SOME ASPECTS OF THE BIOLOGY OF HUMAN POPULATIONS 519 



Has there been any tremendous dashing ofF of Europeans 

 to populate the unused lands of the world? There has not. 

 One example must suffice. Since the war Great Britain has 

 been of all European countries perhaps the one from which 

 one would be most hkely to want to move, if motives of 

 "material well-being" and "standard of living" were the 

 only important ones to be considered. Taxes are enor- 

 mously high, the national debt is large, 'amounting to 

 something of the order of £ 1 80 per capita of population, there 

 are many unemployed (1,180,290 on Sept. 22, 1924) and so 

 on. But in 1924 only 371,306 persons left Great Britain for 

 other than European destinations. In that same year 253,542 

 persons from other parts of the world than Europe decided 

 that they wanted to come and live in Great Britain. So 

 that the net departure was of only 117,766 people. This 

 constituted only about one person in each 400 of the popula- 

 tion. And the proportion of net emigrants to unemployed 

 (who surely are enjoying a low standard of living) was 

 only about i in 10. There seems no escape from the con- 

 clusion that the vast majority of people who five in Great 

 Britain do so because they want to. They may be having a 

 bad time of it, but even so they do not want to move. Why 

 they do not is fundamentally because they are not merely 

 units of economic and sociological discussion, but instead 

 are human beings, full of prejudices, peculiar hkes and 

 disfikes all their own. Such things are fundamental biological 

 attributes of human beings. Any science of mankind which 

 neglects them will not be human biology, whatever else it 

 may be. 



There is finally a general point which needs emphasizing 

 about the discussion of optimal population. Because the 

 word "optimum" by its very definition, implies a matter of 

 taste, feeling or emotion, it in so far removes the discussion 

 outside the field of exact, objective science. Much sociology is 

 filled with discussion of moral or other "values" overtly or 

 otherwise. Many writers on population talk at length about 

 what is "good," or "better," or "best," or "bad," "worse," 

 or "worst" in respect to population. But surely the path to 

 an exact science of population does not lie in these directions. 

 What the subject needs is a Pareto rather than evangelists. 



