Evolution's Next Step

"The cruellest joke ever played on man by .Nature," said G.B.S. As usual, that dear old defensive sentimentalist was being far more emotional than accurate. But it may well be the greatest challenge that Natural Selection has ever offered that stock which is the supreme creature precisely because this one stock has refused to become a species, refused to become defined in one type and confined to one function,

What, then, is this challenge? It is the offer to become the contemporary answer to man's present most acute need, the reply to his greatest danger, the psychophysical compliment and balance to the otherwise utterly overbalanced development of his economophysical, inventiveness, out-put and elaboration. The invitation that Nature is now offering homo sapiens, the invention that she has devised to save him from the results of his disbalanced activity through his forebrain (his hypertrophied power over his environment without an equal power over his inner emotional drives) is to make him the key to a lock, the switch to a dynamo that she has long had in mind.

For the problem of homo sapiens is precisely this: that he has made a social structure, and with it inventions of expansion and explosion, of elaboration and coercion, that has gone utterly beyond that which has ever been constructed by any mammal. None of his fellow mammals raise crops, build cities, have specialized professions, let alone by their malignant skill threaten wholly to

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exterminate not merely other species but their own. However, in respect of those activities which make for survival (and in which man surpasses his fellow mammals, and indeed is in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all quadrupeds and bipeds, all beasts, birds and fishes) man has been equalled, and in some important respects, surpassed, by other forms of life, forms which are so utterly different from us that they have neither blood nor do they draw breath as we have and do. That great division of life is of course that of the insects. Three great, and completely distinct divisions of this strange aspect of living forms. the termites, the ants and the bees have all gone ahead of us. True, they have not fire. They do not need its dangerous aid. For they have devised warmth-control of their cities. But, tho behind us in some of the gadgets and gear of our elaborate and top heavy economy (elaborations that do not seem needed by their more poised way of life) they are ahead of us in the essential requirements of social living. Civilisation is not raised but often lowered-by big Business. Culture is an achievement of conduct not a resultant of accumulation. It depends on advanced ends far more than on vast means. And what we call our scientific defences are certainly today our greatest peril. Our civilisation has so often been a scandal, and was never a less insurable risk than it is today, precisely because our behaviour (which should, in a city civilisation, be that

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