348 pearl: biology and war 



made towards its solution since the beginning of the war than in 

 all the previous struggles with it. 



To bring about such changes, which constitute a real and defi- 

 nite step in social evolution, it is not at all necessary that the 

 enemy should win a war. It is war itself which accomplishes 

 these alterations in human relations and human beings. It only 

 need be sufficiently comprehensive in its magnitude, and suffi- 

 ently long continued in time, to produce definite and permanent 

 evolutionary changes through alterations of social relations and 

 institutions. 



There is a further side to the evolutionary aspect of war which 

 we have not yet considered. If we view the matter in terms of 

 nations, not of individuals, it is at once apparent that war is a 

 deliberately planned struggle between biologically unlike groups 

 of individuals for the purpose of maintaining or bettering their 

 status in the general hierarchy of group domination or preced- 

 ence. A modern war is not entered into casually and without 

 some degree of both spiritual and material preparation. In the 

 nature of the thing itself it cannot be so entered. To make a 

 whole nation w^ant to fight, including all the ignorant, because 

 uninformed, people in it, it is necessary that their emotions be 

 stirred, either by some act or supposed act of an offending nation 

 or else by deliberate emotional propaganda. At the outstart of 

 any war this emotional incentive to belligerency is wholly lacking 

 in a very considerable portion of the populations of the nations 

 involved. It has to be worked up, a process in which the enemy 

 always renders most efficient service, by such things in these 

 latter days as air raids over inoffensive towns, sinking passenger 

 vessels without notice, or in other ways too revoltingto mention. 

 Pending the general distribution of rage in the involved popula- 

 tions, the business of war has to be planned and executed by the 

 nation's leaders in as detached and impersonal a manner as' any 

 other great business enterprise. This fact, which to a resident of 

 another planet not accustomed to our ways might seem strange, 

 raises two questions: In the first place, why do national leaders 

 enter so coolly, and yet under certain conditions so eagerly, upon 

 such a ghastly business as war; and in the second place, why do 



