May, 1922 common misconceptions of evolution 177 



Darwin's theory of Natural Selection has been blamed by 

 undiscerning critics as being responsible for the Great War. 

 Unfortunately the term "natural selection," which means 

 nothing more than that one variation may have an advantage 

 over another one under the conditions of nature, has been 

 draw^n into bad company by those who have misused it, as, for 

 example, in association with the Neitzschian philosophy of the 

 superman. As a sample, we may quote the following statement 

 from von Bernhardi, "Wherever we look in Nature, we find 

 that war is a fundamental law of evolution. This great verity, 

 which has been recognized in past ages, has been convincingly 

 demonstrated in modern times by Charles Darwin." 



Now, Darwin made no such interpretation, and various 

 later biologists have taken exception to this application of his 

 theory to human affairs and especially to war. Thus Thomson 

 wrote, five years before the war, in 1909, in "Darwinism and 

 Human Life": "I find no grounds for interpreting Darwin's 

 'metaphorical phrase,' the struggle for existence, in any sense 

 that would make it a justification for w^ar betw^een nations." 

 Dr. Chalmers Mitchell also comes to the conclusion (Evolution 

 and the War, 1915) that "They" (modern nations) "differ from 

 the units of zoology and botany in that the individuals compos- 

 ing them are not united by blood-relationship. Even if the 

 struggle for existence were the sole law that had shaped and 

 trimmed the tree of life, it does not necessarily apply to the 

 political communities of men, for these cohere not because of 

 common descent, but because of bonds that are common to the 

 human race." 



A former president of this Academy, Prof. Maynard M. 

 Metcalf, stated in his presidential address before the American 

 Society of Zoologists on "Darwinism and Nations," "Human 

 communities, especially, have freed their members from much 

 of the stress of the struggle for existence, by substituting 

 co-operation for rivalry. . . Co-operation may perhaps fairly 

 be said to transcend natural selection as an influence upon the 

 life of highly civilized man. The higher the development of 

 human society, the more dominant becomes the principle of 

 co-operation. Only in the most primitive communities can 

 there be an approach to unrestricted natural selection. Indeed, 

 we know today no such human societies, and it is probable that 

 this stage of social evolution was already passed before man's 



