BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



group than when alone. Like other creatures he will fight 

 when alone to preserve his life and, in some cases, his 

 honor and dignity; but in groups his courage and confidence 

 are enormously elevated, his sense of power and adequacy 

 become inflated, and he becomes aggressive, domineering, 

 and blood-thirsty. In view of his historical record, the 

 devoutly cultivated myth that man was created in the 

 image of a loving God and endowed with a sweet, kindly 

 nature only a little lower than that of the angels, must be 

 looked upon as a most extraordinary compensatory 

 rationalization. Every page of human history is spotted 

 with senseless and unnecessary bloodshed, crimes of vio- 

 lence and ferocious brutality. Warfare and crimes of robbery 

 and violence, individual and collective, seem to be in- 

 eradicable from human relations, just as are also the exist- 

 ence of Tammany Halls and Ohio gangs in politics, and 

 exploitation and monopoly in business. 



Is it not most truthful, and hence wisest, to recognize 

 at the basis of these facts deep-seated elements of human 

 nature? And what is more reasonable, from the standpoint 

 of evolutionary biology, than to find these elements rooted 

 in the age-long struggles of our omnivorous ancestors 

 combining as best they could to win a short and brutish 

 existence from a raw and none too friendly nature? Karl 

 Pearson,^ from a comparative study of the femora of man 

 and other primates, concludes that the ancestor of man was 

 not like the shrinking tree shrew that runs to the tree tops 

 on the approach of danger but "heavy in build and violent 

 in character," "agile in motion, slender in his proportions, 

 gracile in his bones, and dexterous in his flight from pos- 

 sible foes," "a violent fighter and a ravenous feeder." 

 "We owe more than half our trouble to-day to this ances- 

 try. Is the brutality and violence of man to-day a fall from 



' Pearson, Karl, "Side Lights on the Evolution of Man," Eugenics Laboratory 

 Lecture Series, No. 13, p- 6, 1920. 



[40J 



