4 SCIENTIST 



that order but is intimately dependent upon it. His outstand- 

 ing qualities of intellect are to be understood not as a share 

 in the Divine Wisdom, but as the result of an evolutionary 

 process that provides each and every species with some 

 speciaHzed means of survival. In other v^ords, man has an 

 unusually good brain for much the same reasons that a 

 tiger has unusually good teeth and claws, or a cow has 

 an unusually good apparatus for digesting grass. 



Many species met disaster in the past when the condi- 

 tions for which they had developed specialized abilities dis- 

 appeared. Everyone knows, for example, what happened 

 to the giant reptiles when the climate changed. Man has 

 some advantage in that his form of speciahzation confers 

 on him an unprecedented flexibility of adaptation. He can 

 live under more different kinds of circumstances than per- 

 haps any other species. But then too, his very flexibihty and 

 apparent freedom of choice may be his own undoing. For 

 we now know that one of his choices concerns whether or 

 not to press the button on the doomsday machine. 



But let us turn now to our promised very brief review 

 of the place of science in earher Western societies. Among 

 other things we may find that one of the factors which has 

 determined the rate of scientific progress in different soci- 

 eties is the way they have regarded change in general and 

 the relative weight they have given to improving man's con- 

 trol of natural forces as against preserving traditional 

 images of man's place in the scheme of things. 



A very good start in science was in fact made by the 

 ancient civilizations in Egypt and the great valleys of the 

 Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These highly organized soci- . 

 eties depended primarily on the fertility of the bottom land 

 they occupied and its annual renewal by the silt brought 

 down in the spring floods. Since it rarely rained in these 

 areas, the water necessary for agriculture had to be supplied 



