4 THINKING BRAIN AND MORAL 

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IN THE nature of evolution an animal or a plant cannot be 

 made more fit than just fit enough to survive. Animals 

 and plants, therefore, have an uncertain tenure of life. All 

 animals, including man himself, were evolved to the tiptoe 

 of chance and left in partial peril and partial safety. Since it 

 was in the brain of early man that his evolution took place, 

 it was in the brain that there were created action patterns, 

 called knowledge, by means of which man excelled his 

 fellow animals. 



In the brain of early man were included those action 

 patterns denoting how to domesticate animals and plants, 

 how to make from these shelter and clothing, and how to 

 obtain food from them. These action patterns had survival 

 value. It was the superior thinking mechanism of the brain 

 that enabled early man to secure these advantages over the 

 competing animals. But in this sensitive recording and 

 thinking mechanism were also laid down the dangers that 

 beset man. In the brain of early man were recorded the 

 danger of the lion, the rush of the elephant, the fury of the 

 buffalo, the sting of the serpent. In the brain of early man 

 was recorded the fact that many animals injure or destroy 

 man and that, although some animals were good, some were 

 bad, and that even good animals were sometimes bad and 

 bad animals sometimes good. 



Thus, early man, like man today, existed on the unstable 

 boundary of chance. Like the feather that drifts on the 

 breeze and is never carried beyond contact with the forces 

 that convey it, early man, left on the beach of time, where, 

 alternately, the waves and the sun reached him in the 

 twilight zone of chance, within the reach of both safety and 

 peril evolved through the favorable mutations of his 



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