pearl: biology and war 357 



people and the Belgian national feeling do not survive today, and 

 will not continue to survive? 



The plain fact in the matter is that the proudly ruthless phil- 

 osophy of Treitschke and Bernhardi is not only immorally cruel, 

 but also immortally stupid. This whole crude and mechanistic 

 view of war as a process of natural selection is really most unbio- 

 logical in that it takes no account of the most fundamental of 

 human biological characteristics — namely, those which dis- 

 tinctively differentiate man from lower organisms, his mental 

 and moral qualities. Biologically, nationality rests on the group 

 spirit of the people, which in turn means differentiant variations 

 ineradicably ingrained in their germ plasm. Nationality can 

 onl}^ be eliminated in the biological sense by the complete and 

 total destruction of the germ plasm of the people of the nation, 

 because it depends upon things which are to a substantial degree, 

 at least, unchangeably and permanently determined by that 

 germ plasm. Killing a percentage of the male population on the 

 battlefield is as silly as it is a pitifully sad method of attempting 

 to destroy the germ plasm of a nation. What a defeated nation 

 loses in war is simply its status in the international political 

 hierarchy either temporarily or permanently. It suffers, broadly 

 speaking, no fundamental biological loss. The Chinese today, 

 after a century of hopeless military defeats which left them an 

 inert and pacifist nation are just as truly and completely bio- 

 logically differentiated as they ever were. A Chinaman is a 

 Chinaman today, and as different from anybody else in the world, 

 as he ever was. Contrast this with real biological elimination 

 with which this Darwinian School of militaristic philosophy 

 draws so false an analogy. ^ATiat comparison exists between a 

 Chinaman and a dinosaur? Natural selection operated with a 

 real Allmacht on the dinosaurs to a finish that made literally true 

 the proverbial statement of the wondering rustic about the 

 giraffe: "There ain't no such animal." But the Chinaman hope- 

 lessly defeated and crushed in military affairs is still with us and 

 quite capable of enjoying life in his peculiar way. He stands in 

 the aggregate as a gigantic refutation of the much lauded claim 

 which the Germans have made for the "fundamental biological 

 basis of war." 



