330 ANNUAL KEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 5 



secondary reasons superimposed upon his natural, protoplasmic 

 will-to-live. Many of these reasons are, collectively, what we call 

 social. They represent purposeful adaptations in what Wheeler has 

 convincingly argued is the next emergent level above the individual 

 organismal. In most human beings these secondary social adapta- 

 tions of behavior are still somewhat incomplete and imperfect, as 

 clearly appears in times of great stress or danger. And the extent 

 to which the highest forms of hmnan altruistic social adaptations 

 have real and enduring survival value, has yet to be measured. It 

 can be argued with some plausibility that why they give the ap- 

 pearance of having some survival value, or at least of not being 

 positively harmful, is because they became even moderately wide- 

 spread only during that recent portion of human history in which 

 living has been relatively easy for all mankind. It has been rel- 

 atively easy for two reasons : Low density of population, in general ; 

 and rapidly increasing knowledge of applied science with its accom- 

 panying industrial developments. In a world where getting a living 

 was easy, altruistic social relations were correspondingly easy. In- 

 stances, and localities of a real struggle for existence between in- 

 dividual men (other than during large-caliber wars or in the 

 processes incident to the assumption of the " white man's burden ") 

 have been rare in this world since the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century. And few have ever seriously alleged that war is an al- 

 truistic enterprise; nor is it at all micertain that the pleasures of 

 '' civilizing " backward peoples are, like those of condescension, sin- 

 gularly one-sided. 



The urge to reproduce is second in power, if at all, only to that 

 for survival. This basic attribute of living material, like the other, 

 includes in its scope great ranges of academically labeled and pigeon- 

 holed biological phenomena — of which among the more important 

 are perhaps population growth with its part in the struggle for 

 existence and natural selection; and heredity with its concomitants 

 of development and growth. For heredity is most clearly to be 

 apprehended as an aspect of reproduction. Living things do not 

 merely reproduce; they reproduce themselves.i This fact makes it 

 clear that, philosophically viewed, the urge to reproduction is really 

 a part — an extension if you like — of the primal urge to survival. 

 If the individual cannot ensure his own indefinite earthly immor- 

 tality he can and does try his very best to see that his stirp shall 

 keep on living forever and ever. Naturally this self-reproductive 

 process tends toward social as well as biological stability. 



Genes are almost incredibly stable and resistant to alteration in 

 the natural and usual circumstances of life. For something over 15 

 years there has been going on in my laboratory a continuous experi- 



