CHAPTER XXXVII 
BIOLOGY AND HUMAN PROGRESS 
Human progress may be defined briefly as the extent to 
which man has gained control of his environment and the 
use which he has made of this control. In a general way our 
environment has not undergone much change in the last 
thousand years and yet our control over it has undergone 
more change during the past hundred years than in any pre¬ 
vious thousand years. 
This great change is due largely to two factors: (1) scien¬ 
tific discoveries; (2) the intelligent application of these 
discoveries to the life of all the people. 
400. New Discoveries. — Keeping in mind the important 
fact that our universe has remained about the same during 
the past thousand years, the natural inquiry is : How can there 
have been so many new discoveries in recent years? This 
question can be easily answered. When some one finds 
a new animal or plant and announces that he has discovered 
this animal or plant, it simply means that man has seen 
and described it for the first time. This kind of animal 
or plant may have been living in this same region for 
hundreds of years. It is the same when some one makes 
a new discovery in physics or chemistry. He recognizes 
relationships that no one else has ever noticed. All new 
discoveries have been made by men and women who were 
just boys and girls as you are, with possibly no notion of the 
way that they were to help to make this world a better place 
to live in. There is still much to be learned about the 
relation of plants and animals to human progress and some of 
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