pearl: biology and war 355 



been the corner stones on which modern Germany has been built. 

 Various remote and far removed causes have been assigned as 

 contributory to the present conflict, but one highly important 

 cause — perhaps in a philosophical sense the most significant of all 

 — has been very generally overlooked. I believe it to be literally 

 true that the one event in the history of Western Europe which 

 more than any other single one laid the foundation for the situa- 

 tion in which Western Europe finds itself today, was the 

 publication in 1859 of a book called The Origin of Species. With 

 what horror would that gentlest and kindest of souls, whose mind 

 conceived and executed this work, have been filled could he r ave 

 foreseen the frightful welter of blood which has resulted from the 

 gross perversion of his views by German biologists. 



Let us examine with some care the meaning of natural selection 

 in its relation to war. In the first place, it must be remembered 

 that nowhere in nature does natural selection, as indicated by 

 modern careful study of the subject, operate with anything like 

 that mechanistic precision which the German political philosophy 

 postulates. In a recent paper read before the American Society 

 of Naturalists, I presented a number of examples from the litera- 

 ture illustrative of this point, and I need not repeat them here. 

 Nature often does not operate on the natural selection basis, 

 though logically— at least in formal logic — it ought to. Much less 

 does natural selection operate in a rigid and mechanical manner 

 with reference to human affairs. It is perfectly clear that no war 

 in this day and age is, in any proper sense of the word, literally a 

 struggle for existence. The German people have from the be- 

 ginning tried to make it appear that the present war is, from their 

 standpoint, exactly this. They have insisted again and again 

 that their national existence, their continued survival as a nation 

 was threatened by their neighbors, but such a view has only to be 

 stated to any fair-minded, unbiased person to prove its utter 

 absurdity. Could anyone but a German seriously maintain that 

 the French, or the English, or the Italians, or the Russians, would 

 have wished for, or would have attempted if they could, the anni- 

 hilation of the German people? Theoretically, such a feeling or de- 

 sire is conceivable, but practically everyone knows that it did not 

 exist. Normal human beings are simply not constituted that way. 



