CHAPTER V 

 SOCIETAL EVOLUTION 



ALBERT GALLOWAY KELLER 



PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY, YALE UNIVERSITY 



The essence of evolution is the development of form out of 

 form, in a connected series, with survival of the fitter forms 

 in adjustment to environment. The outcome of evolution is 

 adjustment of life to life-conditions. No informed person 

 feels any longer the need of arguing the truth of the theory; 

 interest now centers in the extension and correction of knowl- 

 edge as to the details of the process, and in the applications 

 of the truths discovered. In the Darwinian theory of adjust- 

 ment we have one of those widely orienting factors which array 

 knowledge in orderly vistas and lead mankind to believe that 

 there is some sense in earthly existence. 



If there is any one place rather than another where man- 

 kind would like to find sense and order, it is in the field of 

 human social relations. No one can read the vivid pages of 

 Henry Adams's Education without a deeper appreciation 

 of the darkness and deviousness of the ways along which all 

 of us are traveling, though most of us are not so conscious and 

 concerned about our gropings as was that anxious and rueful 

 searcher after enlightenment. Adams, an evolutionist believes, 

 was after too much. He wanted to find some norm of prog- 

 ress in human history, and seems to have renounced high hopes 

 of Darwinism when he found that it offered no such norm. 



It is one of the common misconceptions about evolution, and 



