Man has now little to fear from competition with other species. His worst enemies outside his own species are insects and bacteria; and even with these he has been, and doubtless will continue to be, able to deal successfully. For man, competition is now predominantly intra-specific. A dispassionate analysis of the circumstances in which the human race now lives makes it clear that most of this intra-specific competition is not imposed by any kind of biological necessity, but is entirely gratuitous and voluntary. In other words, we are wantonly and deliberately pursuing a policy which we need not pursue and which we have the best scientific reasons for supposing to be disastrous to the species as a whole. We are using our intelligence to adapt ourselves more and more effectively to the modern conditions of intra-specific competition. We are doing our best to develop a militaristic ‘hypertely,’ to become, in other words, dangerously specialized in the art of killing our fellows.
Evolution has resulted in the world as we know it to-day. Is there any reason for regarding this world as superior to the world of earlier geological epochs? In other words, can evolution be regarded as a genuine progress? These questions can be answered, with perfect justification, in the affirmative. Certain properties, which it is impossible not to regard as valuable, have been developed in the course of evolution. The lower forms of life persist more or less unchanged; but among the higher forms there has been a definite trend towards greater control and greater independence of the physical environment. Beings belonging to the highest forms of life have increased their capacity for self-regulation, have created an internal environment capable of remaining stable throughout very great changes in the outer world, have equipped themselves with elaborate machinery for picking up knowledge of the outer world, as well as of the inner, and have developed a wonderfully effective instrument for dealing with that knowledge. Evolutionary progress is of two kinds: general, all-round progress and one-sided progress in a particular direction. This last leads to specialization. From the evidence provided by the study of fossils and living forms, we are justified in inferring that any living form which has gone in for one-sided progress thereby makes it impossible for itself to achieve generalized progress. Nothing fails like success; and creatures which have proved eminently successful in specializing themselves to perform one sort of task and to live in one sort of environment are by that very fact foredoomed to ultimate failure.
Failure may take the form of extinction, or alternatively, of survival and adaptive radiation into forms that reach a relatively stable position and become incapable of further development, since such development would imperil the equilibrium existing between the living creature and its environment. Only one species, of all the millions that exist and have existed, has hitherto resisted the temptation to specialize. Sooner or later all the rest have succumbed and have thus put themselves out of the running in the evolutionary race. This is true even of the mammals.
After achieving a stable inner environment, placental and, in some cases, monotocous birth, highly developed sense organs, and a well co-ordinated nervous system, all but one proceeded to specialize and so to shut themselves off from the possibility of further progress. Man alone kept himself free from specialization and was therefore able to go on progressing in the direction of greater awareness, greater intelligence, greater control over environment. Moreover, alone of all living beings upon this planet he is in a position to advance from his present position. If man were to become extinct, it seems certain that no other existing animal would be able to develop into a being comparable to man for control over or independence of environment, for capacity to know the world and its own mind.
What are the general conclusions to be drawn from the scientific picture of life’s history on this planet? There is no need, in this context, to consider any of the lower forms of life. It is enough to point out, for example, that cold-bloodedness limits the power of any animal to become independent of its environment; that effective control over the environment is impossible for animals of less than a certain size; that some animals are not only too small but are predestined, as the arthropods are predestined by their system of tracheal breathing, to remain small to the end of the chapter; that absolute smallness limits the size of the nervous system and so, apparently, of the amount of mental power which any animal can dispose of. And so forth. We can sum the matter up by saying that progress can be achieved only by the highest types of animal life.
Even among these highest types evolution can continue to be a genuine progress only when certain conditions are fulfilled. Let us enumerate the most important of these conditions.
First of all, an organism must advance, so to speak, along the whole biological front and not with one part of itself or in one particular direction only. One-sided specialized advance is incompatible with genuine progress. But one-sided specialist advance is encouraged, as we have seen, by intra-specific competition. This brings us to the second of our conditions, which is that intra-specific competition shall be reduced to a minimum. Progress is dependent on the preponderance of intra-specific co-operation over intra-specific competition. Other things being equal, that species will make most progress whose members are least combative, most inclined to work together instead of against one another. The third condition of biological progress is intelligence. There can be no effective co-operation on any level above the instinctive except among creatures which are aware of one another’s needs and are able to communicate with one another. (It is worth noting that intelligence cannot be developed except on the fulfilment of certain physiological and mechanical conditions. These conditions have been set forth by Elliot Smith and other authorities. For example, among the conditions of human intelligence must be numbered man’s erect carriage and the consequent development of the hand.)
Intelligence is essential; but intelligence cannot function properly where it is too often or too violently interfered with by the emotions, impulses and emotionally charged sensations. The sensations most heavily charged with emotional content are sensations of smell. Man’s sense of smell is relatively poor and this apparent handicap has proved to be an actual advantage to him.[24] Instead of running round like a dog, sniffing at lamp-posts and becoming deeply agitated by what he smells on them, man is able to stand away from the world and use his eyes and his wits, relatively unmoved. Nor is this all. His power of inhibiting emotion once aroused is evidently much greater than that of most other animals. When a human baby was brought up with a baby chimpanzee (see The Ape and the Child, by Professor and Mrs. Kellogg), it was found that the chimpanzee’s intelligence, at least during the first eighteen months of life, was more or less equal to the human’s.
On the contrary, its power of inhibiting emotion was far lower and it was consequently unable very often to make use of its intelligence. (For example, when its parents went away, the baby would cry for a few minutes, then settle down cheerfully to play; the ape would be inconsolable for several hours, during which it was incapable of doing anything else but grieve.) Animals are almost as heavily handicapped by excess of emotionality as by a lack of intelligence. It is this excess of emotionality which has made it impossible for all animals except man to pass from emotional to conceptual speech. Beasts can make noises expressive of their feelings; but they cannot make noises which stand for objects and ideas as such, objects and ideas considered apart from the desires and emotions they arouse. Conceptual speech made possible the development of disinterested thinking, and the capacity to think disinterestedly was responsible for the development of conceptual speech.
No account of the scientific picture of the world and its history would be complete unless it contained a reminder of the fact, frequently forgotten by scientists themselves, that this picture does not even claim to be comprehensive. From the world we actually live in, the world that is given by our senses, our intuitions of beauty and goodness, our emotions and impulses, our moods and sentiments, the man of science abstracts a simplified private universe of things possessing only those qualities which used to be called ‘primary.’ Arbitrarily, because it happens to be convenient; because his methods do not allow him to deal with the immense complexity of reality, he selects from the whole of experience only those elements which can be weighed, measured, numbered, or which
