Dear Sir

With reference to my letter (Newsletter December 1998) concerning the triple-tasting of 6-n-propyl-2-thiouracil and build.

Since build is reported to reflect personality, part of C Robert Cloninger’s temperament and character inventory was used to pick out “Novelty Seeking” (dopamine mediated) and norepinephrine mediated character-factors. The latter showed no correlation.

As before the extended Pembrokeshire family was used, mostly of the 1960s generation, and the scores were corrected for age. Twenty-one men and twenty-four women were tested by myself and the results were as shown in the table.

These results could encourage gene-probing I think; perhaps for other localised populations.

Patrick F James

Ref: A Systematic Method for Clinical Description and Classification of Personality Variants, C Robert Cloninger, Arch. Gen. Psychiatry, Vol 44, June 1987.

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Dear Editor

If you go to the website www.ronsangels.com you will find young women selling their eggs to the highest bidder for thousands of dollars. This service is real, the site exists and the owner says, “The egg auction is a natural outgrowth of the urge humans have to mate with genetically superior people”. Despite all the press hype surrounding the service’s launch in October what no one has mentioned is that it is these attractive young models themselves who will gain the biggest evolutionary advantage, to a point that could put them on a par with some of the most notorious of Arab princes. (The number of eggs a woman has in her ovaries is of course nonetheless finite.) It is perfectly true that all the technology is not yet proven, and all the techniques not yet perfected: but this is not the point. The point is that this is the cutting edge of what is happening where the free market meets eugenics in our society today. Not some outdated debate about black/white intelligence differences, nor a historical analysis of shifts in the social context of eugenic thought since the turn of the century, nor a study of specific family trees. While these venerable and learned subjects are interesting and relevant they quite simply are not where it’s at.

Galton was a man of ingenious initiative and intelligence; his inquiring instinct and inventive nature would have naturally been at the forefront of what was happening. With the resources and academic weight of the society there really is so much that could be done: (I’ve got quite few ideas). It seems to me that our organisation at the moment is not doing justice to the man whose name it bears. Meanwhile Helen, 25 years old, 5ft 6in with a 34-25-36 figure of Polish Jewish extraction continues to take bids above 20,000 dollars.

Philip Mellish