His second lecture was devoted to `heredity and eugenics' where he covered such topics as Weissman's germ-plasm theory, evolutionary theory, neo-Lamarckianism,
Mendelism, Galtonism, Pearson's biometricism, positive, negative and preventive eugenics, including much detail on the `racial poisons' of alcohol and syphilis.
Central to this campaign was the promotion of the synthetic theory of evolution - that blend of Darwinism and
Mendelism to be found in Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species - and part of this promotion centered on the upgrading of the lowest of the low: taxonomy.