Part 6
The qualitative difference between man and other organisms is a cardinal fact with orthodox biology has tended to slur over or to neglect, whereas philosophy has too often tried to magnify it unduly so as to make man frankly incommensurable with his lower relatives, a creature not only unique but disparate.
Man is obviously and undoubtedly an organism of the same general nature as other organisms. He possesses the same general system of organs, working in the same way as a dog, a horse, a bird, a crocodile, or a frog; he passes through the same type of developmental cycle; he is built on the same detailed plan as other mammals; and numerous indications betray his descent from a particular branch of the mammalian stock.
But in his mode of life and type of social organization he is unique. All detailed comparisons between the communities of man and those of bees and ants are as unprofitable in the working-out as they are easy in the making. It is futile to direct the sluggard or any other human being to the ant, since the whole physical and psychical construction of ants is different from that of man, the whole organization of their communities from that of his.
His mode of life is unique because his psycho-neural mechanism is built on a new plan, new modes of connection between parts of the brain being associated with new possibilities of mind. Let us briefly run over the biologically most important points in which he differs from the lower organisms.
In the first place, he is capable of speech, and possesses a true language--not a mere repertory of sounds or signs associated with different states of mind, as in some higher organisms, but a language comprising special symbols for particular external objects, and thus making it possible to have a much more detailed knowledge and classification of the outer world. In the second place, he can frame abstract ideas or concepts, and is thus enabled to extract the general kernel from the husk of innumerable separate and different particulars. As a result of these two faculties, he possesses what we may call a new, accessory form of inheritance. True biological inheritance takes place by means of the reproductive cells. In some birds and mammals, the behaviour of the young is modified by what they learn from their parents, so that they profit by the experience of their elders; however, this profiting by experience is not cumulative, but must be repeated afresh in each generation. In man, on the other hand, speech and writing make it possible to construct a continuous tradition, by means of which experience may be actually accumulated from generation to generation. There are thus two forms of inheritance in man, two hereditary streams--biological inheritance, by means of germ-cells or detached portions of the organism, in which favourable mutations may be accumulated by selection, and “experience-inheritance,” by means of tradition, in which useful experience may be accumulated by the activity of mind. By means of tradition-inheritance, man is virtually enabled to “inherit acquired characters”; thus the environment in which the latter stages of his development are passed through, and consequently his adult self, the end-product of that development, can be altered far more rapidly than in any other organism. Finally, it is possible, as is being increasingly realized, thus to accumulate experience relating to the alteration of biological inheritance, and so eventually to substitute conscious purpose for blind natural selection in man’s future evolution.
Next point: by means of speech, tradition, and invention, man has been enabled to extend his biological environment--in other words, that part of the cosmos with which he stands in relation--till it has reached an enormously greater size than that of any other organism. He is learning ever more facts about the celestial bodies, studying stars that are at an inconceivable distance from him. He is able to travel at will to all parts of the globe. He can penetrate by means of tradition to remote periods of the past: as Mr. Wells has forcibly put it, a modern Englishman can know more of the world in the Classical Epoch than could the most learned Greek or Roman. And even when he can no more get into contact with ideas, he can still unravel facts: flint implements help him to the history of man, fossils to that of life, rocks to that of the globe, stars to that of the solar system. In time, as well as in space, his environment enlarges to a size that is for practical purposes infinite, whereas no other organism can penetrate beyond its own memories, or, at most, do more than profit by those of the generation immediately before it. Professor Keyser,[20] in a suggestive article, has characterized this unique attribute of man by calling him “the time-binder.”
Speech and reasoning, with all their consequences, have only been rendered possible through another important qualitative change in the human brain, which in its turn has led to other new potentialities of life being realized in man and in man alone--its flexibility.
In some of the lowest forms of life, such as Paramecium, there are but one or two possible modes of reaction--reactions which it attempts in response to any one of the myriad changes that may occur in the outer world. As we ascend the scale, we find two chief types of alterations: in the first place an increase in the number of hereditarily-given modes of reaction, and in the second an increased power of “learning,” of altering behaviour in adjustment to experience. In the insects, the first is chiefly in evidence. Although many insects undoubtedly can profit by experience to a limited degree, yet most of their behaviour is instinctive, in the sense that it unrolls itself automatically and efficiently in the absence of previous experience or of any possible instruction. In the vertebrates, on the other hand, we see as we pass from the lower to the higher groups a definite, steady increase in the power of learning by experience, from the fish that takes weeks to associate a given colour with a given event such as feeding-time, to the dog or monkey capable of learning elaborate tricks after a couple of trials. But even in the most “intelligent” of birds or mammals, the power of image-formation is very probably absent,[21] and the power of concept-formation, of generalizing, certainly so. This fact (quite apart from the absence of tradition, although this too operates in the same direction) means that the associations of animals can only be arbitrary and individual: a rook in one country (to choose a somewhat far-fetched example) may happen to associate danger with fire-arms, one in another with bows and arrows. Life, for the animals, is a cinema, different for each individual, in which one event may be associated with another in the most diverse and haphazard ways. With the advent of the human type of brain, however, experience can be sorted out and properly docketed; the mere cinematographic record is converted into a drama full of significance, the diary into a card-index. By this means, and by tradition, it is possible for man to obtain a much more accurate and more complete grasp of the relationships of the objects that compose the outer world than is possible for any other animal. Through knowledge, as ever, comes power: and as a result, man has been enabled to invent tools and machinery, and so to enlarge enormously his control over his environment. Just as his “range,” in the zoogeographical sense, is extended to an unprecedented degree both in space and time, so tools represent, biologically speaking, an extension of himself as an operator. While man is using a tool, he and the tool together constitute but a single unit in the struggle for existence. As various writers have put it, tools and machines are temporary organs of man, which have the additional merit of being replaceable if lost or damaged.
But this is not all: the great power of association possessed by man, together with his faculty of generalization and of speech, makes it possible for him to _learn_ his rôle in the community, instead of being born with it as are the bee and the ant. Great educability instead of differentiated instinct, infinite possibility, at the expense of the pains of learning, instead of an effortless but limited stock of inborn modes of behaviour--in this again man represents a qualitatively new organic type.
By this means he can escape what has always been a necessity with lower forms: by means of education and machinery he can play a specialized part in the community life, and so build up a community with a high degree of division of labour, without being born specialized. He could not thus learn his rôle if he were not educable, nor if he could not manufacture tools. An ant or a duck or a dog possesses admirable tools for its particular job: but they are living parts of the organism’s own body. A worker ant cannot lay down its serviceable carpentering mandibles and become a soldier by picking up a large and warlike pair:--once a worker, always a worker; once a soldier, always a soldier--that is the rule for ants, but not for men.
The efficiency and biological success of communities depends on the degree and accuracy of the division of labour and co-ordination between the units of which they are built up. This is true of cell-communities and the second-grade individuals or metazoa or multicellular animals and plants to which they give rise,[22] and also of the communities of metazoa and the third-grade individuals to which they give rise, whether the members of such communities of higher grade are physically bound together, as in a Hydroid or a Portuguese Man-o’-War, or united only by mental bonds, as are the communities of ants and bees and termites. As we have seen, the individuals are differentiated structurally for the different functions which they have to perform.
This is not so in human species: a man is not born cross-legged to be a tailor, or broad-thumbed to be a miller, or big-armed to be a blacksmith. Even in the hereditary castes of India, the trade or profession is determined by tradition, and not by inborn structural adaptations.
Still another consequence flows from this educability, this flexible and elastic mental organization. A man can pass from one occupation to another. He can be specialized for several, or combine a high degree of professional skill in one with the generalized knowledge of an amateur in another. It is this obvious but fundamental fact which is at the bottom of many of the failures to apply biological ideas to sociology.
Another human distinction is the increase of the part played by environment in man as opposed to animals (in determining his biologically effective nature). Environment plays not merely a large part, but a preponderating one, in his development after the first year or so of his life. Tradition provides a special environment, made by man for man’s own development; and men brought up in markedly different traditions arrive at different end-results just as surely and obviously as do men of markedly different hereditary tendencies arrive at different end-results even though exposed to similar traditions. Traditions are infinitely complex things: there are world traditions, national traditions broad and narrow, class traditions and traditions of profession and trade, traditions of predilection, of art, of religion: and men may be exposed in their development to the combined influence of a number of these. But the net result of the diversity of tradition is an extraordinary diversity of end-result. “_Nihil humanum alienum a me puto_”--Terence could only say this with truth in the sense that there are certain fundamental emotions and instincts found in all men, and also certain aspects of environment shared by all humanity--the sun and moon, earth, water, and fire, space and time, parents and society, and so on and so forth.
I make no apologies for the length of this preliminary analysis, since it is precisely by the neglect of preliminary analysis that most attempts to correlate biology and sociology have failed. The salient fact emerges that with man there has been a radical change in evolutionary method.
As space is limited, I am here only proposing to consider three of the chief contributions which biology can make to sociology--on the idea of progress, on the relation between individual and community, and on the applicability of the doctrine of the struggle for existence to man.
As regards the idea of progress, biology can make a clear and unequivocal contribution: whereas man is biologically so young, his evolution is yet so chaotic and divergently directed, that it is very hard to arrive at definite conclusions from the study of his history alone. It has been a source of constant surprise to me that more use has not been made of biological data in the controversy over this question. In the little book recently edited by Mr. Marvin on various aspects of the concept of Progress, there was no article dealing with biological progress; and even in Professor Bury’s notable book, _The Idea of Progress_, biology was as little and as unsatisfactorily drawn upon as in Dean Inge’s writings on the subject.
We have already seen that a certain direction obtains in organic evolution. Into the details of this process I have not here the time to go; we must be content with the brief enumeration which has already been given of the qualities of organisms whose maximum level, and to a lesser degree whose average, have increased during evolution.
So far so good. But a process may be going in a definite direction and yet not be satisfactory.
This road leads to London; this other to Puddlington Parva. We all know people who are obviously headed for success, while it is on record that Mr. Mantalini’s direction was towards “the demnition bow-wows.”
But we know that we ourselves consciously find _value_ in things, in objects and aims, in directions and processes. In this we are unique among organisms, and as a matter of fact a large part of our life is determined by the relative values we set on objects. On the whole, however, there is a reasonable amount of agreement among different individuals, at any rate in one country at one epoch, as to what they call good and what they call bad. There are very few western Europeans who find dirt or untruthfulness good, knowledge or bravery bad.
When we look into the trend of biological evolution, we find as a matter of fact that it has operated to produce on the whole what we find good, to bring into being more and more things on which we can set positive value. This is not to say that progress is an inevitable “law of nature,” but that it has actually occurred, and that its occurrence provides an external sanction for many of our subjective human hopes and ideals.
True that we are ourselves a product of the evolutionary process and might therefore be thought biased. None the less, it is clear that if a degenerate animal like a tapeworm, or one inevitably specialized like a hermit-crab, could possess and enunciate values, they would be of a very different nature from our own. But we should further find that the direction of the evolutionary process which led to the former was directly opposed to the main trend, that of the latter more or less at right angles to it. The general coincidence of the main observable trend and of our own concepts of value warrants us in calling the one progressive, and in feeling that the other is no mere isolated flicker in an alien or hostile world, but finds a sanction and a resting-place in being part of something vastly bigger than itself. The remarkable and important fact for man is to find, in spite of all the apparently fundamental differences between his organization and his evolutionary methods and those of lower organisms, in spite of the widespread degeneration and “blind-alleyism” to be seen in evolution, that the direction in which he desires to go coincides with the resultant, the main direction of organic evolution. There are no ideals, there is no purpose, in fish or ant or tree: but man’s ideals and purposes are the outcome of the blind interplay of forces in which fish and ant and tree play their unwitting rôles. True again that further analysis shows that the methods of evolutionary progress are often crude, wasteful, and slow: that some of our values are unreal or artificial: but this does not destroy the main fact, and only means that each side can here learn something from the other.
The main fact abides--that progress is an evolutionary reality, and that an analysis of the modes of biological progress may often help us in our quest for human progress.
The next great problem on which biology has something to say to sociology is that eternal one of the relation between individual and community. As it is sometimes put, Does the individual exist for the State, or the State for the individual? In all non-human biological aggregates--cell-colonies, second-grade aggregates or metazoan organisms, third-grade aggregates like Siphonophora and insect communities--the very existence of the aggregate as a unit, its biological efficiency and success, depend upon a permanent division of labour between its members, upon their thoroughgoing specialization. This always and inevitably involves a sacrifice of certain of their potentialities to greater efficiency in one of a few actual functions, and in evolution a progressive subordination of the smaller unit to the aggregate.
At first sight, biological principles seem to contradict themselves on this subject. On the one hand, the human individual is, or, we had better say, has the potentiality of being the highest type of organism in existence--far higher, biologically speaking, not only than any human community now in existence, but than any which we could possibly imagine as coming into existence in the future. When we remember the general agreement of biological progress with our human values, it is clear that to degrade the individual for the benefit of the community is wrong--a biological crime.
On the other hand, human progress depends and will always depend to an extent scarcely to be overrated upon the proper organization of the community. So long as present competition continues, the very survival of a nation may easily depend upon the efficiency of its organization as a community. Biological as well as human experience makes it perfectly plain that such success, in a unit which is itself an aggregate of smaller units, depends upon the degree of specialization of these constituent units and the division of labour and co-operation between them.
Biology here then lays down that human individuals should become more and more specialized if progress is to continue; but since specialization implies the sacrifice of many potentialities for the good of the whole, this apparently contradicts what we have just inculcated above.
This is where our human flexibility comes in. Man should neither live whole-heartedly for himself, nor throw his individuality, ant-like, beneath the wheels of the community Juggernaut. He can escape from the dilemma by passing from one state to the other. For part of his time, he can apply his energies as a specialized unit--for the rest, he can be a complete individual, realizing the various potentialities of his many-sided nature, with the community contributing to his development, not he to the community’s. And not only can he, but he should act thus.
Be it noted, to avoid misapprehension, that I have here been using the community to denote the single aggregate unit which from the beginning has played such an important part biologically in human evolution, not merely as denoting the sum of individuals considered separately.
Thus biology gives a definite answer to this question too. Pure individualism is condemned, and so is what we may call ant-and-bee socialism. Some form of the “dual day,” to use a current phrase, or at least of the “dual life,” is the method which seems to be in accord with the enduring principles of biology, although the precise details are not and cannot be the biologist’s concern, and particular lives, such as that of the creative artist, who moves on a different plane of reality, escape his analysis.
I have reserved to the close that biological principle which has been most often and most seriously misapplied in sociology and politics--the struggle for existence. Never was the proverb about the Devil’s quoting Scripture better exemplified than in this matter. This fundamental idea of Darwin’s has been used as justification for three totally different and indeed incompatible political doctrines. In England, it has served chiefly to bolster up _laissez-faire_ individualism and free competition. In Germany in the years immediately succeeding the publication of the _Origin of Species_, it was seized upon by the Socialists as implying equal opportunity for all as against feudalism or hereditary aristocracy. Later in the same country (and to a certain extent elsewhere) it was abundantly employed as a theoretical support for militarism.
As a matter of fact, the use of it as sole principle governing the interrelation of biological units is wholly unjustified. As has been shown by a number of writers, among whom may especially be mentioned Darwin himself, Ritchie in his _Darwinism and Politics_, and Kropotkin in his _Mutual Aid_, the struggle for existence is only _one_ of two possibilities in this relationship: the other is that of co-operation, of mutual aid, which is especially well marked in the building up of higher-grade units from a multiplicity of smaller lower-grade ones. Two of the most important steps in the whole evolutionary process have been based on the co-operation of units--the origin of multicellular from unicellular organisms, and the development of true man, with his social life, from his pre-human ancestor. It is also prominent in the lives of many species of the highest groups--insects, mammals, and birds: witness the ants and bees, the rook, the wild dog, the elephant, the baboon. In fact, once the bodily specialization of units has reached a certain pitch, progress, as we have seen, is only possible through mental development, and this in the great majority of cases brings about aggregation into some sort of community, held together by mental bonds.
Besides aggregation of similar units, there has frequently been co-operation between units of unlike character and origin--witness symbiosis, as in lichens; the relation between many insects and flowers; the formation of flocks consisting of two or more species, as with jackdaws and rooks, and many other cases.
Competition and co-operation both occur throughout the whole of evolution: but co-operation comes to play an ever more considerable part in higher forms. In lower organisms enormous overproduction is of no great consequence; their organization is simple, and, given favourable conditions, they can turn inorganic matter into their own specific substance at a great rate. But higher forms are more complex, more delicately balanced, and longer lived. Accordingly, waste of life is of greater consequence to them, and methods by which a struggle on the grand scale can be minimized tend to be more and more adopted. We find regularly, for instance, a reduction of the number of offspring in higher groups together with greater parental care.