EVOLUTION 1079 



lengthy controversy, a specious illustration (not to say a spectacular 

 one) may here suffice to indicate our caution. 



People of normal sight in youth usually come to need spectacles 

 about the age of forty-six, or so ; and many, of course, need to start 

 much younger, or even from childhood. Now since these accessory 

 lenses (with their exact adaptation to the internal ones) are of very 

 great importance for so many of the functionings of our lives, and 

 these for both sexes, their vitally adaptive value is obvious, and 

 their health-value also, as in many famous cases; and assuredly 

 often we may say their survival-value as well. Now spectacles of all 

 types are akin to pince-nez, i.e. are adapted to fit and rest steadily 

 on our noses, if not even grip them. Here therefore might not an 

 ardent (Martian) adaptationist say — must not this also be the 

 adaptive origin of the human nose-bridge, as developed in course 

 of survival of the fittest! And might he not even maintain and 

 defend his argument much as do we mundane naturalists in many 

 cases? For single developmental instance, see how, since babies 

 have no spectacles, their nose-bridges are so commonly of little 

 prominence! And for the corresponding phylogenetic argument, see 

 how races not yet adapted to spectacles, as in Africa or Australia, 

 have also often their nose bridges much less developed than are 

 usually ours! O.E.D. (?) 



Artificial Adaptation. — ^An illustration like the above is not 

 simply jocular, nor even exceptional, far-fetched, or the like. On 

 the contrary, it is but the example most obviously before our very 

 eyes, of man's main line of external and artificial adaptation, both 

 as and since he became truly human; and which, beyond internal 

 organic evolution, as of mammalian progress, has given him his 

 place and powers above the organic nature-forms he so increasingly 

 dominates and controls. Recall how our spectacle-lens — fundament- 

 ally a monocle and not so long ago cut and polished out of natural 

 quartz crystal — has thus arisen anew (and at the Renaissance!) 

 out of the technique of the neolithic past (in which some observant 

 worker may well have had a glimpse of its powers), and so carries 

 us back into the history of tools. And as all these are extensions of 

 our bodies, though generally of arms, hands and fingers, our lens 

 is but a tool directed to reinforce the eye, instead of as more gener- 

 all}^, however more indirectly, to satisfying the more clamant 

 mouth. Such progresses of man are of course best considered 

 with his own anthropology, discussed later: yet from the present 

 biological point of view a term like Artificial Adaptation is conveni- 

 ent for appreciating such manifold survival values, and these for 

 individual and society, whether up to guns and armour in war, or 

 from lens (or waterdrop) to microscope in the laboratory of Peace- 

 war, say the Pasteur Institute. Artificial Adaptation is thus the 

 main field for Man's own Artificial Selection (and much of human 



