THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



point that the biologists are pretty well agreed that 

 natural selection is an effective agent to exterminate 

 a species but that it is not an adequate cause of con- 

 tinuous variation. If it is not accepted in this field it 

 is still less likely to apply to human society. Fiske 

 finds that perhaps half of the primitive stocks were 

 able to progress beyond savagery and of these almost 

 all have stayed arrested in an immobile type of civ- 

 ilization. Continuous progress, he says, is limited to 

 the European Aryans and a very few other stocks. He 

 thus restricts the operation of natural selection to 

 what he calls the rare cases where there is a concur- 

 rence of exceptionally favourable environmental fac- 

 tors. This is a vague and ineffective hypothesis. His 

 argument amounts to this: We, looking backwards, 

 see that progressive civilization occurs only in a cer- 

 tain few peoples; natural selection is the cause of this 

 progress ; therefore, circumstances must in these cases 

 only have been favourable. He cannot tell us what 

 these circumstances were nor can he predict what 

 people will continue to advance or when they will 

 retrograde. 



Those who still follow the example of the pio- 

 neers in the doctrine of sociological evolution invari- 

 ably run against that mystery, or miracle, of the un- 

 known and unexpected variation of individuals, the 

 fact that blood ties give certain common characteris- 

 tics of power or weakness and that at the same time 

 each individual is unaccountably different from his 



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