BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFPAIRS 



and war. These touch closely the perennial needs for food 

 and security. Economic activities are less imbued with 

 inviolate taboos than are most others; they are more 

 nearly commonplace and hence more readily modifiable in 

 the light of experience and rational thought. Methods 

 of warfare are subjected to the selective action of competi- 

 tive value. Changes in economic life especially tend to 

 exert a modifying influence on all other aspects of the 

 associated culture. There is a constant "strain toward 

 consistency"^ among the mores. New ways are brought 

 under old sanctions in the same way that Christianity 

 devoutly approves both a holy war and world peace, or first 

 opposed the charging of interest and later embraced the 

 capitalist economics, only to be transformed thereby. - 

 These transformations of culture often have a quality 

 of rationality attributed to them that does not properly 

 belong to them. The judgments of a social group no doubt 

 represent all the powers of reason it can muster, but the 

 premises of thought are mainly derived from the mores, 

 and the action of reason is guided by the overpowering 

 emotions associated with ethical, religious, and philo- 

 sophical principles. The facts which would expose reality 

 are obscure, while only proximate ends can be envisaged. 

 The resulting adjustments are, therefore, hit and miss 

 affairs. Abundant illustrations may be found for modern 

 times in Herbert Spencer's writings — especially in his 

 "The Sins of Legislators" — showing that the unexpected 

 results of laws often greatly exceed the expected; in Ber- 

 trand Russell's exposition of "the harm that good men 

 do"; and in the thousand and one instances in the evolution 

 of western culture where the distant consequences of an 



^ Sumner, Wm. G., "Folkways," Ginn & Company, Boston, 1915. 



^Tawney, R. H., "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism," Harcourt, Brace & 

 Company, New York, 1926; Max Weber, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of 

 Capitalism," trans, by Talcott Parsons, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1930. 



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