296 I The Process of Evolution 



People just assume that man must be the most successful organism 

 and define success accordingly. (Since man invented the language, 

 he most certainly has a right to do so.) However, the threat of 

 thermonuclear extinction hangs more heavily over our heads than 

 over the cockroaches, and we may yet envy them their ability to 

 crawl under rocks and their relative immunity to radiation. 



Since most scientific work is done by individuals who are repro- 

 ductive (or, more rarely, postreproductive ) members of Homo 

 sapiens, the "adult" stage of the life cycle has acquired a certain 

 prestige relative to other stages. For instance, illustrations of phylo- 

 genetic trees almost invariably depict series of adult organisms, and 

 the taxonomy of almost all groups is based primarily on this stage of 

 the developmental sequence. How different would be our view of 

 evolution if we were intelligent May flies, with a long nymphal life 

 in which to ruminate over nature, followed by a few frantic, flap- 

 ping days as reproductives? Similarly, mosses might have a rather 

 different view of the relative importance of the haplophase and 

 the diplophase; if dandelions were authors, one might find sexual 

 reproduction discussed in the literature as a rare and imprudent 

 luxury. 



Needless to say, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that 

 man is the ultimate goal of evolution; indeed, there is none to indi- 

 cate that he is even the terminus of his own lineage. If there were 

 purposive forces guiding evolution, we would expect to find traces 

 of them in the process; in the absence of such evidence, it must be 

 assumed that such forces do not exist. 



CULTURAL BIAS 



Evolutionary theory has been almost exclusively the product of 

 Western minds— minds that think in terms of the Indo-European 

 languages. The structure of these languages has acted to mold our 

 view of nature into a form easily handled by the language. Ideas 

 such as that an effect implies a cause, or a creation a creator, have, 

 since Aristotle, been considered to be immutable laws of logic. It is 

 interesting that Oriental rehgions have emphasized the artificiality 

 of the subject-object dichotomy. Their philosophies aim to eliminate 

 this division, the supposed result being similar in many ways to the 

 professed goals of psychotherapy in Western cultures. A linguistic 

 need for a doer and the done, for objects and relationships among 

 them, may have deeper and more damaging effects than are pres- 

 ently reahzed. Our language requires us to put things into various 

 relationships even when it is patent nonsense to do so. For instance. 



