BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



The ultimate consequences for racial quality, and hence 

 for social evolution, are only dimly perceived. 



A final difficulty in the achievement of that social 

 control w^hich is the goal and final test of scientific validity 

 is that public opinion determines both the introduction 

 and the effective working of new truths. It is not easy 

 to achieve in popular thought that degree of rational 

 insight necessary for the rapid readjustment of political 

 and ethical institutions. The growth of rationality in 

 these fields is necessarily slow and takes place by a tedious 

 transformation of popular views through suggestion and 

 imitation of one social class by another. The gradual 

 emergence of science to a position of chief authority among 

 the mores is probably the most significant cultural change 

 taking place at present. The warfare between science and 

 theology is real and epoch-making. They represent two 

 directly opposed modes of explaining phenomena, 

 the animistic and the realistic, the creationist and the 

 evolutionary, the irrational or supra-rational, and the 

 rational. The future of our civilization depends on which 

 one succeeds to the place of unquestioned and universal 

 primacy among the criteria of thought and emotion. 

 From this point of view the popularization of science and 

 the increasing attachment of popular thought to scientific 

 concepts and attitudes are bright omens of a new and better 

 era.^ In the light of present knowledge, we seem warranted 

 in saying that the future of our culture is dependent on 

 learning how to accomplish by scientific methods that elimina- 

 tion of the unfit and ill adapted which now is accomplished 

 by natural selection on both the biological and the socio- 

 logical planes. Nature's methods are haphazard, wasteful, 



^ For an interesting statement of what has already been achieved in the direction 

 of a new texture of social life, see page 1402, "The Science of Life," by H. G. 

 Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., Garden 

 City, N. Y. 1931. 



[52] 



