The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9

domesticating other creatures for his own

support. And he does not do this mechanically, by instinct, as the ants do. He does it by forethought.

Some other mammals store food—the beaver and squirrel, for example; the leopard will hide away a_half-consumed corpse and return to it as a dog will bury a bone, but no other mammals cultivate. To find any creature that cultivates we must go outside the vertebrata altogether, to the ants and termites. In the social life of these insects we find a superficial parallel to the social life of man. When, however, we scrutinize the methods of co-operation, the parallelism disappears. In Book 8 we have made a study of these methods of insect organization, and pointed out the essential difference of a society based on instinct from one based on_ intelligence. One point in that comparison we may recall. A fundamental feature of the insect society is the differentiation of the individuals into a number of types. The individual is either a worker, a soldier, a queen or a drone. Sometimes there are several different types of worker. Each does its work as a machine does its work in accordance with the way itismade. A worker cannot become a soldier, or a soldier a male.

But in the case of human society, there is no such differentiation. Save for abnormalities and unimportant exceptions of usage, every individual remains a physiologically complete individual, every man is a ‘man and a brother,” and queen and beggar girl are “sisters under their skins.” Except for rare abnormalities every individual remains male or female and has at least the capacity for reproduction. That is in flat contrast with the condition of the social insects. There may be social considerations to prevent the profoundest philosopher or the richest business man marrying and begetting children by a negro defective or giving his daughter in marriage to a gaolbird or a tramp, but there is no irrevocable physiological separation to prevent such things occurring. In various regions, class and caste restriction of intermarriage may have sustained slight differentiations of manners, intelligence and colour, the importance of which has been frequently exaggerated, but at present such ancient barriers seem to be weakening and dissolving. They have scarcely any relationship to current economic organization.

The complex economic life of mankind, infinitely more complex than that of any other creature, has been achieved without

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 1

any such differentiation. Man is the sole economic animal undifferentiated for function, and he is the sole known user of grammatically arranged words, as distinguished from merely expressive and indicative sounds and signs. He is the sole surviving species which uses fire and deliberately shaped tools, and he has now carried his use of extraneous power and of accessory external limbs and organs (for that is what tools amount to) to such an extent that much of his exacter knowledge comes to him through such artificial sense-organs as microscope and galvanometer, and the greater part of the energy of the economic life of his species is derived from other than his bodily sources, and a great part of its handling is mechanical.

The development of this abnormal and novel social life is the latest, greatest and strangest of the products of evolution. It is a new phase in the history of life. Essayists of the “smilingly thoughtful” school are apt to ascribe man’s disposition to set himself apart as the head and centre of the story of life to the natural egotism of the species, and playful writers have “ turned the tables ” by writing accounts of the world from the point of view of an ant or a crocodile, in which man is spoken of with the pity and contempt we have for these lower creatures. But as a matter of fact there is no view of the world from the point of view of an ant or crocodile, their interests have no such range ; and an abstract intelligence without the least prejudice in our favour would have to do just as we do here, and treat the collective life of Homo sapiens as the present culmination and most distinctive and wonderful phase of vital evolution.

The outer forms, the political forms of the rise of this unprecedented specific collectivity, mankind, can only be treated in an Outline of History, and an adequate review of its economic developments will need a work even more bulky and extensive than the whole of this Science of Life. Here we restrict ourselves as severely as we can to the more definitely biological aspects, to social origins, broad factors in social adaptation, religion, education, each regarded strictly as a biological force, and the possible increase, survival and suppression of types ; leading up to a final consideration of the biological outlook of our kind.

§ 2 Origins of Homo sapiens

Adam and Eve die hard. People are still apt to talk of “ the first man and woman ~