334 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 33 



Even organized warfare was an animal development. Some ways 

 of modern war are old in nature: smoke screens are rivaled by the 

 ink clouds by which squids escape their enemies; camouflage is all 

 but universal in nature. Explosives as a weapon of combat seem to 

 have been a human discovery not duplicated by nature — hardly a 

 justification for man's feeling of supreme superiority over the nat- 

 ural world. The rocket plane, which some predict as an outstanding 

 tool of war and peace in the future, will but repeat the mode of 

 locomotion utilized by squids. 



These inventions of nature are not the work of a demigod. They 

 are the end products of evolution — the adjustment of animals to 

 their environment. This evolution, it is now generally agreed, is 

 accomplished by an orderly process: those individuals which are so 

 constituted, so fitted to their environment, that they survive better 

 in the intense struggle for existence, produce offspring like them- 

 selves, multiplying their own kind at a faster rate than do those 

 individuals not so well endowed with characteristics favoring sur- 

 vival. Eventually those best fitted to survive breed out those less 

 well fitted and thus populate their section of the world. 



Man himself is a product of evolution. His ability to create ideas 

 and things has been a leading characteristic fitting him to survive. 

 The human " creations ", which so clearly parallel the products of 

 nonhuman nature, are therefore also the result of natural evolution- 

 ary processes. The distinction between natural and human inven- 

 tions is consequently a rather arbitrary one, based on differences 

 of time, of zoological position, and of degree, rather than on inherent 

 differences in kind. 



Probably the most outstanding among the basic human inventions 

 which was not utilized by prehuman nature was the wheel. True, 

 the wheel animalcules, or rotifers, produced circular water currents 

 by movements of the double circle of cilia about the mouth, but this 

 is not such a movement as would be produced by the spokes of a 

 true wheel, each advancing independently, in rotation. The turning 

 of a circular disk on or about an axle is a distinctively human inven- 

 tion only weakly anticipated (though perhaps suggested) by the 

 motion of animal, including human, limbs around ball-and-socket 

 joints. The wheel is not necessary to high human development, for 

 the American Indians, including even the Mayas and the Incas, seem 

 never to have known of this basic unplement. In one form or an- 

 other, however, the wheel enters into almost every phase of progres- 

 sive human activity characteristic of the mechanical age in which 

 we are living. All current means of transportation, of power de- 

 velopment, and of machine production somewhere involve rotation 

 on or about an axis. The release of man from day-long drudgery. 



