EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 219 



In the review of social evolution in the organizations of 

 animals other than man one was constantly reminded of sit- 

 uations which appear in human society. There are definite 

 dominance-subordination relationships in groups of people. 

 The hierarchies of birds and mammals have obvious coun- 

 terparts in man's society, where despotism of a more com- 

 plex and thorough type often appears but is not to be con- 

 doned, however, on the excuse of animal origin, particularly 

 since many animals have evolved patterns of cooperative 

 equality on a high order. Unlike the social insects, which 

 show the cooperative equality pattern through a behavior of 

 fixed instinctive responses, man's whole evolutionary trend 

 has been toward plasticity of intelligence. Man's societies 

 are never likely to work with the machine-like smoothness 

 of the ant hill. The altruistic instincts in man, it appears, 

 will never become dominant; and it is probable that human 

 altruism will only with difficulty be increased beyond its 

 present level— perhaps by the transmission of favorable ac- 

 quired social characters or, more remotely, by favorable 

 gene mutations or, better, by proper educational indoctrina- 

 tion. 



Man's freedom from the absolute control of instinct is the 

 gift of his mammalian ancestors. In these animals nature, in 

 her search for conscious understanding, found the formula 

 with the greatest promise, namely, the cerebral brain which 

 in the mammals, nourished by rich, warm blood, takes on a 

 greater mass than all the rest of the nervous system put to- 

 gether. Through the organization of association areas in the 

 brain nature finds expression in self-consciousness and, 

 finally, in conceptual processes. The eternal striving of the 

 mind-matter substance is rewarded here, but only if the so- 

 ciety of the organisms possessing such a brain evolves the 

 complex, cooperative learning patterns necessary to high- 

 level realization. 



In our review of the social evolution of man (Chapter 8) 

 we briefly traced some origins of the human family and 



