BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



Intelligence tests carried on in the more enlightened 

 countries during the past two decades have shown that 

 fully fifty per cent of the people involved lack the capacity 

 to follow even elementary scientific reasoning. This fact is 

 often accepted as evidence that the scientific outlook can 

 appeal to only a small fraction of the population. No con- 

 clusion could be more superficial. The average mind, the 

 mean mind, as the statistical wag puts it, absorbs teaching 

 to the limit of its power. It is conditioned by its experience, 

 as all minds are conditioned by experience. But where the 

 superior mind is compelled — also by training — to sift its 

 varied grist of lore, holding fast that which is good, the 

 untrained or inferior mind takes in more indiscriminately 

 whatever is offered of digestible quality. The reason the 

 brains of most people are stuffed with so much medieval 

 nonsense, therefore, is that this is the intellectual fodder 

 with which they have been supplied. Clearly, then, if 

 progress in the world of ideas is to keep pace with material 

 progress, these thob-fancies must be replaced by ascertained 

 truth. 



Can it be done? Well, why not? Have we no leaders of 

 thought? Can we make no changes in our educational 

 system? It is very difficult to alter the mores of a people, as 

 Sumner has shown in that noble treatise "Folkways"; yet 

 it is not impossible. The soviet rulers are doing it rapidly 

 and thoroughly. It is true that here one set of foolish ideas 

 is being replaced with another; but this fact is of little 

 consequence. The important thing is the demonstration 

 that success is possible in such an undertaking. My personal 

 belief and, I think, the universal belief of all true men of 

 science, is that humanity can aspire to nothing more lofty 

 or more satisfactory than a philosophy based solely on 

 demonstrated truth. I should like to see a world in which 

 people endeavor to deal only with facts, all the facts, and 

 nothing but the facts; where truth is approached without 



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