time: the refreshing river 



cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating 

 it." I shall quote from an acute commentary which my friend C. H. 

 Waddington^ has written on this pronouncement. "Huxley was 

 writing under the spell of that extraordinary impulsion, so incompre- 

 hensible to us to-day, which forced the Victorians to transmute the 

 simple mathematics of their major contribution to theoretical biology 

 into a battleground for their sadism. To Huxley, the cosmic process 

 was summed up in its method; and its method was 'the gladiatorial 

 theory of existence' in which *the strongest, the most self-assertive, 

 tend to tread down the weaker;' it demanded 'ruthless self-assertion' 

 and 'the thrusting aside or treading down of all competitors.' To us, 

 that method is one which, among animals, turns on the actuarial 

 expectation of female offspring from different female individuals, a 

 concept as unemotional as a definite integral; and we recognise that 

 quite other, though equally natural, methods of evolution may occur 

 when it is societies and not individuals that are in question. Moreover, 

 being no longer hypnotised by the methods of evolution we can see 

 its results^ and these can not be adequately summarised as an increase 

 in bloodiness, fierceness, and self-assertion." The matter could not be 

 better put. Man must indeed com.bat sub-human nature in so far as 

 it must be subdued to his will. He must never imitate it in forming 

 his social order. Evolution as a whole is neither a scene of Flaubertian 

 tortures as the Victorians saw it, nor yet does it betray any conscious 

 purpose of goodness. But in so far as the highest human societies, 

 yet achieved or yet to be achieved, are the product of evolution, the 

 good has arisen out of the evolutionary process. Just as Drummond 

 said. 



His book The Ascent of Man is of such interest that we must discuss 

 it a little further. He did not merely draw attention to the earliest 

 phases of co-operation exhibited in the coming together of cells to 

 form the metazoan organisms, or in the development of close animal 

 associations like the termites and ants. He successfully traced the 

 origins of social altruism and co-operativeness to the many-sided 

 phenomena of parental care, and ultimately to that donation of part 

 of the self for the benefit of the offspring which occurs in every 

 reproductive act.^ While recognising the principle of natural selection 

 and the struggle for existence as the main factor in the origin of 



^ Nature, 1941. 



2 AOM, 1902 edition, pp. 278, 282, 286, 398. In many cases this takes extreme forms, 

 e.g. the exhaustion of the muscles of the migrating salmon in egg formation. 



36 



