The Higher Usefulness of Science 55 



say about our problems?" "Why, thunderation," is 

 the way he said he answered, "biology has nothing to 

 say about such matters !" The fact that biology should 

 take endless pains to understand the behavior of sea 

 anemones, earth worms, crabs, frogs, crows, mice, and 

 the rest, but should make official declaration that with 

 the behavior of one species alone, man, it has nothing to 

 do except as to how his strictly physiological and some 

 of his minor psychological activities are inflenced by 

 certain experimentally imposed conditions, would seem 

 about the climax of absurdity to anybody whose sci- 

 entific specialization had not been in its larger signifi- 

 cance checkmated by sophistication. 



How the notion that the most distinctive part of 

 human life lies outside the province of biology, should 

 have gained lodgment in the minds of many biologists 

 is not difficult to explain once one attains a critical 

 insight into the course of biological theory during the 

 last half century. But that we must pass now. 



Almost certainly biological science will have to share 

 with German political philosophy in the condemnatory 

 verdict which history will pass upon some of the appli- 

 cations to human affairs of the survival of the fittest 

 doctrine made in our era. This does not mean that 

 science ought to back and fill in promulgating the 

 truths it discovers, from humanitarian considerations. 

 But the promulgation of fully demonstrated truth is 

 one thing and the promulgation of half-proven hypoth- 

 eses is quite another. It is only in the case of such of 



