Genetic Progress by Voluntarily Conducted Germinal Choice 
must have constituted critical factors that favoured man’s 
survival. It is obvious, therefore, that under primitive condi- 
tions of living those faculties in our pre-human and early 
human ancestors must have become enhanced by natural 
selection. These same faculties, moreover, after having become 
sufficiently enhanced in their genetic basis, made possible an 
increasing mental transfer from individual to individual and 
from generation to generation of the lessons and skills acquired 
by experience, and thus gave rise to the process of extra-genic ac- 
cumulation of learned reactions that we call cultural evolution. 
For a long time there must have been a considerable positive 
feedback from cultural to genetic evolution**. Some of the 
comparatively advanced and demanding practices instituted by 
culture must inevitably have called forth keener forms of com- 
petition between individuals, and between small groups of them. 
These practices would include more sophisticated types of com- 
munication and of mutual aid, which would better serve the 
interests of the given family or small community, in its direct or 
indirect competition with other groups. Thus culture itself 
provided a basis for more effective natural selection in favour of 
the very traits that advanced that culture. 
For a further understanding of the influence of culture upon 
biological constitution, it is important to recognize certain 
other principles concerned with the operation of natural selec- 
tion. It is easy to see that greater ability of any kind, physical 
or mental, exerted on behalf of its possessor, has a selective 
advantage and tends in the course of generations to become 
established in a population. It is also evident that predisposi- 
tions to be of service to others of the immediate family will be of 
selective advantage, because the operations of these predisposi- 
tions will promote the survival and multiplication of replicas 
of the very genes that gave rise to them. In other words these 
actions, although altruistically directed, are in essense reflexive 
in that they foster, through their selective influence on others, 
the multiplication of the same type of genes as they themselves 
derive from. This is in a sense an extension of genetic selfishness 
or, if you prefer, an enlightened, limited altruism. 
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