The Future of Understanding

A BIOLOGICAL BLIND ALLEY?

We may, I believe, regard it as extremely improbable that our understanding of the world represents any definite or final stage, a maximum or optimum in any respect.

By this I do not mean merely that the continuation of our research in the various sciences, our philosophical studies and religious endeavour are likely to enhance and improve our present outlook.

What we are likely to gain in this way in the next, say, two and a half millennia - estimating from what we have gained since Protagoras, Democritus and Antisthenes - is insignificant compared with what I am here alluding to. There is no reason whatever for believing that our brain is the supreme ne plus ultra of an organ of thought in which the world is reflected. I t is more likely than not that a species could acquire a similar contraption whose corresponding imagery compares with ours as ours with that of the dog, or his in turn with that of a snail.

If this be so, then - though it is not relevant in principle - it interests us, as it were for personal reasons, whether anything of the sort could be reached on our globe by our own offspring or the offspring of some of us. The globe is all right. I t is a fine young leasehold, still to run under acceptable conditions of living for about the time it took us (say 1,000 million years) to develop from the earliest beginnings into what we are now.

But are we ourselves all right? If one accepts the present theory of evolution - and we have no better - it might seem that we have been very nearly cut off from future develop- ment. Is there still physical evolution to be expected in man, I mean to say relevant changes in our physique that become gradually fixed as inherited features, just as our present bodily self is fixed by inheritance - genotypical changes, to use the technical term of the biologist? This question is difficult to answer. We may be approaching the end of a blind alley, we may even have reached it. This would not be an exceptional event and it would not mean that our species would have to become extinct very soon. From the geological records we know that some species or even large groups seem to have reached the end of their evolutionary possibilities a very long time ago, yet they have not died out, but have remained unchanged, or without significant change, for many millions of years. The tortoises, for instance, and the crocodiles are in this sense very old groups, relics of a far remote past; we are also told that the whole large group of insects are more or less in the same boat - and they comprise a greater number of separate species than all the rest of the animal kingdom taken together. But they have changed very little in millions of years, while the rest of the living surface of the earth has during this time undergone change beyond recognition. What barred further evolution in the insects was probably this - that they had adopted the plan (you will not misunderstand this figurative expression) - that they had adopted the plan of wearing their skeleton outside instead of inside as we do. Such an outside armour, while affording protection in addition to mechanical stability, cannot grow as the bones of a mammal do between birth and maturity. This circumstance is bound to render gradual adaptive changes in the life-history of the individual very difficult.

In the case of man several arguments seem to militate against further evolution. The spontaneous inheritable changes - now called mutations - from which, according to Darwin’s theory, the ‘profitable’ ones are automatically selected, are as a rule only small evolutionary steps, affording, if any, only a slight advantage. That is why in Darwin’s deductions an important part is attributed to the usually enormous abundance of offspring, of which only a very small fraction can possibly survive. For only thus does a small amelioration in the chance of survival seem to have a reasonable likelihood of being realized.

This whole mechanism appears to be blocked in civilized man - in some respects even reversed. We are, generally speaking, not willing to see our fellow-creatures suffer and perish, and so we have gradually introduced legal and social institutions which on the one hand protect life, condemn systematic infanticide, try to help every sick or frail human being to survive, while on the other hand they have to replace the natural elimination of the less fit by keeping the offspring within the limits of the available livelihood. This is achieved partly in a direct way, by birth control, partly by preventing a considerable proportion of females from mating. Occasionally - as this generation knows all too well - the insanity of war and all the disasters and blunders that follow in its wake contribute their share to the balance. Millions of adults and children of both sexes are killed by starvation, exposure, epidemics. While in the far remote past warfare be’tween small tribes or clans is supposed to have had a positive selection value, it seems doubtful whether it ever had in historical times, and doubtless war at present has none. It means an indiscriminate killing, just as the advances in medicine and surgery result in an indiscriminate saving of lives. While justly and diametrically opposite in our esteem, both war and medical art seem to be of no selection value whatever.