Where do you come from?

• What use, if any are you?

What, if anything, do you point to?

A FUTURE

for the ISOPHYL

D. B. Vest

The chief charge made against isophyls has been that they are "unnatural" (merely

private jaded hehavior.) This is not true. Every known species of mammal produces intergrades. Further, with man, isophylia is commoner, because man's rapid advance has been due to his retaining unspecialized youthfulness longer than any other species. With play, curiosity, wonder and creativity (largely lost by other adult animals) man retains psychosomatic generalization, that panaesthetic response, that need for caress and fondling, which is gay, exploratory and stimulant, but purely erotic rather than specifically sexual, for it is pre-productive.

Modern society faces two demands. The first is Malthus' Devil, brooding again over mankind: we must realize man breeds faster than he can produce food. When such societies as the Achaean Greeks or the nomads on their failing grasslands found population pressures threatening disaster, they seemed to alter their mores regarding isophylia, and produced increasing proportions of those to whom this way of life was satisfying and inspiring.

When certain breeding-changes are necessary to the race, biological modifications do seem to occur. After a war, male births increase, tending to readjust the malefemale ration. Thus isophylia is Nature's response to the population pressures on the food supply.

Never before have human societies approached such elaboration, or changed at

such unsettling speed. Taylor, pioneer in scientific management, discovered that the invention of a new machine requires a new type of machine-mind. Western economy can only escape fission and collapse if served by experts who must be concerned with and feel loyalty to the entire accelerating process. They must retain the brave curiosity of the child.

All highly developed social creatures bees, ants, termites produce worker types, specific mutations to fit the elaborate socio-economic structure. As human society grows complex and interlocked, man too produces a type to serve the need.

。

In advanced societies, the isophylic type, relieved of breeding, is produced and so specialized as to run the elaborate organizations. The increasingly complex social structure demands a type less restricted to the small pattern of the family than the heterosexual.

These are the two uses of the iscphyl. One is outside his control willy nilly he serves the biological purpose of Nature. The other is more a promise than an assignation. Human society is still in a more rudimentary state than that of the more advanced creatures.