CARLETON S. COON 
as nearly infinite as it need be to cancel out life, time is shrinking 
to a few ticks of the clock, and space is growing as inconse- 
quential as the surface area of a postage stamp. Yet as long 
as the major part of the face of the earth remains intact, 
variations in environment will still be with us. Arctic wastes 
and parching deserts will still be marginal areas to a certain 
degree. The requirements of keeping warm or cool and the 
difficulties of finding food have kept some of the world’s 
cleverest people, the Eskimo and Lapps, on a very simple 
institutional level, and it is not easy to imagine any technolo- 
gical changes that will make the icecaps and deserts of the 
world anything more than expensively maintained colonies of 
captive workers as in Greenland, Antarctica, and the Arabian 
oilfields today. The best lands of the world will continue to be 
centres of social complexity in the foreseeable future, if we 
think in terms of people rather than of machinery. 
RACE AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 
I have left to the end the most troublesome—and least 
rationally handled—aspect of the total problem of social 
evolution, that of race. Yet it is a real problem and must be 
faced if we are to do anything but chat about the future of man. 
Since the time of our first knowledge of Homo erectus our genus 
has been divided into geographical races adapted in varying 
fashions and degrees to heat, cold, altitude, and disease. These 
adaptations remain’. How long will the Communist Chinese be 
able to survive and reproduce their kind in the thin air of 
Tibet ? Will the genetic superiority of native West Africans over 
White men, which has kept the latter out for centuries, be 
lost when all the malaria-carrying mosquitoes have been 
stamped out with millions of tons of DDT? If the races of man 
stay where they are best adapted, it creates much less trouble 
than when they move into each other’s territories. 
And, more importantly, are all peoples equally suited, in a 
neuroendocrinological sense, to live under the regimentation 
which is bound to come in a vastly overcrowded world? These 
are questions that I cannot answer, and the very mention of 
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