BIOLOGY AND THE FUTURE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 39, 15 February 1934, Page 6

BIOLOGY AND THE FUTURE.

Sir Flinders Petrie has counted the ruins, buried in mud or sand in the silent places of the world, of seven civilisations much like ours (says the "Manchester Guardian"). Recently biology, through the mouth of Professor Langdon Brown, held a provisional j inquest 011 the body of the eighth and last, which is our own. Why is it that in country after country men are deliberately turning their backs on the evolutionary process, deliberately preferring the discarded savage value to the civilised? Biology offers one explanation which, for the sake of human faith and courage, had better be described as tentative, since it is a dismally cheerless one.

Kvflutiiui always offers ,1 higher and a lower road, one wliicli leads to an expanding and more complex nniit and one which degenerates .to a lower level.

J Where the higher road would lead to-day in the political groupings of mankind is in 110 doubt. As Professor Langdon Brown remarked, the normal and natural evolutionary process i.s always from the simple and partial structure to the larger whole. To-day it is towards a political fabric which must ultimately be coterminous with mankind. But. he adds, whole nations have abandoned that road. What is worse, but enormously significant, is that they are positively happy in abandoning it.

The.v actually seem to gam a new hope and a new ftiitli by departing from it. The new level Is more suitable to their evolutionary development, and they are more comfortable in it.

Professor Langdon Brown went on to speculate whether "material changes have perhaps outstripped the rate at which the rational powers ofi the highest levels of the brain can develop." Has the pace grown too hot? Are we grown tired of progress, as the megatherium grew tired, as Neanderthal man and the aboriginal Tasmanians grew tired? Or is it rather that, far from being too rapid, for the great majority even of civilised men, the rate of progress, of education, is not rapid enough? That question will remain to be answered.