BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



rain to fall on parched fields, or bring the aid of an omnipo- 

 tent deity in a murderous war. It is becoming more and 

 more evident, however, even to the man on the street, that 

 progress toward greater personal happiness and a more 

 perfect social organization is intimately connected with 

 the advancement of scientific realism. Authority in religion, 

 and in the morality resting thereon, gives way before a 

 skepticism which queries whether there may not be a way 

 of life that is freer and more abundant, a way illumined by 

 the light of physiological, psychological, and sociological 

 knowledge. 



Darwinism was very largely responsible for the develop- 

 ment not only of a natural history view of man but also 

 of a naturalistic view of society and its institutions. 

 Obviously, if man is a part of nature, society is also. If 

 society is a culminating product of organic evolution, then 

 the social institutions must be viewed as means whereby 

 societies have sought to maintain and perpetuate them- 

 selves in adaptation to their environments. The result was 

 that social scientists of the generation after Darwin busily 

 applied themselves to the significance of the concepts of 

 fecundity, variation, struggle for existence, selection, 

 heredity, and adaptation for the interpretation of social 

 phenomena. It was inevitable that the use of biological 

 analogies would be pushed too far. It was also to be 

 expected that the progress of psychology and ethnology 

 would change the points of emphasis in sociology from the 

 biological to concepts imbued with psychological and 

 culturistic implications. Nevertheless, the biological orien- 

 tation served to give firmness to sociological interpretation, 

 partly through supplying useful rubrics and partly by 

 removing sociological theory from the deadly grip of a 

 sterile metaphysics. 



Among the most widely exploited of these early concepts 

 was that of the social organism. While Herbert Spencer is 



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