development of the bones of the skull, particularly the maxillary bones.

In the light of these new data developed from my studies among primitive faces and from animal experimentation, there is strong evidence that these backward individuals are primarily the product of defective germ cells of one or both parents. It is a cause for great concern that these disturbed mental states frequently express themselves in such unsocial behavior that many of this group are conspicuous in their communities for delinquency in various forms. These character changes have been largely assigned to environmental influences due to frustration and disappointments of the child in the early growth period and therefore assigned entirely to the environment, with the result that the effort at their correction has been almost entirely limited to improvement in the social environment of the growing child. This procedure is apparently much too late for prevention of this expression of racial degeneration, which has a very wide spread influence in our modern social organization, including group and national behavior. It is particularly tragic that whereas many of the primitive races studied have had practically no delinquency problems prior to their contact with the white race, serious problems have arisen with the processes of modernization. These severe expressions of group and racial deterioration constitute what is probably one of the most serious single problems confronting modern civilization.

Specialists in the study of the physical and mental characteristics of these delinquents have presented important data. Burt,³ of London, after extended contact with juvenile delinquents, makes this comment:

“It is almost as though crime were some contagious disease, to which the constitutionally susceptible were suddenly exposed at puberty, or to which puberty left them peculiarly prone.”

That there are predetermining conditions which relate to physical constitutions has been emphasized by Tredgold, whose extended studies led him to relate the problem to two sources of germ-cell injury, which he described as “germinal blight” and “arrest.” He has stressed particularly that the former condition was pathologic and related to the germ of either or both parents, being due to poisoning of the germ cell. It is also important that Tredgold recognized the direct relationship between facial and dental arch development and mental deficiency. He says,⁴ in discussing palate form:

“The association of abnormalities of the palate with mental deficiency has long been recognized, and there is no doubt that it is one of the commonest malformations occurring in this condition. Many years ago Langdon Down drew attention to the subject, and more recently Clouston has recorded a large number of observations which show conclusively that, although deformed palates occur in the normal, they are far and away more frequent in neuropaths and mentally defective. He states that deformed palates are present in 19 per cent of the ordinary population, 33 per cent of the insane, 55 per cent of criminals, but in no less than 61 per cent of idiots. Petersen, who has made a most exhaustive study of this question, and has compiled an elaborate classification of the various anomalies, found palatal deformities present in no less than 82 per cent of aments (mental defectives), in 76 per cent of epileptics, and in 80 per cent of the insane.”

Hickson, in the report of the Cook County Probation Officer, in 1914 states, regarding delinquents, that 85.8 per cent of females are distinctly feeble-minded and 84.5 per cent of boys under arrest are morons.

Hooton, in his investigation of criminals published in his book Crime and the Man, after consolidating studies of 15,000 criminals in ten states, writes:

“On the whole, the biological superiority of the civilian to the delinquent is quite as certain as his sociological superiority. One set of consistent contrasts rears itself in a solid, unbroken, and towering front. The putatively law-abiding citizen, however humble his social and economic status, is largely superior in physique and in most anthropological characters, so far as judgments of quality can be made, to the White criminal of comparable ethnic and racial origin and drawn from approximately similar occupational levels.”

Social workers and teachers are continually impressed with the evidence that we have an increasing number of backward boys and girls unable to carry forward their studies with their classmates, and with conspicuous unsocial traits. In many communities, field workers and clinicians are observing an increasing number of defectives. A teacher from the hill country of a neighboring state recently reported to me that a considerable number in her group of thirty children were unable to carry forward their studies. The children from one family strikingly illustrated the progressive decline in reproductive capacity of the parents. The youngest of the eight children has both harelip and cleft-palate; the seventh has cleft-palate; the sixth is retarded mentally, while the first born is normal.

This problem of capacity for efficient reproduction constitutes one of the most important confronting our declining modern white race.

The importance of the perfection of the germ cells is well expressed by Dr. Streeter, director of the Department of Embryology, Carnegie Institute at Washington:

“It is well known that eggs, and by eggs I refer to fertilized ova, are not all of equal quality. In pigs and in man it is estimated that as many as 25 per cent of them are not good enough to be born as living individuals…In man such specimens make up a large part of the material that the physician encounters as miscarriages. Nor is the importance of quality limited to uterine life. Whether the infant survives its first year and in fact a large number of them fail to do this depends in considerable part on the original quality of the egg. If they withstand the usual experiences of life until between 50 and 60 years old and then succumb to its aggregate wear and tear, they conform to the actuary’s ‘expectation of life at birth,’ and to the embryologist’s expectation of the performance of an egg of average quality. It is only the extraordinarily good egg that is still going strong at 80 years, and we see him (or her) do this in the absence of any exquisite hygienic regime or environmental favor.”

Race Regeneration

Since the processes of race decline and race degeneration are clearly biologic and related to failure to meet Nature’s requirements in the matter of nutrition, both that of the individual during the formative and growth periods and that of the parents-to-be before fertilization takes place, means are indicated whereby the correction of these errors may be achieved for the progressive betterment of the human stock.

Two distinct types of degeneration have been disclosed by my studies among the primitive races. One has to do with the breakdown of the organs and tissues of the affected individual, whereby function is disturbed, and the other has to do with the architecture of the body and is related to the capacity of the germ cells to carry forward the unit characters that are provided for normal heredity.

A typical example in the first group is dental caries. The members of many of the primitive races, who, like their ancestors, have been almost completely free from dental caries, have developed caries in a relatively short period following the change of nutrition from that of the primitive stock to that provided by the commerce of the modern civilization, and have again quickly regained their immunity to caries on returning to the primitive diet. That the same condition has obtained in nearly all of the fourteen primitive races studied when they changed from their various native diets to the food of commerce is strong evidence that a controlling factor lies in the nutrition.

A chemical analysis of the primitive foods provided in the various native dietaries when compared with the foods of commerce has disclosed a much higher level of minerals and vitamins in the native foods, as selected in accordance with the accumulated wisdom of those tribes, than in the foods of commerce. We have hereby a means for the control of active dental caries through modification of the dietary by making it chemically equivalent to that of the primitive stocks.

An excellent illustration of the application of this principle is provided by the history of the Maori stock in New Zealand. The skulls of the native New Zealanders before the coming of the white face and at the time of its arrival showed that only one tooth per thousand teeth had been attacked by dental caries. My studies of the modernized Maori revealed that from 30 to 60 per cent of the teeth had been attacked by 557 dental caries, or from 400 to 600 teeth per thousand teeth. The present Maori dietary is very similar to that of the whites of New Zealand. In contrast with the original high immunity of the natives to caries, the modern whites of New Zealand are credited by their own dentists with having the poorest teeth of all groups in the world.

The Hukerara Girls’ School in Napier for native Maori girls had, as I have reported, a high incidence of dental caries in the student body when I visited the school in 1936. Dr. Tocker has undertaken to improve the conditions there by modifying the food selection for this group in accordance with a program that I have outlined for him. This included a liberal increase of sea foods and seeds as used by the original Maori. His report, recently made in the New Zealand Dental Journal, indicates a reduction in dental caries of 75 per cent since the establishment of the program. Another item of importance that he reports relates to a flu epidemic in which not one of the girls in this group under the nutritional program contracted the flu, whereas, in the Maori boys’ school in the same vicinity, approximately half of the boys developed influenza. Similarly, diphtheria, which was epidemic, failed to attack any of the girls on this special dietary program.

My investigations have included the practical application of the data obtained from these studies among primitive races to the control of dental caries in our highly modernized whites. By reducing the energy sources, chiefly refined sugar and white flour products, and increasing the foods providing the minerals and vitamins in their natural form, tooth decay has been controlled for from 90 to 95 per cent of the individuals. The failure to establish complete immunity was limited to those persons who did not cooperate properly.

It is a common experience to have referred patients in whom all or nearly all of the teeth have been attacked by dental caries and, with no other change in the program but a reinforcement of the diet, to have caries completely checked even without fillings.

Another serious affection involving the tissues of the mouth is related to the supporting structures and is commonly regarded as pyorrhea. My experience among several primitive races in various parts of the world has been that both the skulls of past members of their race and the living members while in isolation have healthy supporting structures of the teeth with little tendency toward pyorrhea. An important change occurs in all of these groups with the change from the native nutrition to the foods of commerce.

A critical examination of the foods as selected by these isolated groups indicates a high level of the vitamin B series. Patients suffering from pellagra in various parts of the world have as one of their outstanding symptoms the breakdown of the supporting tissues of the teeth characterized by swelling and bleeding of the gums and loosening of the teeth. This constitutes one of the early symptoms, but one of the most nearly universal and the severest. Pellagra has been shown to be directly due to an inadequate quantity of that vitamin B factor which is now recognized and produced synthetically as nicotinic acid. The breakdown of the alveolar tissues and membranes surrounding the teeth is directly due to deficiency of both fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins. Reinforcement with foods rich in these, including the vitamin B series, is indicated. The continued use of nicotinic acid as a prophylactic procedure, however, is not advocated, as other factors are involved which are provided in natural foods.

Another important part of the training of the young life of primitive races has been the transfer from parent to child of information relative to efficient sources of nutrition for maintaining complete health. I have presented many illustrations of this in my reports.

If our modernized civilizations are to regain much that has been lost through failure to provide our bodies with an adequate amount of the essential food factors, the first requisite will be information in time to prevent the development of the structural changes and affections that are responsible for the expressions of our modern degeneration. The data that I have been collecting from the primitive races are immediately applicable for this purpose.

Owing to the many requests from universities, colleges, high schools, boards of education and uplift organizations for illustrative material, such as I have accumulated, for teaching purposes, I have developed a series of profusely illustrated lectures in very simple language adaptable for educational uses in lay and professional groups.

Since the efforts of health agencies, particularly of the medical and dental professions, have been devoted so largely in the past to treatment and repair after disease and dysfunction have been established in order to relieve pain and discomfort without stemming the tide of degeneration, it is clear that any program that is to be effective should go back to the sources and prevent the development of these affections.

 

Editor’s note: Since the era in which this article was written, society’s understanding of respectful terminology when referring to ethnic and cultural groups, and those with mental illness and developmental disabilities has evolved, and some readers may be offended by references to “primitive” people and other out-of-date terminology. However, this article has been archived as a historical document, and so we have chosen to use Price’s exact words in the interest of authenticity.  No disrespect to any individuals or groups is intended.

 

References Cited:

1. Carrel, Alexis: Man, the Unknown. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939.
2. Price, W. A.: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., Medical Book Department, Harper & Brothers.
3. Burt, C. L.: Young Delinquent. London: The University of London Press, 1925.
4. Tredgold, A. F.: Mental Deficiency (Amentia). Ed. 5 Baltimore: William Wood & Co., 1929.