THE DYNAMICS OF EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE 



is that from time to time new qualities emerge through more 

 complex organization of simpler substances and systems. On 

 the chemical level, we see this in many compounds which have 

 properties very different from the chemical elements and sim- 

 pler compounds of which they are built. The properties of 

 salt and the elasticity of rubber are examples. Life itself dif- 

 fers from non-living matter only in having a special type of 

 very complex organization. Since the dominant theme of cul- 

 tural evolution has also been increasing complexity of organ- 

 ization, one need not be surprised that it has generated entirely 

 new qualities. Our minds, our foresight, and our social struc- 

 ture, although they are the products of evolution, are neverthe- 

 less completely real and new. They set us apart from animals 

 just as truly as if they had been specially created. 



Another important fact about socio-cultural evolution is that 

 it progressed for a very long time through traditions and learn- 

 ing which were passed down to each successive generation by 

 word of mouth, without benefit of writing. Men have been able 

 to speak to each other for at least five hundred thousand years; 

 they have had brains as highly developed as ours for at least 

 seventy-five thousand years; they have had such spiritual beliefs 

 as that in an afterlife for at least fifty thousand years, as wit- 

 nessed by ancient graves which include implements for use in 

 the world to come. But writing as a means of perpetuating tra- 

 dition is barely six thousand years old. Now everything we 

 know about modern peoples who are not, or were not, able to 

 write leads us to believe that among them reason dominates only 

 the immediate events of their lives. Their social structure and 

 their plans for the future are bound up in their emotions and 

 are passed on from generation to generation by spoken rules, 

 stories, chants, poems, and incantations, surrounded with the 

 symbols of religious worship. We do not know how religion 

 began, but we can be sure that it has guided man's evolution 

 for at least a hundred thousand years. Before the advent of 

 writing, the stability of society depended upon the ability of 

 children to learn from their elders the spoken word, and this 

 was developed largely through the force which the symbols of 

 religion gave to certain essential moral precepts. The ability 

 to receive these words and to accept these precepts must, there- 



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