No. 564J 



THE FIXATION OF CHARACTER 



727 



All conservative and stable characters which are com- 

 mon to large groups of organisms have thus reached their 

 present condition through slow but steady progress dur- 

 ing the same time that plastic and functionally important 

 features were changing and moulding themselves in adap- 

 tation to every new demand of the environment. 



Organic evolution in general, including that of human 

 civilization, seems to have resulted from the opposing 

 actions of the two great factors which we have so often 

 mentioned : on the one hand, the tendency toward fixation, 

 which results in the stereotyping of structures and of 

 habits and social customs, and which gives rise to mental 

 as well as physical conservatism ; and, on the other, the 

 action of natural selection in weeding out such physical 

 characters as tend to make the organism unadaptable and 

 such customs, institutions and even societies as have 

 become too firmly stereotyped through habit and prece- 

 dent or too bound by tradition to maintain themselves in 

 the advance of civilization. Natural selection does not 

 interfere with useless or harmless characters which there- 

 fore become firmly fixed and are of great value in deter- 

 mining relationships between organisms and between civi- 

 lizations and in deciphering the path of evolutionary 

 advance. 



This biological principle that trivial but conservative 

 characters which happen to distinguish the beginnings of 

 a successful evolutionary line become closely associated 

 with all its subsequent development has therefore many 

 suggestive parallels in human history. Any great move- 

 ment is always colored by the circumstances surrounding 

 its inception. The fact that our first popular translation 

 of the Bible happened to be written in the seventeenth 

 century English does not account for the enormous sub- 

 sequent spread of the Scriptures, but nevertheless the 



