346 pearl: biology and war 



degree unique and peculiar to the group. Once started, these 

 social relations and institutions acquire a sort of inertia which in 

 and of itself tends to stabilize them quite without any conscious 

 activity looking towards stabilization on the part of any of the 

 component individuals in the group. This inertia extends within 

 the group in an extraordinary degree to every sort of social rela- 

 tion, including even the minor conventions. It makes the whole 

 social fabric, which, as we have seen, constitutes a very important 

 element of human environment, extremely resistant to change or 

 alteration of any sort. Ordinary social forces produce but little 

 effect. It requires years of unremitting effort to bring about 

 even mild and minor social reforms or changes in the ordinary 

 normal course of human events. It has taken nearly seventy- 

 five years to get as far forward as we are with the prohibition 

 movement in this country. More strongly socially inherited 

 institutions would be still more difficult to alter. To illustrate 

 the point, let us consider the social-economic institution of inter- 

 est. It is entirely possible, not to say easy, to conceive a society 

 so organized that credit and the interchange of credit would be 

 effected without the institution of interest. But try to conceive 

 the concrete possibility of putting into actual operation in the 

 civilized world today a system which would do away with interest 

 charges. The mind balks at the thought. The inertia of this 

 institution, its social inheritance, is so strong that to change it 

 would be a task of commensurate relative magnitude somewhat 

 approaching to the task of so changing the germ plasm of the 

 human race that man would have, for example, no vermiform 

 appendix. Both are extremely stable things which cannot be 

 easily or quickly changed by the operation of ordinary forces. 

 Both changes involve an alteration in stably equilibrated sys- 

 tems, and it is a general characteristic of such systems that they 

 do not change either frequently or easily. The inertia of social 

 relations, which is I think a better term than social inheritance, 

 is simply a special case of the general phenomenon of the natural 

 occurrence of systems in stable equilibrium, the manifestations 

 of which in the inorganic world have been so brilliantly expounded 

 by Lawrence J. Henderson in his book The Order of Nature. It is 



