124 MAN THE ANIMAL 



equal in natural endowments. The attempts to extend the 

 principle of democracy beyond group rule-making, which in 

 the mammalian pattern of sociality is in biological fact a group 

 function, so that it shall also include, and operate in respect of 

 getting a living has not added to the acceptability or the stability 

 of democracy as a social pattern. In the basic mammalian sociality 

 getting a living is an individual function, and not a group func- 

 tion as it is in the termite pattern. 



There would seem to be two possible alternative trends of 

 man's further bio-social evolution that might conceivably be 

 followed, provided he succeeds in surviving as a species. In this 

 apparently elliptical statement is intended to be implicit the 

 truism that man himself plays an important and conscious part 

 in determining the course of his own social evolution, and that 

 there are discernible now only two suggestions of possible future 

 trends that seem to have a sufficient element of probability in 

 them to be worth discussing. One of these that is at least 

 theoretically possible, even if necessarily slow in practical ac- 

 complishment, would be by breeding out the innate differences 

 that now exist between men and making them into a uniform 

 lot except for such caste differentiations as might seem desirable 

 to perpetuate, or might naturally evolve, in the interest of group 

 efficiency solely. Such a process would eradicate all significant 

 individual differences within each caste. Individual incentives 

 and strivings would disappear, and also the social troubles they 

 always produce. The process might conceivably be hastened, in 

 the manner suggested in Brave New World, by conditioning the 

 young from the moment of fertilization on for group conformity 

 in the long period while genetic differences were being elimi- 

 nated by breeding. In the end getting rid of differences would re- 

 sult in the human equivalent of the termite pattern of sociality. 

 All men then would be truly equal, within the caste, and eco- 

 nomically and socially equal within the total group, the colony, 

 or state, or world. In cold fact this may be precisely the present 

 trend of human evolution. We are here and now breeding out 

 the innate differences between men, and at an accelerating rate. 



