Selective breeding can alter man's capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy. There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature.
Psychologists
Edward Thorndike
American psychologist (1874-1949). Puzzle-box experiments made animal learning measurable; his law of effect founded educational psychology. Eugenic views led Columbia to rename Thorndike Hall.
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Edward Thorndike's Other Quotes
Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation.
Most of the books do not give us a psychology, but rather a eulogy of animals. They have all been about animal intelligence, never about animal stupidity.
Anything that exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality.
Related Quotes
I have no patience with the hypothesis - often implied in tales meant to teach children to be good - that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the only agencies creating differences between boy and boy, or man and man, are steady application and moral effort.
-- Francis Galton
Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.
-- Francis Galton