EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS 



are sound, the most highly organised social communities should be 



the most stable, perhaps the most long-lasting. Here the social insects 



bear a testimony, for the forms of their different castes have been 



identified embedded in amber many thousands of years old, but 



they differ so severely from the primates in their morphology that 



they have less to teach us than is often supposed. The most highly 



organised social communities should also be the least wasteful. Hence 



it is significant that much of the criticism directed against our existing 



social order by those who wish to see a more highly organised state 



of society is precisely on the ground that our present arrangements 



are wasteful. Wasteful of human effort, when infinite care is devoted 



to the growing of a crop of coffee, only for it to be shovelled into 



locomotive fireboxes. Wasteful of energy, when heavy goods, the 



tr^sport of which is not urgent, are transported by air or rail, while 



for purely financial reasons canals lie unused or derelict. Is there not 



a thermodynamic interpretation of justice.'^ Is not injustice wasteful.'^ 



Is not the failure to utilise to the maximum the available talent and 



genius of men a wasteful thing? As has been acutely said; "Those 



fundamental human rights which have so often been regarded as 



absolute postulates — liberty, equality, fraternity — turn out to be 



necessary conditions for a truly efficient productive mechanism and 



for the provision of sound social environment." That great aggregation 



of mankind to which we all look for^^ard, the kingdom of heaven on 



earth, will be nothing if not efficient. There was a false contradiction 



in Richard Baxter's immortal remark: "I had rather go to heaven 



disorderly, than be damned in due order." The more truly orderly 



order is the more it approximates to the heavenly and this process is 



our own social evolution itself, our own history, in which it is our 



duty to participate, but we must always beware of mistaking the 



lesser forms of order for the greater, and, as Auden reminds us, we 



must be modest in our claims. 



"Great sedentary Caesars who 

 Have pacified some dread tabu. 

 Whose wits were able to withdraw 

 The numen from some local law, 

 And with a single concept brought 

 Some ancient rubbish heap of thought 

 To rational diversity; 

 You are betrayed unless we see 



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