Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

This will of course be true only so far as the general conditions of the environment remain within certain limits: it is probable that too great reductions of temperature or moisture on the surface of the earth would lead to a gradual reversal of progress before the final extinction of life. Up to the present, however, it is clear that such conditions have not occurred, or, possibly, have occurred only for short periods. The general state has been one in which steady, slow progress has been achieved. Progress, like adaptation, is in pre-human evolution almost entirely the resultant of blind chance and blind necessity.

What corollaries and conclusions may be drawn from the establishment of the fact of biological progress? In the first place, it permits us to treat human progress as a special case of a more general process. Biologically speaking, the human species is young—not perhaps still in infancy, but certainly not yet attained to any stable maturity. The conception, common enough in much traditional thought, that man as a species is old, far removed from all pristine vigour and power, is demonstrably untrue. The genus Homo has not yet adapted itself to the new conditions and the new possibilities arising out of the acquisition of reason and tradition. Its history so far is a record of experiment after experiment. From a period so short and so empirical it is impossible to deduce any general law of progress. In certain respects, as we shall see more in detail later, there has been advance; in others, the species has been stationary. But whether humanity in this or that particular has progressed is for the moment comparatively immaterial. Humanity is part of life, a product of life’s movement; and in life as a whole there is progress.[9]

What is more, there was progress before man ever appeared on the earth, and its reality would have been in no way impaired even if he had never come into being. His rise only continued, modified, and accelerated a process that had been in operation since the dawn of life.

Here we find, in the intellectual sphere at least, that assurance which men have been seeking from the first. We see revealed, in the fact of evolutionary progress, that the forces of nature conspire together to produce results which have value in our eyes, that man has no right to feel helpless or without support in a cold and meaningless cosmos, to believe that he must face and fight forces which are definitively hostile. Although he must attack the problems of existence in a new way, yet his face is set in the same direction as the main tide of evolving life, and his highest destiny, the end towards which he has so long perceived that he must strive, is to extend to new possibilities the process with which, for all these millions of years, nature has already been busy, to introduce less and less wasteful methods, to accelerate by means of his consciousness what in the past has been the work of blind unconscious forces. “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.”

For this is one of the most remarkable facts of evolution—that consciousness, until a very late period, has played in it a negligible part. Indeed the rise of consciousness to become a factor of importance in evolution has been one of the most notable single items of progress. Darwin gave the deathblow to teleology by showing that apparently purposive structures could arise by means of a non-purposive mechanism. “Purpose” is a term invented to denote a particular operation of the human mind, and should only be used where a psychological basis may reasonably be postulated. On the other hand, a result can be attained by conscious purpose without the waste of time and of living material needed by the indirect method of natural selection; and thus the substitution of purposed for unpurposed progress is itself a step in progress.

As another corollary of our concept of progress, it follows that we can and should consider, not only the direction of any evolutionary process, but also its rate.

An evolutionary process, if it is to be considered progressive, must have a component in one particular direction—a direction which we have already defined. But this is not all; for even if it be moving in the right direction, and yet be moving extremely slowly, it may, if it have any interaction with a much more rapid progressive movement, actually exert a drag on this; its relative motion—relative to the main current of progress—will be backwards, and we may have to class it as the reverse of progressive. For example, the interaction of carnivore and herbivore, pursuer and pursued, led during the development of the vertebrates to the evolution of much that was good—speed, strength, alertness, and acuity of sense—and of many noble types of living things. But with the advent of man, different methods have been introduced, new modes of competition and advance; and the tiger and the wolf not only cease to be agents of progress in its new form, but definitely stand in its way and must be stamped out, or at least reduced to a condition in which they can no longer interfere as active agents in evolution.

Some such considerations as these will help perhaps to resolve various difficulties of ethics—how, for instance, that which seems good to me may seem evil to another. Even the good, if it be a drag on the better, is evil. Expressed thus, the proposition is a paradox; but expressed in terms of direction and relative speed, it is at once intelligible.

But the test of any such general biological theory as I have outlined will be its application to human problems. And here too, I venture to say, the value of biological method is apparent. What we ask, and rightly ask, is whether in the laws of biological progress we can find any principle which we can apply directly to guide us in devising methods for human progress.

I do not propose to follow the example of many rather hasty philosophers and biologists, who have thought that, whenever the study of lower organisms permitted the promulgation of a biological law, such law can be lifted bodily from its context and be applied without modification to human affairs. Man is an organism—but a very exceptional and peculiar organism. Any biological law which epitomizes only facts about the lower creatures is not a general biological law, for general biological laws must take account not only of plants and animals, but of man as well. In practice, however, the simplest method is to frame our biological laws without considering man, and then to see in what way they must be modified if they are to be applied to him.