The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29
Variation and resemblance are large issues, crucial material of the
science of biology upon which much has been thought and written. That
the proportion of the endocrines determines variation and resemblance,
heredity and evolution is a hypothesis advanced, supported by a large
amount of facts, and capable of the most interesting experimental
verification and observation. If a child resembles particularly either
of its parents, grandparents or relatives, there is good reason for
believing that it is because their endocrine formulas are very much
alike. When people apparently not blood-related at all resemble
one other, the same law must hold. Resemblances may be partial or
complete, and the degree will depend upon the amount and ratio of the
internal secretions involved.
The same endocrine constitutions will produce corresponding physiques,
physiognomies, abilities and characters. Deviations in endocrine type
from that of the original stock, more of one endocrine and less of
another, is at the bottom of the phenomenon of variation, basic for
the origin of new species as well as the extinction of the old. In
short, viewing the internal secretions as determinants, by their
quantitative variations, of a host of biologic phenomena furnishes a
concrete and detailed foundation for Darwin's theory of pangenesis.
INHERITANCE OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS
Darwin's theory of pangenesis was an attempt to harmonize everything
known in his time about heredity. It supposed that the various
organs of the body gave off into the blood substances, themselves
in miniature, which were taken up by the sex cells, and so became
responsible for the development of their mother-organ in the newly
forming individual. Modern knowledge cannot accept all this as a
whole. But in a modified version, it has become the germ of a theory
of heredity of which J.T. Cunningham, of Oxford, is the chief backer.
Beginning with the traits and qualities which distinguish the sexes,
grouped as the secondary sex characters, he showed that they are
correlated with the special sexual function of the species in which
they occur. These traits appear only when the hormones occur which
are present in one sex and that only when the gonads of that sex are
mature. In some cases they appear only at the period of the year
when reproduction takes place, disappearing again after the breeding
season. Their presence makes certain cells develop in excessive
numbers at a particular spot in the organism (as in the growth of
breasts from a few sweat glands) or causes them to specialize (to make
hair on the face in man, or to grow antlers on the head of a stag).
After castration, the hormones being absent, all these points of
contrast between the sexes fail to appear. So by analogy we may
explain all somatic and psychic differentiation as functions of the
glands of internal secretion. Contemplated from the angle of the
effect of environment upon the endocrines, and a reflected action
upon the germ cells, we may outline a mechanism of the inheritance of
acquired characters at certain times and consequent adaptation. The
cycle of events would be as follows:
1. A state of lability of cells at a point because of increased or
decreased use.
2. An increased or decreased appropriation by them of the hormone
controlling their function.
3. A corresponding increase or decrease in function of the gland of
internal secretion and so,
4. An increased or decreased representation of it in the reproductive
sex cells in the gonads.
To take a classic illustration, the long neck of the giraffe. The neck
of certain animals living in a district populated by trees with high
branches would be in state of instability. If at the same time the
pituitary, for some reason, was unstable and reacted with an extra
supply of its secretion, it would stimulate the neck cells to
reproduce themselves. In turn the pituitary would become stabilized
in the direction of increased secretion, and hand on the component of
increased secretion to the sex cells. That component, in conjunction
with other factors, would therefore determine the emergence of a
definite species character. In other words, the glands of internal
secretion, as intermediaries between the environment and body, and
between the body and the reproductive sex cells or germplasm, tender
the clue to a phase of the puzzle of heredity, adaptation and
evolution. It is only a dotted outline of an explanation to be sure,
but one certainly capable of being filled in.
THE BEARING ON BREEDING
Since the endocrine glands are so subtly sensitive and responsive to
environment, and are at the same time so intimately concerned in the
process of inheritance--a law which sums up their influence upon
resemblance and variation in animals--there is no need to stress
their importance for the practical science and art of good breeding,
eugenics. Another mode of approach to its problems is opened up, and
fresh enthusiasm instilled into its hopes and aspirations. A method
of analysis of the factors involved, together with rules for the
prediction of the outcome of certain matings, when finally worked out,
will elevate its procedure to the level of the more exact sciences.
A man's chief gift to his children is his internal secretion
composition. The endocrines are truly the matter of breeding as
they are of growth. They are the material carriers of the inherited
physical and psychic dispositions, powers, abilities and disabilities
from the soma to the germplasm and back from the germplasm to the
soma. All kinds of questions arise as soon as one attempts to consider
the bearing of this underlying principle upon concrete situations.
What happens, say, when a pituitocentric mates with a thyrocentric?
Or when a pituitocentric marries a pituitocentric? Is there a
reinforcement or a cancellation of the dominant endocrine? Is there
a quantitative addition of internal glandular tendencies in the
germplasm, or a more complex rearrangement dependent upon reactions
between all the internal secretions?
The term endocrine dominants brings up the inquiries of Mendelism, and
the relation of Mendelian conceptions of dominant and recessive to the
internal secretions. The Mendelians have emphasized the role of the
unit factor in heredity, and the conservation of the unit factor as
an entity through all the adventures of matings. Also, that when unit
factors, say of the color of the eyes, come into conflict, brown or
black being mixed with blue or grey, one, the recessive, is submerged
and overlaid but not destroyed by the other, the dominant. So brown or
black eyes, dark hair, curly hair, dark skin, and so on, are dominant,
while blue or grey eyes, light or straight hair, light skin are
recessives. A nervous temperament is dominant to the phlegmatic. A
number of psychic qualities have been declared to be Mendelian unit
factors: memory, mechanical instinct, mathematical ability, literary
ability, musical ability, and even handwriting.
As architects of human qualities the endocrines must be involved
in the Mendelian unit factors. Moreover, they seem to act upon a
particular locale in different degrees, which is the strongest
argument against the resolution of a number of structural traits into
Mendelian unit characters. Most characters, somatic or psychic, are
the products not of the action of one internal secretion alone, but of
the interlinked activities of all of them. The amount of fat deposited
under the skin, for instance, is influenced by the pituitary, the
thyroid, the pancreas, the liver, the adrenals and the sex glands.
Other qualities, likewise, are resultants of a compromise between all
the endocrine factors comprising the equation of the individual. If
we are to look for unit factors at all in endocrine heredity, we must
look more deeply into constitution, and measure the hormone potentials
and their mobilization or suppression.
It will, in all probability, be found that the stability or
instability of an endocrine will have a good deal to do with the part
played by it in inheritance as well as in the life of the individual
An unstable pituitocentric marrying another unstable pituitocentric
will have children either exceptionally small or tall, or abnormally
bright or stupid. The instability tends to right itself in the next
generation, or that following. Genius as a sport, as well as sudden
degeneration of family stock, the whole problem of mutation, may be
closely connected with this tendency.
It has been noted that the extinction of species has been preceded by
a great increase in their size, for example, the case of the great
reptilia of prehistoric time. That possibly represented pituitary
stabilization, and so an abeyance of the ability to vary, necessary
for fresh adaptation to a changing environment. Indeed, endocrine
instability appears the fundamental condition of the tendency to vary,
endocrine stability the opposite.
Certain endocrine facts in relation to heredity should be mentioned.
The daughters of mothers who menstruated early, themselves menstruate
early. Animals fed upon thyroid during pregnancy, comparable to the
thyrocentric, give birth to offspring with a very large thymus,
comparable to the thymocentric. Women with partial thyroid deficiency,
or myxedema, bear cretins. These are suggestive of what the internal
secretions may do to an individual in inheritance and development.
Inherited endocrine potential is the maximum reaction of which a gland
is capable. This matter of potential is comparable to the factor of
reserve power or margin of safety demonstrated up to the hilt for
such organs as the heart and kidney as varying from individual to
individual. A low potential, like instability of an internal secretion
gland, may be latent, and not made manifest until the proper stimulus,
the maximum amount of stress and strain, like accident, disease, shock
or war, arrives.
When the individual is tested the effects may be purely local because
there is always in the organism a point of least resistance. Physical
changes alone may be prominent. Or because somatic changes are minor,
the psychic will dominate the picture. An attack of the "blues,"
unaccompanied by any demonstrable transformation of the bodily
processes, may be the sole symptom of an endocrine failure somewhere
in the chain due to hereditary weakness or low potential.
So we may account for family trends and streaks, for varieties
and strains among individuals, upon more precise lines based upon
endocrine analysis. Family disturbances of the internal secretions of
the extreme sort denominated disease are well known. Indeed, a number
of family diseases or predispositions to diseases, have been traced
to them. Predisposition in any direction will probably be shown to be
caused by them, within limits. Research here has its opportunity.
THE IMPROVEMENT OF RACIAL STOCK
A vast new territory of inquiry and achievement, as yet totally
unexplored, is opened by the endocrines to the eugenists, and those
idealists whose most earnest aspiration is the improvement of racial
stock as a necessary preliminary to improvement of racial life.
Beginning with Galton, they have brought to light a great collection
of data to prove that human traits and faculties, good and bad, are
inherited. Ability has been shown to run in certain families and
degeneracy in others. Yet all of the practical net result has been
summed up in the term "negative eugenics," the eugenics of prohibition
and warning.
Now the concept of personality, as woven around a system of chemical
reflexes, handed on from generation to generation, is bound to change
all that, and to create a structure of positive eugenics. It has been
said that what radium is to chemistry, the internal secretions are to
physiology. Just as radium enlightens the chemist about the history of
matter, and the integrations and disintegrations constituting the life
of an element--the internal secretions illuminate the history of the
individual as part of the life of the race, and of its integrations
and disintegrations. Seeing the individual as a system of chemical
substances interacting will assist enormously to predict the nature,
character and constitution of his descendants, which is essentially
what the eugenist is after.
The study of matings, the heart of the matter, will concern itself
with the investigation and comparison of the kind of endocrine
personalities that mate, the internal secretion predominances that
cross, and the consequent endocrine personality of the offspring.
Data bearing upon physique and physiognomy, details of anatomy and
function, mind and behaviour will so be co-ordinated as no eugenist
has hitherto succeeded in doing. Laws of endocrine inheritance will
emerge that will bring the control of heredity within measurable
distance. Standards and norms of a new kind would be obtained.
A beginning of this study of endocrine inheritance, on the pathologic
side, has been made. Some of these have been along Mendelian lines.
Following up abnormal growth (making giants and dwarfs) and abnormal
metabolism (goitre, diabetes, and so on), it has been stated that it
would seem that abnormal growth is dominant in the male, and recessive
in the female, while abnormal metabolism is dominant in the female and
recessive in the male. If an endocrine abnormality like a goitre,
or cretinism, or a dwarf or giant appear in a family as a sign of
endocrine instability, other members of that family will very likely
show internal secretion abnormalities.
If one gland of internal secretion acts as the centre of the system
and the others as satellites, we should be able to trace what happens
to it in the different generations. Does it maintain its supremacy? Or
will it be ousted by another member of the group? The time will come
when we shall thus be able to advise prospective parents of the
consequences of procreation and to forecast the meaning for the race
of a particular marriage. Internal glandular analysis may become
legally compulsory for those about to mate before the end of the
present century.
What are desirable and undesirable matings? The general law followed
by nature in her helterskelter way seems to be the production of the
greatest number of hybrids and variations possible, whether for
good or evil does not matter. Certain endocrine types appear to be
specially attracted to others belonging to the same group. Thus
thymus-centered types frequently marry. The ante-pituitary type of
male, the strongly masculine, mates often with the post-pituitary type
of female, the markedly feminine. The children exhibit the lineaments
of the pituitary-centered type. The general trend seems to be the
establishment of a better balanced, equilibrated type. Yet the
children often are apt to segregate into pituitary dominants or
pituitary deficients. Happiness and unhappiness in marriage should
be examined from the standpoint of endocrine compatibility or
incompatibility. Likewise those divorced or about to be divorced.
The correction of endocrine defects, disturbances, imbalances and
instabilities, before mating, presents another field. It remains to be
seen whether we shall thereby, in one generation, be able to affect
at all the germplasm, hitherto revered by all pious biologists as an
environment-proof holy of holies. No one can deny, in the face of the
multitude of evidence available, that internal secretion disturbances
occur in the mother, which, when grave, offer in the infant gross
proof of their significance, and therefore when slight must more
subtly work upon it. Endocrine disturbances in infancy have been
traced to endocrine disturbances in the mother during pregnancy.
Pregnant animals fed on thyroid give birth to young with large thymus
glands. The diet of the mother has been proved conclusively to
influence the development and constitution of the child. As the
internal secretions influence the history of the food in the body,
they affect development in the womb indirectly as well as directly.
Certainly, whether or no we learn how to change the nature of
germplasm within a short time, we have in the endocrines the means at
hand for affecting _the whole individual that is born and sees the
light of day_.
THE CONTROL OF MUTATIONS
The true physical and intellectual evolution of man depends upon the
production of mutations of a desirable kind that can survive. The
information furnished by the study of the endocrines concerning
the genesis of personality provides the foundations for a positive
eugenics, a eugenics of the encouragement of desirable matings, with
the proper legal and social procedures. Selective breeding for the
production of the best endocrine types should become practicable.
But the biologist should be able to go farther. If the eugenist is to
limit himself to the method of the animal breeder he will have to rest
satisfied with the characters or hereditary factors given, that turn
up spontaneously in an individual. But with the internal secretions
as the controllable controllers of mutations, the outlook changes.
It should become possible to produce new mutations, good and bad, to
speed up their production at any rate. The feeding of thyroid to
a gifted father before procreation might enhance immeasurably the
chances of transmission of his gift as well as of its intensification
in his offspring. A field of investigation is opened that would
embrace in due time the deliberate control of human evolution.
All the physical traits, stature, color, muscle function, and so on,
offer themselves for improvement, as well as brain size, and the
intellectual and emotional factors which have dominated man's social
evolution. The general prevalence of nervous disorders in civilized
countries, visible even in the nervous infants the specialist in
children's diseases is called upon to treat, shows that the nervous
system of the better part of mankind is in a state of unstable
equilibrium. It may be another example of the curious coincidences
that have been called the Fitness of the Environment that the
investigation of the endocrines promises to put into our hands the
instruments of the control of the future of the nervous system. In
general, meanwhile, the eugenist should strive for raising the level
of the endocrine potential, and discourage its lowering. That means
the encouragement of matings in which all the internal secretion
activities are reinforced. On the other hand, those internal secretion
combinations, generally leading to a deficiency of all of them which
produce types of mental defectives, delinquency and crime should not
be allowed to occur.
THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT
What suggestions now are there for the euthenist who would control
the influence of environment upon child culture. There are certain
pertinent facts and leads that are worth considering.
In analyzing environment, one must distinguish sharply in the jungle,
the non-living factors from the living. For while the nonliving act
upon the endocrines directly, the living act upon the vegetative
system, as a whole. The non-living factors are those with the intimate
scrutiny of which physics and chemistry have busied themselves: food,
water, air, light, heat, electricity, magnetism. The living are the
animals that prowl all over the planet, the predatories spreading the
gospel of fear.
The dietetic habits of a person, for instance, are known to have an
influence upon the glands of internal secretion. Meat-eating produces
a greater call upon the thyroid than any other form of food. In time
this ought to produce a degree of hyperthyroidism in the carniverous
populations. Pre-war statistics concerning meat-eating in different
countries show the greatest meat-eating among the English-speaking
groups, who all in all must be admitted the most energetic.
_Meat per Day per_
_Countries_ _Capita in Grams_
Australia 306
U.S. of America 149
Great Britain 130
France 92
Belgium and Holland 86
Austria-Hungary 79
Russia 59
Spain 61
Italy 29
Japan 25
Sea-water contains iodine. People living in contact with sea-water
would be apt to get more iodine in their systems, and so a greater
degree of thyroid activity. On the other hand, certain bodies and
sources of inland water hold something deleterious to the thyroid, so
that whole populations in Europe, Asia and America drinking such water
have become goitrous and cretinous, and a large percentage straight
imbeciles. Endemic cretinism is the name given to the condition. In
parts of Switzerland, Savoy, Tyrol and the Pyrenees, in America
around some of the Great Lakes, there are still such foci. Marco Polo
described similar areas he encountered in his travels through Asia.
Certain foods with aphrodisiac qualities may act by stimulating the
internal secretion of the sex glands. A type of pituitocentric has an
almost uncontrollable craving for sweets. Alcohol and the endocrines
remain to be studied.
Light, heat and humidity stand in some special relation to the
adrenals. Pigment deposit in the skin as protection against light
is controlled by the adrenal cortex. The reaction of the skin blood
vessels to heat and humidity is regulated by the adrenal medulla. A
change in the adrenal as a response to changes of temperature and
humidity in an environment would result in a number of concomitant
transformations throughout the body. So variation and adaptation are
probably connected. Most Europeans living for a sufficiently long time
in the tropics suffer from a combination of symptoms spoken of as
"Punjab head" or "Bengal head." The condition is probably the result
of excessive adrenal stimulation by the excessive heat and light of
the tropical sun, followed by a reaction of exhaustion and failure,
with the consequent phenomena of a form of neurasthenia. In the
section on the pineal gland there was mentioned the relation between
light and the pineal gland in growing animals, and how it serves to
keep in check the sex-stimulating action of light. The earlier puberty
and menstruation of the warmer climates may be explained as due to an
earlier regression of the pineal under the pressure of a great amount
of light playing upon the skin.
All these, and many more could be cited, are instances of the direct
influence of environmental factors upon one or more of the endocrines,
and so upon the organism as a whole. Indeed, stimuli may be considered
to modify an organism only in so far as they modify the glands of
internal secretion. Consequently, climatic factors will tend to make a
population possess certain points of resemblance in common.
Varieties of the human race exist as do varieties of dogs. The
pekingese and the fox terrier are as different as the Slav and Latin
are different: because of differences in internal secretion make-up.
The Slav peasant is definitely subthyroid in his general effect:
round head, coarse features, stubby hands, and his stolid, brooding
intellectual and emotional reaction. The Latin shows a pronounced
adrenal streak in his coloration, his emotivity, his susceptibility to
neurosis and psychosis. H. Laing Gordon, a Scot physician, reported
that of 700 cases he studied, more than twice as many of duplex eyed
individuals (brown or black, i.e., adrenal-centered most often), were
susceptible to the mental disturbances of war as the simplex (blue or
gray-eyed, i.e., thyroid-centered most often). He also pointed out
that such individuals tend to have a narrow and abnormally arched
palate. The Anglo-Saxon tends to be more sharply pituitarized, his
features are more clean-cut, his mentality more stable. The Frenchman
is rather a cross between the Anglo-Saxon pituitary-centered and the
Italian or Spanish adrenal-centered.
So national resemblances, traceable to climatic influences being
repeated from generation to generation upon the endocrines, may be
explained physiologically. The physiologic interpretation of history
will indeed be found the broadest, including as complementary Buckle's
climatic theory, Hegel's ideas on the influence of ideas, and Marx's
on the superiority of the economic motives and forces.
THE RACES OF MANKIND
Arthur Keith, conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of
Surgeons of England, was the first to apply the principle of endocrine
differentiation to the problem of the color-lines--the lines which
have divided mankind crudely into the yellow, the red, the white and
the brown, the Negro, the Mongol, the Caucasian, the copper tinted
American. It has long been recognized by anthropologists that the
differences of color march with differences in every comparable trait.
Thus the ideal Negro is built upon a pattern in which all the elements
are specific and singular. When the looms revolve that make him,
there is produced a gleaming black skin, kinky black hair, squat
wide-nostriled nose, thick protruding lips, large striking teeth,
prominent jaws, and staring eyes. As his upright carriage and
bone-muscle-fat proportions are distinctive, so are his musical voice
and his easily wrought upon nerves. In contrast the Caucasian has a
good deal of hair on his body, his skin is a pale tan-pink, his lips
are thin, and his nose especially has the definite bridge which
narrows it. The Mongol, like the Negro, has the hairless body and the
beardless face, but unlike him has lank straight hair on his head,
while his features are flattened and fore-shortened.