A first book in organic evolution

by D. Kerfoot Shute

Environment is the coöperating and, to us, vitally important factor, inasmuch as it may supplement and thus reënforce the hereditary tendencies, whether good or bad; or it may even tend to turn them into new channels, correcting the evil or vitiating the good.

Man is not simply a creature of the present, but profoundly a product of the past. Bodily structure, moral and intellectual tendencies, disease, vices, and virtues are all in the marvelous stream of heritage that comes to him from the past. “Diseases that no facts in the individual life can account for point gaunt fingers of blame from one generation to another. Not a murderer is hung, not a daughter starts on the downward way, but a great company, like those who were present at the stoning of Stephen, stand by inaugurating and consenting to the ruin.”[4]

Truly has it been said that the past is at work in the present, its powers reaching down through the ages, to all the race, largely molding every human life, touching and influencing every individual’s thought and will, and, more than any other force, coloring history.

Studies in heredity illustrate most luridly that the continuity of the human race is a terrible but remorseless reality.

If the ignorance and the perverted pleasures of one generation may produce the vices and the crimes and the diseases of another, a question of tremendous import arises: Is heredity as potent in the direction of virtue and health as of vice and disease? At the first look one is almost tempted to answer Nay! for the most striking examples of heredity seem to be in the direction of evil. But this is perfectly natural. Decay is always more rapid than growth. A cherry rots much more quickly than it ripens. Vice and disease spread much more quickly and widely than virtue and health. But all history and all social and medical science teach that vice and disease carry within themselves the seeds of decay, and virtue and health the seeds of endurance and growth.

Through the great Darwinian principle of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, vice and disease will become less and less predominant, and virtue and hygienic constitutions more and more disseminated.

As influencing a man’s life and character,[5] which is the stronger factor, heredity or environment? Fatalism or choice? In our opinion, as the result of long study and reading, where we have an average man of “mens sana in corpore sano,” environment will be the stronger factor whether for good or for evil—that is, in men in general, who have no organic defect, such as insanity or idiocy, and allied affections, the stronger force is environment; but in those having such defect, heredity is the controlling power, and, we may add, the destroying power.

It must be recalled, though, that the average man with a “sound mind in a sound body,” in his development to his present estate, has become possessed of a vast aggregate of diverse heritages, of varying age, strength and dignity. Some of them are so old and strong that they seem to be cast in unyielding molds, while others are so weak and recent that they fluctuate with every passing circumstance. The most dignified and important of all his heritages is that of rational volition. It is the play of this volition upon many of his other heritages that gives him the power of selecting, to a limited extent, his environment.

Every man is born into the world with a certain physical constitution, and, therefore, with a given temperament; with certain passions; with the power of judgment; and with a certain strength of will. If the power of his will be not equal to the strength of his passions, the latter will surely predominate and will display him as the slave of heredity. If he has such an organization of his nervous system that his volition is superior to his passions, he will be none the less the servant of heredity, though a being now possessed of the power of Free-Will.

Man is, to a far greater degree than is ordinarily realized, the servant of heredity. It seems to us an incontrovertible fact that every living creature, at any given moment, is swayed infinitely more by the totality of its heritages than by its environment. No one can possibly deny this so far as plants and most animals are concerned. Nor, if one look below the surface, can it be denied of the higher animals and of man. Happily, the average man, with his present constitution, has his diverse heritages so proportioned that we may repeat that his life and character (in customs, morals, and religion) are vastly more influenced by environment than by heredity.