172 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



culture. Except in physical traits, it becomes completely 

 Western in thought and action. There were, also, many in- 

 stances in the past where a child has been raised without hu- 

 man teaching. In Europe and elsewhere before this century, 

 when children were abandoned or lost in the forests and 

 learned there the ways of animal survival, they became ani- 

 mals in every sense of the word. Observing some of them in 

 the eighteenth century, the great taxonomist Linnaeus could 

 not believe that such seemingly witless brutes were born hu- 

 man. He supposed they were some kind of gnome that man 

 seldom sees. He even classified them as a distinct species. 

 Homo -ferns, and described their apparent utter lack of in- 

 terest in what went on around them, the way they rocked 

 themselves back and forth rhythmically like a caged animal, 

 and how their organs of speech could hardly be trained to 

 do service. 



How the brain records the experience of the individual 

 —that is, how the physiological processes in the brain cor- 

 relate with the psychic levels of consciousness— is the puzzle 

 of the mind-brain problem. A more or less direct attack is 

 made by neurological scientists, but thus far their efforts 

 have been crowned with little success. They have been un- 

 able so far adequately to describe the neural processes in- 

 volved in even the simplest forms of mental activity. Via the 

 frontal attack on the problem, that is, by scientific analysis 

 of the neural correlates of psychic experience, progress will 

 be slow. In the meantime, however, there are the very help- 

 ful analogies of the new field of cybernetics which examines 

 the processes common to nervous systems and mathematical 

 machines. 



Cybernetics is a word invented by Norbert Wiener to 

 define a new field of science. It combines under one heading 

 the study of what is generally described as thinking in the 

 human and what is known in engineering as control and 

 communication. Cybernetics attempts to find the common 

 elements in the functioning of mathematical machines and 



