Publisher's Synopsis
Giant intellects like Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee have given us complex and tortuous reasons for the decline of civilizations. Dr. Pendell presents us with a simple one. Civilizations fall because the less capable slice of the population regularly outbreeds the more capable. In precivilized times nature weeds out the unfit and eventually produces a superior variety of men whose intelligence and industriousness are channeled into constructing an advanced social order that defeats nature's best-laid plans by protecting instead of eliminating the unfit. The outcome is that in several generations the protected outnumber the protectors. Dr. Pendell scours the annals of history to prove his point, after beginning his seminal study with a remarkable analysis of the inborn, polarized egotistic and altruistic drives which are the biological basis for both the building and unbuilding of civilizations. Most importantly, Dr. Pendell offers us ways and means to stop the historic and hitherto unstoppable processes of social entropy. One of his most intriguing-and most controversial-remedies is a genetically oriented marriage law to raise the birthrate of our better human specimens and substantially lower the proliferation rate of the civilization-destroying people who can neither provide for themselves nor their offspring. About the author: Elmer Pendell (1894 to 1982) was one of the world's foremost population experts and the holder of a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Cross, acquired his B.S. at the University of Oregon, M.A. at the University of Chicago, LL.B. at George Washington University and Ph.D. at Cornell.
