Dangers To Intellectual Evolution

Is further biological development in man likely?

1. The biological importance of behaviour. B

By conforming to innate faculties as well as to the environment and by adapting itself to changes in either of these factors, behaviour, though not itself inherited, may yet speed up the process of evolution by orders of magnitude.

While in plants and in the lower ranges of the animal kingdom adequate behaviour is brought about by the slow process of selection, in other words by trial and error, man’s high intelligence enables him to enact it by choice.

This incalculable advantage may easily outweigh his handicap of slow and comparatively scarce propagation, which is further reduced by the biologically dangerous regard not to let our offspring exceed the volume for which livelihood can be secured.

2. This will depend on us and our doing.

We must not wait for things to come, believing that they are decided by irrescindable destiny. If we want it, we must do something about it.

If not, not. Just as the political and social development and the sequence of historical events in general are not thrust upon us by the spinning of the Fates, but largely depend on our own doing, so our biological future, being nothing else but history on a large scale, must not be taken to be an unalterable destiny that is decided in advance by any Law of Nature.

To us at any rate, who are the acting subjects in the play, it is not, even though to a superior being, watching us as we watch the birds and the ants, it might appear to be. The reason why man tends to regard history, in the narrower and in the wider sense, as a predestined happening, controlled by rules and laws that he cannot change, is very obvious. It is because every single individual feels that he by himself has very little say in the matter, unless he can put his opinions over to many others and persuade them to regulate their behaviour accordingly.

As regards the concrete behaviour necessary to secure our biological future, I will only mention one general point that I consider of primary importance. We are, I believe, at the moment in grave danger of missing the ‘path to perfection’. From all that has been said, selection is an indispensable requisite for biological development. If it is entirely ruled out, development stops, nay, it may be reversed. To put it in the words of Julian Huxley: ’ … the preponderance of degener- ative (los~ mutation will result in degeneration of an organ when it becomes useless and selection is accordingly no longer acting on it to keep it up to the mark.’

The increasing mechanization and ‘stupidization’ of most manufacturing processes involve the serious danger of a general degeneration of our organ of intelligence. The more the chances in life of the clever and of the unresponsive worker are equalled out by the repression of handicraft and the spreading of tedious and boring work on the assembly line, the more will a good brain, clever hands and a sharp eye become superfluous. Indeed the unintelligent man, who naturally finds it easier to submit to the boring toil, will be favoured; he is likely to find it easier to thrive, to settle down and to beget offspring. The result may easily amount even to a negative selection as regards talents and gifts.

The hardship of modern industrial life has led to certain institutions calculated to mitigate it, such as protection of the workers against exploitation and unemployment, and many other welfare and security measures. They are duly regarded as beneficial and they have become indispensable. Still we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that, by alleviating the responsibility of the individual to look after himself and by levelling the chances of every man, they also tend to rule out the competition of talents and thus to put an efficient brake on biological evolution.

I realize that this particular point is highly controversial. One may make a strong case that the care for our present welfare must override the worry about our evolutionary future. But fortunately, so I believe, they go together according to my main argument.

Next to want, boredom has become the worst scourge in our lives. Instead of letting the ingenious machinery we have invented produce an increasing amount of superfluous luxury, we must plan to develop it so that it takes off human beings all the unintelligent, mechanical, ‘machine-like’ handling.

The machine must take over the toil for which man is too good, not man the work for which the machine is too expensive, as comes to pass quite often. This will not tend to make production cheaper, but those who are engaged in it happier. There is small hope of putting this through as long as the competition between big firms and concerns all over the world prevails.

But this kind of competition is as uninteresting as it is biologically worthless.

Our aim should be to reinstate in its place the interesting and intelligent competition of single human beings.