Ethical Considerations 
Where, however, are we to find a basis for these judgments ? 
Crick’s honest admission that science does not provide us with 
such an ultimate basis accords with my own feeling. If we let 
go of our anchor in the one dimension which has some hope of 
answering questions of value—namely the religious dimension, 
in which the question of the origin and meaning of existence is 
asked—then we are indeed ethically anchorless. When you 
look closely into the logic of the arguments people have 
advanced for throwing away the rope, you find it, I believe, 
as full of non sequiturs as any produced by their opponents. The 
experience of this has helped me, like many others, to a strong 
conviction that for our generation the way forward will be first 
to look back again, and to recover what we have irrationally 
lost in the enthusiasm of opposing people who drew mistaken 
inferences in the name of the Christian religion. 
To go on to a more technical point, it seems to me that our 
biggest lack at the moment is in our whole understanding of 
the nature of the process of valuation. For an acute analysis of 
this problem I would particularly like to recommend the 
chapter by Sir Geoffrey Vickers in a forthcoming symposium 
entitled The Environment of the Metropolis}. 
Our understanding of what it is to arrive at a common 
judgment of value is as primitive by comparison with what we 
would like it to be, as pre-scientific thought is by contrast with 
science today. One of our most pressing needs, I would suggest, 
is for men of a greater variety of experience than scientists to 
get together with us and try to understand more about the 
nature of the characteristically human process by which 
valuation is performed. 
Huxley: One of man’s major properties is that he is always 
evaluating and creating values. How has this function of 
valuing developed and how and why have his values evolved in 
his relatively brief psychosocial existence ? 
Young: You refer only to man in his evolution as a psycho- 
social creature, but I think too little has been said about the 
early stages of biological evolution. We have talked only about 
the past ten thousand years as a guide to the next ten thousand 
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