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

THE PRESENT PHASE OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION

It is fairly plain that the acceleration of transport and communication is still in progress and shows no certain limits. The facilities for every form of mental exchange and interaction increase. The thrusts that tend to interlock the economic life of the species into one system, and which strain the traditional political network to the breaking-point, increase. Traditionalism and its inseparable attendant, war, remain huge and dangerous powers in human affairs; they must be denounced, written about and fought and defeated, and they will claim their toll of martyrs, but so soon as they have been thrust out of action, if ever they are thrust out of action, men will find it difficult to realize how great and terrible they were. . They may wax old and shrivel away. The plans for the exploitation of the earth may be released almost insensibly from the entanglement of frontiers. The deserts of the world may be irrigated and its changes of weather and season foretold. It may become a planetary farm and garden, a playing field, a fishpond, paddock, workshop and mine. It is possible that there will be a considerable shrinkage then of the areas devoted to food-production. Not that there will be any diminution of the food-supply ; but there is no reason to suppose we have yet reached anything like the full possibility of yield per acre. Our chapters on Ecology supply the fullest justification for a forecast of an intensive cultivation demanding only a fraction of the space and toil now given to food-production.

Concurrently with this shrinkage of the food-growing areas there may be a considerable fall in world population. At present the full extent of the decline of the birthrate of most civilized countries is masked by the prolongation of the average life due to better hygienic conditions. If there is a limit to the latter process, and at present there seems to be one, then a real fall in total population will presently become apparent. ‘This may go on for some time, and it may involve the elimination of types unwilling to bear and rear children. To have a world encumbered for a time with an excess of sterile jazz-dancers and joyriders may be a pleasanter way to elimination than hardship and death. Pleasure may achieve what force and sword have failed to do. The world can afford it ; it is not a thing to fret about. It is only a passing fashion on a grand scale, this phase of sterilized “ enjoyment.” The great thing is that it should be able and willing to sterilize

itself. We may expect an increase in the gravity and sense of responsibility of the average sort of people even in the course of a few generations because of this elimination. The types that have a care for their posterity and the outlook of the race will naturally be the types which will possess the future.

But these are only the opening sentences of the next chapter of human _ biology. The fall and recovery of populations, the politico-economic unification of human affairs, may present phases of intense stress and tragedy, periods of lassitude and apparent retrogression, distressful enough for the generations that may endure them, but not sufficient to prevent the ultimate disappearance of misleading tradition and the dominance of a collective control of human destinies. And by that time biological science will be equipped with a mass of proved and applicable knowledge beyond anything we can now imagine.

At present eugenics is merely the word for what still remains an impracticable idea. But it is clear that what man can do with wheat and maize may be done with every living species in the world—including his own. It is not ultimately necessary that a multitude of dull and timid people should be born in order that a few bright and active people should be born. That is how things have to be to-day, but it is an unnecessary state of affairs. Because at present our knowledge of genetics is too limited to do more than define certain sorts of union as “undesirable *? and others as ‘“ propitious,” it does not follow that we shall always be as helpless. There may come a time when the species will have a definite reproductive policy, and will be working directly for the emergence and selection of certain recessives and the elimination of this or that dominant. In our treatment of genetics we have given a few first-fruits of the science, which suggest what forms the practical eugenic work of the future is likely to take. Once the eugenic phase is reached, humanity may increase very rapidly in skill, mental power and general vigour.

And it is not only human life that human knowledge may mould. The clumsy expedients of the old-time animal and plant breeder will be replaced by more assured and swifter and more effective methods. Of every species of plant and animal man may judge, whether it is to be fostered, improved or eliminated. No species is likely to remain unmodified. Man’s protective interference goes far to-day, and it may extend at last to

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