Out of the Night - book on eugenics 1936
(Out Of The Night : Muller,h.j. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive)
Muller was born in New York City, the son of Frances (Lyons) and Hermann Joseph Muller, Sr., an artisan who worked with metals. Muller was a third-generation American whose father’s ancestors were originally Catholic and came to the United States from Koblenz.[3] His mother’s family was of mixed Jewish (descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews) and Anglican background, and had come from Britain.[3][4] Among his first cousins are Herbert J. Muller and Alfred Kroeber (Kroeber is Ursula Le Guin’s father).[3] As an adolescent, Muller attended a Unitarian church and considered himself a pantheist; in high school, he became an atheist.[5] He excelled in the public schools. At 16, he entered Columbia College. From his first semester, he was interested in biology; he became an early convert of the Mendelian-chromosome theory of heredity—and the concept of genetic mutations and natural selection as the basis for evolution. He formed a biology club and also became a proponent of eugenics; the connections between biology and society would be his perennial concern. Muller earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1910.[6]
In 1914, Julian Huxley offered Muller a position at the recently founded William Marsh Rice Institute, now Rice University; he hurried to complete his Doctor of philosophy degree and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915–1916 academic year (his degree was issued in 1916). At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work. In 1918, he proposed an explanation for the dramatic discontinuous alterations in Oenothera lamarckiana that were the basis of Hugo de Vries’s theory of mutationism: “balanced lethals” allowed the accumulation of recessive mutations, and rare crossing over events resulted in the sudden expression of these hidden traits. In other words, de Vries’s experiments were explainable by the Mendelian-chromosome theory. Muller’s work was increasingly focused on mutation rate and lethal mutations. In 1918, Morgan, short-handed because many of his students and assistants were drafted for the U.S. entry into World War I, convinced Muller to return to Columbia to teach and to expand his experimental program.[9]
