HUMAN PROSPECTS — BLACKWELDER 281 



waiting for the biologists to work out these problems, we may use 

 the term "species" a bit vaguely in its current meaning, and we may 

 tentatively adopt the now preponderant view that new species origi- 

 nate not by gradual imperceptible changes but by sudden mutations, 

 either extensive enough to produce a distinct species at once or 

 occurring in series which eventually culminate in full specific status. 



However any new species actually originated, its parental species 

 doubtless continued to exist for a time without much change. The 

 new kind expanded in numbers and, if more effective, eventually over- 

 ran and exterminated the older one. It then went on living without 

 important physical change until it was in turn crowded out by more 

 efficient animals or until it succumbed to other adverse factors in its 

 environment. 



Have we any reason to suppose that Eomo sapiens is not subject to 

 the same process or that his fate will not be similar? He differed 

 from earlier species of men very slightly in physical form and struc- 

 ture. His achievements and the shapes of his crania suggest that he 

 possessed, from the outset, not only a larger but probably also a dis- 

 tinctly better brain, which has enabled him to learn more extensively, 

 to devise complicated languages, and eventually to develop what we 

 now call civilization. This progress seems to have gone forward on 

 a steadily rising curve. For perhaps 20,000 years Homo sapiens was 

 only a savage, a wandering hunter. In the next 5,000 years or more 

 he advanced locally to the status of a shepherd and even a village 

 farmer. In another 3,000 years he learned to extract and use metals, 

 form city states and even nations, and become skillful in many of the 

 finer arts. Accelerated advance in the next 1,000 years lead to books, 

 commerce, literature, and philosophy. The last century or two has 

 witnessed a rapidity of material progress in communication and far- 

 flung organization that exceeds anything previously known; and 

 with it has come much growth in ideas and in the complexity of eco- 

 nomic and social arrangements. Are we justified in assuming from 

 the contemplation of that curve that it will continue to rise indefi- 

 nitely, and at a similar rate? Is there in all geologic or human his- 

 tory any precedent for that? Other animal species of the past have 

 followed career curves that involved a rise, culmination, and decline. 

 We have seen the same law controlling the nations and even races of 

 humanity. Will our own species also reach its climax and then 

 deteriorate? And if that happens, how and when will it occur? 

 As yet we have but little basis for answers to such questions. 



In contrast to his progress in ways and ideas. Homo sapiens seems 

 to have undergone only slight physical changes, even in the estimated 

 30,000 years of which some records have come down to us. Anatom- 

 ically there seems to be no evidence whatever of any progress — no 



