334 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1935 



indeed we are prepared to admit the reality of the latter at all, as 

 some are not. 



We may conclude this liasty^ survey of basic principles with a word 

 or two about the environment. The effective environment of any 

 particular living organism is determined by the pattern of that or- 

 ganism, just as truly as the pattern of the organism is in part at least 

 determined by the environment. For a particular man, and for a 

 group of similar men, but not for any mouse, the relative honesty of 

 his banker and the urbanity of his dean are highly important ele- 

 ments in the effective environment. And what makes them so is not 

 the bankishness of the banker nor the deanishness of the dean, but 

 the pattern of the particular man of whom we are speaking — a pat- 

 tern not shared by the mouse. In short the relation between organ- 

 ism and environment is everywhere and always mutually reciprocal 

 and as man is the most complicated and manifoldly diverse in his 

 capabilities of all organisms, so also is his effective environment the 

 most complicated. 



More extensively and more effectively than any other organism he 

 makes his own environment. He is constantly altering it in the hope 

 of making it better. But such is the interplay of the contradictory 

 biological elements in his nature that he dislikes and resists any alter- 

 ation of his environment by anyone else than himself or the group 

 of people similar to himself to which he belongs. The social and 

 political consequences of these opposing attitudes are far-reaching 

 and encompass within their range the greater part of our communal 

 troubles in this imperfect world. 



The full implications of the reciprocally determinative influences 

 of organism and environment seem to me to have been generally 

 somewhat less than adequately valued in the last century's develop- 

 ment of biological thought, and certainly an extremely inadequate 

 amount of first-rate research has been put upon the matter. This is 

 partly an obvious consequence of the trend given to biological phi- 

 losophy by Darwin, Galton, Weismann, and Mendel, with their em- 

 phasis upon the entailed or endowed element in the whole biological 

 picture. In human biology particularly the role played by heredity 

 has come to take on many of the aspects of religious dogma. In- 

 deed it has been urged that eugenics should be overtly espoused and 

 developed as a religion. And all this has been going on in a world 

 where consciously planned and directed alterations of environmental 

 conditions have had far-reaching and profound biological effects 

 upon whole populations, not alone in the field of public health but in 

 many others. Every geneticist knows that the final expression in 

 the individual of each hereditary determiner is conditioned by the 

 environmental circumstances under which its development is under- 



