Exact date unknown–early ’51
Dear Miss Lynd,
Thank you for forwarding my reply to your Scientific Correspondent’s letter to him, although unexpected this exchange of opinion is to be entirely welcomed–at least it may sharpen one’s wits! Polemics, beloved of the Greeks, never seems to lose its charms!
Your correspondent states: “Shorn of verbiage. Mr. Evans’ belief is that man does not evolve by any biological means, but only by ’transfering sensed knowledge.’ Not only is this anti-Lysenko, it is also anti-’modern’ genetics, anti-scientific.”
I must say I like people who can speak their minds, it sort of gives one room in which to swing. I shall add additional proof that your correspondent and Professor Haldane have long since left this world of reason, where science should be King, and plunged into a jungle of cloudy thought, as abstractionist in its way as in Picasso’s idea of what a woman looks like. And why, oh why! bring in Lysenko’s name? I never mentioned the man.
Where did these three seemingly mysterious words of mine come from? From some passage buried in subjective obscurity? Or from a passage too long to quote, inadvisable to give in full? Not at all, here is the essence of what I say: “It has always been my view that man represents a qualitative departure from the lesser animals, that man is capable of transferring sensed knowledge into logical, stored-up knowledge, which accumulates unevenly-according to the precise conditions of life–according to the methods through which he sustains life–and which is passed on from one generation to the next.”
Is there anything obscure or difficult about such a statement? Is it a denial of evolutionary change through biological channels? If it is then surely words have ceased to have meaning, they have become what they have in the field of poetry,–(vide T. S. Eliot) pontificial utterances to be accepted through faith alone, but–and this is a point worth remembering–without, utterly without the glorification of man’s spirit essential to the higher religions.
Was it necessary for me to point out to a scientist that ’qualitative departure from the lesser animals’ meant the development on increasingly higher levels of man’s biological organism, the constant refinement of his senses? Man, as all things, is a process, a product of matter carried to its highest degree–at least on this planet. The struggle between that which is constant and that which is not, the struggle between heredity and variability, is the mainspring of evolution.
Your correspondent–and Professor Haldane–elevates the accidental, the fortuitous, to first principles. They see the new development not as a result of the basic conflict between heredity and variability–variability with its room for the development of literally millions of curious features, with its room for individual characterisation, for response in many directions, all within the given historical stage of the organism–but as the result of chance. Their science is reduced to one of mathematics dealing with “possibilities,” rates of “constancies,” to matters relating to the frequency of emergence of a brachycephalous idiot or a hermaphrodite. Such a methodology contains little to interest true science.
Your correspondent argues so vaguely and so eclectically that you will have to excuse me for resorting once again to quotes. I must admit I have little liking for them myself, I am almost as bad as your correspondent who limits himself to three words of mine–and even then, by god! they make sense. Here is what your correspondent says, in his last letter: “Herein (my so-called belief that man is ’solely an expression of his environment,’ the falsity and stupidity of which I have just demonstrated) lies Mr. Evans’ attitude to all the factual material which I adduced–the relative constancy of a particular child’s intelligence, the particular musical ability of some primitive peoples including the Negro... the physical and mental qualities which so fit some forest peoples for their surroundings. All these are facts and thousands of others could be arranged alongside them to show that creatures, including man, are variable and that part of these variable qualities can be passed on from one generation to another.” I am afraid your correspondent has become highly selective! The above quote bears only casual relationship to the quite clear statement of his first letter–and even the above amended statement bears little relationship to actual fact, save the last and only then in degree. Mechanical adaptation put forth in all its glory.
This is what your correspondent stated in his first letter: “Thus to talk of the Red Indian as a product of a reservation is to talk in social and not evolutionary terms... The fact is that peoples which have inhabited forests for many thousands of years are endowed with the faculty to find their way through forests.” My emphasis. God in heaven! Have the poor children no fathers, no elder brothers, to teach them the ways of the forest? But let him continue: “Your arguments on intelligence tests for children are not valid, since all experience (whose experience? conditioned under what precise circumstances?) has shown that the scores obtained are relatively independent of the child’s background.” The questioner is not related to his surroundings, but the scores obtained are ’relatively independent of the child’s background’! The man who uses such sophistry should be ashamed of the brain he thinks he possesses. Like the child he wants to keep the cake and eat it too!
All the hedging in the world cannot hide the fact that your correspondent believes that an organism once fixed through biological specialisation operates indefinitely despite the organism’s changed surroundings. The Red Indian still possesses an innate ability to move through giant forests, the fact that these forests no longer exist, that the Red Indian no longer hunts and traps for a living but is supplied at the nearest Yankee post-exchange, means nothing, nothing at all, the Indian is still endowed with the faculty of his primitive forebears!
But even this is not all. In his first letter your correspondent stated that possibly I misunderstood the difference between biological evolution and man’s social evolution. If he believes I misunderstood such a factor why does he state that a child’s mentality is a constant, 4 years to 16 years, unless he is conceding that the child’s mentality has been fixed through a long biological epoch’. If not, what is this ’relative constancy of a child’s particular intelligence due to then? The answer is plain, your correspondent believes it is due to the evolutionary process, not the society in which the testing takes place!
Likewise with the Negro, he too, according to this Scientific-Correspondent of yours, is a product of long evolution, hence not subject to what we might call reasonably swift social change. Why deny the cannibal his liking for ’long-pig’? Leave him alone, he cannot be changed save through the long process of evolution–that is what the arguments of this ’scientist’ of yours come to. He denies the emergence of the new through quick and sometimes pretty drastic change in the external environment, thus forcing the organism to meet new requirements abruptly, change its mode of life, with the alternative degeneration or oblivion.
I shall conclude by returning to Professor Haldane. Does your correspondent agree with Professor Haldane’s statement in the Daily Worker of January 23, 1951: “We know very little about the causes which make human population increase or decrease, and we shall certainly learn something from the animals.” Does your correspondent agree with my assertion that Professor Haldane is badly mistaken? Does your correspondent agree with my assertion that the growth or decrease of population is subordinate to social law-government? That the law of human population changes with each form of society, is specific to each class, for each concrete situation?