PROCESSES OF SELECTION 53* 



not merely in helping survival at the time, but in strengthening 

 foothold, increasing comfort, lengthening life, promoting re- 

 productive success, and so on. 



It may be a miserable squabble around the platter of sub- 

 sistence, but it may be a gentle endeavour after well-being. 

 It may be prompted by " love " as well as by " hunger," using 

 both words in the widest sense ; it may be other-regarding as 

 well as self-preservative. 



There may be struggle between foes of quite different natures, 

 e.g. birds of prey and vermin; competition between fellows of 

 the same kin, e.g. brown rat against black rat; opposition 

 between the sexes (cf. courtship of spiders, in which the female 

 often devours the male, and human competition between male 

 and female doctors, clerks, etc.) ; self-assertion against the quite 

 indifferent, often merciless " weather " of the physical environ- 

 ment. The phases of "struggle " are as varied as life itself. 



Interference with Natural Selection. Not a few sociological 

 writers have echoed the warning of Herbert Spencer that modern 

 hygienic and therapeutic methods interfere with the natural 

 elimination of the weaklings whose survival consequently be- 

 comes a drag on the race, and there is doubtless some force in 

 the argument, especially if we could confine ourselves to an 

 entirely biological outlook. It appears to us, however, that 

 the practical corollary that we should cease from interfering 

 with natural selection, as the phrase goes, is as fallacious as it 

 is impossible, (i) It seems a little absurd to speak of, say, 

 the prevention of an artificially exaggerated infantile mortality 

 as if it were an interference with the order of nature. (2) Much 

 weakness which may readily become fatal is simply modificational, 

 due perhaps to lack of nutrition at a critical moment ; many 

 weakly children grow up thoroughly sound ; and even if we 

 do keep alive some whose constitutions are intrinsically bad, 

 we are at the same time saving and strengthening many whose 

 intrinsically good constitutions only require temporary shelter. 



