44Q POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



INDIVIDUAL ADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENT 



By Professor JOSEPH HERSHEY BAIR 



UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO 



[~N a preceding article 1 the author has attempted to show that man, 

 -*- as a result of the development of medical science and education, 

 is approaching his limit in evolution, both physically and mentally. 

 The burden of the argument here was to show that, as a result of the 

 incorporation into his environment of his cumulating knowledge, 

 man's social and economical conditions are continually changing, but 

 that with his increased intelligence he has greater power of adapting 

 himself to the new conditions of life which are inevitably the result. 

 And as soon as man acquired those intellectual and moral qualities 

 which distinguish him from the lower animals, he began to invent 

 weapons, tools and various stratagems to procure food and to defend 

 himself, and was but little liable to bodily modification through nat- 

 tural selection. When he migrated into colder climates he used clothes, 

 built shelter, made fires. He also aided his fellows and anticipated 

 his future. Selection seized upon intelligence and man was enabled 

 to keep an unchanged body in harmony with a changing environ- 

 ment. Progress implies a continued increase of control over nature, 

 through the gradual acquisition of knowledge of her laws. One of 

 the great fields of acquisition of human intelligence is along the line 

 of human diseases, and the means of combating them. Medical 

 science advanced until at present, through surgery and inoculation, 

 she succeeds to a considerable degree in keeping the race adjusted to 

 its ever changing environment without sacrificing many of her indi- 

 viduals, and, consequently, without bringing about any marked ~ change 

 in the type of the human body. Education, too, succeeds in maintain- 

 ing the intellectually unfit by adapting them to the environment so 

 that they are enabled to make a living and to bring up a family, thus 

 precluding a rise in the average of intelligence in the race. Man is 

 enabled to advance independently of heredity, and natural selection is 

 cheated out of her work. Man can select everything in his world except 

 his own body and mind. He is born with a body and mind which were 

 developed by natural selection and are naturally adapted to the environ- 

 ment that existed when selection ceased. So adaptation to the environ- 



1 ' Limits of Evolution in the Human Race,' University of Colorado Studies, 

 Vol. II., No. IV., June, 1905. 



