45^ Living in a World of Change 



seeks to reconcile a system of ethics with prevailing science, 

 as it does to the needs of a Nietzsche who seeks to glorify 

 ruthlessness and arrogance. 



The argument on both sides can be elaborated indefi- 

 nitely — and has been. Darwin himself stressed the im- 

 portance of variation, since he conceived the " struggle for 

 existence " to be effective, in an evolutionary or selective 

 sense, only where there is variation; yet some of the attempts 

 to apply his teachings to political theory assumed a funda- 

 mental equalitarianism. It is of course conceivable that a 

 struggle would ensue even among perfectly equal individu- 

 als, where there w;as a deficiency of food or water, for exam- 

 ple, or insufficient standing room. The struggle in such case, 

 however, would not be selective and therefore unrelated to 

 evolution. 



We may recognize at work here the same processes that 

 had already been observed in other great controversies. Not 

 only can Satan quote scripture, but perfectly sincere ex- 

 ponents of the Bible have used it for justifying slavery, pros- 

 titution, the burning of witches, human sacrifice — and 

 others for combating these institutions. If the Bible has been 

 used to discredit the evolutionary doctrine, it has also been 

 used to confirm it. For did not the several races of man 

 diverge from the parental stem and become established as 

 distinct " species " in but a few thousand years? 



Evolution and Natural Selection 



The confusion between the general theory of organic 

 evolution and Darwinian hypothesis of natural selection is 

 not confined to the general reader. It crops out frequently 

 among professional biologists and other scientists. A recent 

 writer on racial characters passes back and forth between 

 description and inference without seeming to be aware of 

 the difference. " The black skin of the tropical negro," we 

 are told, "protects him from sunburn"; and "... the 

 Eskimo has under his skin a layer of fat that serves as a 



