WAR, SCIENCE, CIVILIZATION 
Biologist Protests Against the Kind of Biology Preached by Militarists—Defective 
Politics Resting on Defective Understanding of Nature Makes War 
Now Possible—Changes in Public Sentiment That Will 
Make War Unlikely—What the United 
States Could Do 
Review of a book by WitiiAM E. RITTER 
Director of the Scripps Institution for Biological Research of the University of 
California, La Jolla, Cal. 
HE idea of settling by arbitration 
the question as to whether a 
hungry man may take a loaf of 
which he has the full strength 
to possess himself is chimerical and 
quixotic. 
So says a recent German writer, 
attempting to justify wars of expansion. 
Taking this statement as a starting 
point, Professor William E. Ritter, of 
the University of California, has under- 
taken! to show what modern biology 
would say about war of that type. 
In the first place, he strongly objects 
to the tendency of militaristic writers 
to justify wars among men on the mere 
ground of a struggle for survival among 
the lower animals. Admitting the truth 
of the statement made in the first 
paragraph of this review, he remarks 
that it does not cover the whole case. 
“Such situations constitute what 
militarists of the Homer Lea and von 
Bernhardi type regard as the biological 
necessity for war. As a biologist, I 
would insist that the argument which 
would make war everlastingly necessary 
on such grounds implies a limitation to 
the conception of ‘biological’ that is 
utterly inadmissible by biology itself. 
Biology never stops and never can stop 
in its dealings with any animal by 
regarding it just as an animal in an 
unrestrained sense. It always deals 
with some particular kind or spectes of 
animal. The fish must be treated as a 
fish, and the bird as a bird. . Neither 
can be disposed of by merely attending 
1 War, Science and Civilization, by William E. Ritter. 
French & Co., 1915. 
186 
to such general attributes as need for 
food and propagation, common to both, 
and to all animals. 
‘In exactly the same way is it im- 
possible for biology to consider man as 
just an animal. If it touches him at 
all it must touch him as the human 
animal. Confusion of thought in this 
matter, not only among laymen but 
among many biologists, is amazing, 
and has led to the most bizarre specula- 
tions about man, some of these being 
truly direful in their effects on human 
outlook and conduct.”’ 
If biology, then, is to be drawn into 
the discussion of war, it must insist that 
man be considered as distinctly a 
human animal, endowed with reason, 
and foresight, and inventive talent, and 
humane sentiments. 
Given these endowments, man de- 
humanizes himself if he does not use 
them to forestall situations that would 
make hunger press so severely on him 
as to lead him to war. This is a ques- 
tion of the proper distribution of the 
earth’s resources. 
THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM 
“This brings us to the kernel of this 
discussion, and, as it seems to the 
writer, to the supreme question our 
nation will have to grapple with if it 
would accomplish anything significant 
toward world peace. That question is, 
Can we present any practical plan 
whereby nations foremost in the march 
of civilization shall be assured such 
Pp. 125; price, $1 net. Boston, Sherman 
