Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

When we look into the trend of biological evolution, we find as a matter of fact that it has operated to produce on the whole what we find good, to bring into being more and more things on which we can set positive value. This is not to say that progress is an inevitable “law of nature,” but that it has actually occurred, and that its occurrence provides an external sanction for many of our subjective human hopes and ideals.

True that we are ourselves a product of the evolutionary process and might therefore be thought biased. None the less, it is clear that if a degenerate animal like a tapeworm, or one inevitably specialized like a hermit-crab, could possess and enunciate values, they would be of a very different nature from our own. But we should further find that the direction of the evolutionary process which led to the former was directly opposed to the main trend, that of the latter more or less at right angles to it. The general coincidence of the main observable trend and of our own concepts of value warrants us in calling the one progressive, and in feeling that the other is no mere isolated flicker in an alien or hostile world, but finds a sanction and a resting-place in being part of something vastly bigger than itself. The remarkable and important fact for man is to find, in spite of all the apparently fundamental differences between his organization and his evolutionary methods and those of lower organisms, in spite of the widespread degeneration and “blind-alleyism” to be seen in evolution, that the direction in which he desires to go coincides with the resultant, the main direction of organic evolution. There are no ideals, there is no purpose, in fish or ant or tree: but man’s ideals and purposes are the outcome of the blind interplay of forces in which fish and ant and tree play their unwitting rôles. True again that further analysis shows that the methods of evolutionary progress are often crude, wasteful, and slow: that some of our values are unreal or artificial: but this does not destroy the main fact, and only means that each side can here learn something from the other.

The main fact abides—that progress is an evolutionary reality, and that an analysis of the modes of biological progress may often help us in our quest for human progress.

The next great problem on which biology has something to say to sociology is that eternal one of the relation between individual and community. As it is sometimes put, Does the individual exist for the State, or the State for the individual? In all non-human biological aggregates—cell-colonies, second-grade aggregates or metazoan organisms, third-grade aggregates like Siphonophora and insect communities—the very existence of the aggregate as a unit, its biological efficiency and success, depend upon a permanent division of labour between its members, upon their thoroughgoing specialization. This always and inevitably involves a sacrifice of certain of their potentialities to greater efficiency in one of a few actual functions, and in evolution a progressive subordination of the smaller unit to the aggregate.

At first sight, biological principles seem to contradict themselves on this subject. On the one hand, the human individual is, or, we had better say, has the potentiality of being the highest type of organism in existence—far higher, biologically speaking, not only than any human community now in existence, but than any which we could possibly imagine as coming into existence in the future. When we remember the general agreement of biological progress with our human values, it is clear that to degrade the individual for the benefit of the community is wrong—a biological crime.

On the other hand, human progress depends and will always depend to an extent scarcely to be overrated upon the proper organization of the community. So long as present competition continues, the very survival of a nation may easily depend upon the efficiency of its organization as a community. Biological as well as human experience makes it perfectly plain that such success, in a unit which is itself an aggregate of smaller units, depends upon the degree of specialization of these constituent units and the division of labour and co-operation between them.

Biology here then lays down that human individuals should become more and more specialized if progress is to continue; but since specialization implies the sacrifice of many potentialities for the good of the whole, this apparently contradicts what we have just inculcated above.

This is where our human flexibility comes in. Man should neither live whole-heartedly for himself, nor throw his individuality, ant-like, beneath the wheels of the community Juggernaut. He can escape from the dilemma by passing from one state to the other. For part of his time, he can apply his energies as a specialized unit—for the rest, he can be a complete individual, realizing the various potentialities of his many-sided nature, with the community contributing to his development, not he to the community’s. And not only can he, but he should act thus.

Be it noted, to avoid misapprehension, that I have here been using the community to denote the single aggregate unit which from the beginning has played such an important part biologically in human evolution, not merely as denoting the sum of individuals considered separately.

Thus biology gives a definite answer to this question too. Pure individualism is condemned, and so is what we may call ant-and-bee socialism. Some form of the “dual day,” to use a current phrase, or at least of the “dual life,” is the method which seems to be in accord with the enduring principles of biology, although the precise details are not and cannot be the biologist’s concern, and particular lives, such as that of the creative artist, who moves on a different plane of reality, escape his analysis.