342 pearl: biology and war 



medical sciences, where the contribution is directly to the sal- 

 vaging of the human wreckage with which the pathway of war 

 is strewn, and only rather indirectly towards its winning. It is 

 generally taken for granted, and to a considerable extent even 

 by professional biologists, that in the nature of things the biologi- 

 cal sciences, other than the medical, can have only rather a remote 

 and indirect relation to the conduct of war. 



One purpose of this paper is to make some examination of the 

 biological philosophy of war. It has seemed to me that if one 

 does this, he is likely to come to the conclusion that the ordinarj^ 

 valuation of the relative significance of the physical and chemical 

 problems connected with war as compared with the biological 

 problems is substantially the reverse of the true valuation. To 

 begin with, we should remind ourselves of a distinction which is 

 often forgotten when one attempts to evaluate in military terms 

 the potential contributions of the different sciences to war. 

 Essentially what the physicist and the chemist contribute is 

 towards the creation, development, or perfection of some de- 

 structive or protective mechanism — at best an inanimate, im- 

 personal machine. But the very essence of a fight is that it is 

 between living things. A 120-kilometer gun, or a submarine, or 

 a tank, cannot of and by itself make war. All such engines of 

 destruction are only the secondary implements of war. The 

 primary implements are biological entities — men. Without 

 these entities there neither would nor could be any war. So then, 

 obviously, the primary problems of war are biological problems. 

 They are such problems as why men fight; what kinds of men 

 make the best fighters; what conditJbns, both internal and exter- 

 nal, biological and environmental, conduce to the most effective 

 fighting; and what are the probable biological consequences 

 (including physiological, social, and genetic) of the fight, both to 

 the winner and the loser. This is the sort of problems to which 

 the biological sciences can alone make any significant contri- 

 bution and they are clearly much more fundamental than those 

 entailed in the designing of a new aeroplane or submarine. 



Furthennore, it admits of no doubt that the accumulated 

 knowledge in the field of biology could be utilized in a way to be of 



