MAN 69 



sirion among organisms. It has improved his weapons and 

 tools. It has increased his understanding through the accu- 

 mulation of the knowledge of past individuals. In the evolu- 

 tion of high-level mind such social continuity by cumula- 

 tive tradition would be absolutely necessary; and there is no 

 doubt that the tremendous acceleration of man's latter evo- 

 lution has been due solely to his finding means to record and 

 pass on the knowledge of his generation. It is this power to 

 pass on a heredity of knowledge which quickly becomes 

 available to all individuals in the population that is poten- 

 tially so different from germinal heredity. Genetic heredity 

 is greatly restricted in space and time and in the limited 

 numbers of individuals within a population which receive 

 the changed determiners. Organic evolution operates slowly 

 in a population of interbreeding groups. The new social 

 evolution may be said to operate, as G. G. Simpson ex- 

 presses it, in "interthinking groups." Like the organic groups, 

 they are set off in geographical units and in social organiza- 

 tions involving nationality, language, custom, and religion. 

 Man, then, is undergoing a two-phase evolution, the older 

 organic and the newer social evolution. In the latter, the 

 poetry of the Lamarckian approach may well be read into 

 the record. The needs and desires of the individual are ele- 

 ments rising to consciousness to become factors in the fu- 

 ture social transmission of the race. Later this situation will 

 be examined more fully, but it is obvious that the new evo- 

 lution could, hke natural selection, progress or retrogress. 

 The social institutions of man which have failed are already 

 numerous in the record, and the control mechanism of evo- 

 lution by social characters is no less complex than by genes. 

 Indeed, there is nothing in the whole evolutionary record 

 that guarantees man any special favors. The goal of evolution 

 is not man. He is not the ultimate organism. But through 

 him may be visualized something of the promise of the evo- 

 lution of the spirit-matter substance in its progression 

 toward conscious understanding. 



