Commemoration of the publication of Gregor Mendel's pioneer experiments in genetics / Papers read at the Annual General Meeting, April 23, 1965.

  • American Philosophical Society
Date:
1965
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Commemoration of the publication of Gregor Mendel's pioneer experiments in genetics / Papers read at the Annual General Meeting, April 23, 1965. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    VOL. 109, NO. 4, 1965] MENDELISM, DARWINISM AND EVOLUTIONISM 213 And according to Hallo well (1959) : The great novelty, then, in the behavioral evolution of the primates, was not simply the development of a cultural mode of adaptation as such. It was, rather, the psychological restructuralization that not only made this new mode of existence possible but pro¬ vided the psychological basis for cultural re-adapta¬ tion and change. To an orthodox reductionist, the concept of evolution transcendence may sound faintly vital- istic. A similar view has, however, been arrived at by the simon-pure dialectical materialists in Russia. Despite his Marxist jargon, Present (1964) states it fairly clearly as follows; Wherever it arose, the human society must have come from the zoological world, and it was work, the process of production, that made man human. How¬ ever, what has removed people from the animal way of life and gave a specificity to their (new) life, became the essence and the basis of the history that ensued. . . . Likewise, in the realm of living nature, what removed the novel form of material motion from its nonliving prehistory, necessarily became its essence, its fundamental basis. Reductionism is not wrong, but it tells only a part of the story. Where man is concerned, it is only a small part. Reductionism must go hand in hand with compositionism, Cartesian with Darwinian inquiry and discovery. VII Mendel, a peasant's son, found an opportunity for his intellectual pursuits only behind a mon¬ astery's walls ; Darwin, a wealthy English country squire, made the study room in his house his laboratory. Neither of them was a professional scientist, and unknown to each other (Mendel read some of Darwin's books probably after his own biological work was finished), they collabo¬ rated to lay the foundations for an evolutionary world view. The universe, life, a man, are evolving products of evolutionary developments. It is often alleged that Darwin's evolution theory has rendered complete man's alienation from the world which he inhabits. Copernicus and Galileo showed that man is not the center of the world, and that the earth is but a speck of dust in the cosmic spaces. Before Darwin, man was believed to be only slightly lower than the angels, Darwin showed that he is only slightly higher than brute animals. And animals are, to con¬ sistently reductionist biologists, automata only slightly more complicated than watches, and per¬ haps less complicated than some electronic com¬ puters. All this misses the main point. Evolution means that, whether one considers the present state of the world and of man satisfactory or otherwise, it is not necessarily fixed and unchange¬ able forever. It is at least thinkable that man may recast the whole situation in a direction which he believes to be good, even though a long time and much effort may be needed to accomplish the reform. Evolutionist world views range from deeply pessimistic to brightly optimistic ones. To Sir Julian Huxley, H. J. Muller, Sir Charles Galton Darwin, and others, mankind is headed for biological twilight, unless something is very quickly done to rescue it. And what will a world without man be worth? The development of culture and civilization has brought about an unpremeditated reversal of the trend of the bio¬ logical evolution from beneficial to nefarious. Mankind evolved as it did because natural select¬ ion fostered improvements of the genetic basis for intelligence, group solidarity, cooperation, and, so it is believed, for human ethical values. Civi¬ lization has tended increasingly to frustrate and pervert the action of natural selection. Many kinds of hereditary infirmities and weaknesses are cured or relieved by ministrations of the medical arts ; the carriers of genetic defects are helped to survive and to reproduce, thus increasing the incidence of the same defects in future generations. Living in dense populations, particularly in crowded cities, may have also more subtle but sinister effects. When nuclear families and even individuals must be sufficient unto themselves, instead of mutual help being enjoined on all by custom, natural selection which in the past favored altruism may now favor selfishness. The way out is an eugenic selection of desirable types. One must begin, with all deliberate haste, to collect and preserve in deep-frozen condition the semen of eugenically approved donors, partic¬ ularly of great and illustrious men. This will be utilized for artificial insemination of numerous women. Eventually techniques should be de¬ veloped to obtain and preserve also the egg cells of superior women. Even more ambitious meth¬ ods may be possible in the future. Sir Charles Galton Darwin thinks, however, that the willing¬ ness of people to regulate their procreative activi¬ ties taking in consideration the common good is it¬ self a genetic trait. If so, those who fail to heed such considerations will outbreed those who do, and their uncooperativeness will grow more and more frequent in future generations. A human flood,