Amerika

Michael Walker looks at the issues involved in the unending “Darwin Debate”

Everybody has heard of Darwin; but as in the case of Malthus, few have read him. Debates about Darwin continue to rage, and although seemingly a theory of the past rather than of the future, every intelligent person instinctively realises that the Darwin debate indeed concerns our species’ future and the course that humanity shall take. Hostile critics warn of a “religion of Darwin” while current official wisdom accepts Darwin as the man who dug the grave of revealed religion (even if the corpse refuses to lie down!) and provided us with the basis for drawing a crude sketch of our biological history; yet that same official wisdom is very reluctant to draw conclusions from the evidence of evolution which might affect a political direction of any kind. In the meantime, whilst the great mass of humanity is preoccupied with survival or trivia, the potential of human evolution has been developing so rapidly that a hybrid robot with many times the intelligence of Homo sapiens is a distinct likelihood in the twenty-first century. Our species will soon have evolved to the point that it will be able to replace itself with something else. The very idea of evolution is the inheritance from Darwin.

More than a century after Darwin’s death in 1882, the debate around his work The Origin of Species by Natural Selection (published in 1859) still goes on, between those who accept his central thesis and those who do not and then again within the group of those who accept Darwin, between those drawing “optimistic” and those drawing “pessimistic” conclusions from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. In this context I mean by “optimistic”, drawing from Darwin the conclusion that humankind is constantly improving itself and by “pessimistic”, that our species’ behaviour and entire history is steered by a naturally conditioned impulse to struggle against rivals and destroy them (the thesis that Cro-Magnon man exterminated Neanderthal man is a classic example of this aspect of Darwinian belief). The pessimistic interpretation may be combined with an optimistic one: the struggle for survival justifies social inequality (especially, “I am all right Jack and you poor worm, not only sit in the gutter but natural justice assures me that you naturally belong there”). Our position of privilege, according to this philosophy of so-called social Darwinism, proves fitness to enjoy life, be it the fitness of an individual, member of a race or member of a species. It is true that whether through competition or natural catastrophe, a combination of both, or even a decision of the fickle Dame Providence, species and races in countless numbers through the history of life on our planet, reach an (appointed?) end, fail to ‘pass themselves on’ and perish without issue. Did God above pity the last dinosaur, the last trilobite? Who will pity the passing of the Great race once past? There are no consolation prizes in the evolution game. “Time will say nothing but ‘I told you so’”.

Darwin’s argument that species were not static beings created by a deity but developing and ever adapting beings determined and driven by their environment and ever changing in a struggle to survive, was not original. As Marx’s genius lay in synthesising German historic idealism, British economic theory and French revolutionary rationalism, so Darwin’s genius lay in synthesising Malthusian pessimism, Lamarck’s belief in “vital force” and Cartesian and Newtonian science. Added to that of course was faith in Man’s unending progress (a faith typical of the nineteenth century). In Darwin’s day many geological and fossil discoveries were providing evidence that the earth was vastly older than dreamed of in the doctrine of the established Church, and finally, that many species had lived on earth and died out, before Man had appeared. When the evidence of the existence of giant reptiles was beyond dispute the question had to be asked: if these creatures existed before the creation of Man why did God destroy them and why had he created them? It made no Biblical sense at all.

Darwin was a zoologist, not a philosopher. His arguments were based on verifiable data, on observation of living fauna and analysis of the remains of departed species. One of the most confusing elements in debates about Darwinism is the confounding of ethics (is progress desirable? Is Man divine?) with debate about facts (how old is the species Homo sapiens? Do species transform themselves by a process of selection into new species?) Darwin’s arguments belong to a nineteenth century paradigm of progress (writers like Evola or Guénon would say the “myth of progress”) in the sense of “paradigm” which Thomas Kuhn gave to the word. (Kuhn’s famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that scientific arguments in modern “normal” science agrees about the basic entities to be discussed, the so-called paradigm.) But while circumstances were favourable to Darwin and the acceptance of his ideas, this does not mean that the factual description of species is some way made invalid. For all that, much of the opposition to Darwin and Darwinism, whether from a fundamentalist or traditionalist viewpoint (especially a critique of biological Darwinism) or from the egalitarian left (a critique of social not biological Darwinism) seeks to avoid the debate about facts by shifting the debate to a discussion of the paradigm, to use Kuhn’s expression again. A proper understanding of the issues involved should be careful to distinguish a debate about facts from the debate about the implications of those facts.

Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury. His father was the son of the natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin. His grandfather was none other than Josiah Wedgewood of Wedgewood china fame, whose life was a classic case of a Victorian rags to riches tale. On the recommendation of a friend Darwin was offered the post of naturalist on board the cruiser Beagle. His five year voyage on the Beagle was his practical apprenticeship as a naturalist. In his early life he had been a devout Christian and had intended to become a clergyman. Darwin suffered throughout the famous voyage from seasickness and his entire life was overshadowed by very poor health; however, he did not allow his illness to deter him from his work. Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Balzac: the prodigious tenacity of the nineteenth century intellectual seems to be characteristically overshadowed by recurring sickness. It is as though such men were all conscious of a terrible act of destruction in their realistic depictions of the exposure of hidden truths, which was their self-imposed life’s work. It was during the voyage of the Beagle that Darwin began to discover that his observations of the distribution of species was difficult to explain in terms of a single act of divine creation. But if that were so, then the story of creation as told in the Book of Genesis, which The Christian Occident had for 1700 years pronounced “the sacred Word of God”, was (at best) only “symbolically” true. Darwin’s observations confirmed the evidence of geologists and anthropologists: Adam and Eve had parents and the earth was more terribly ancient than ever dreamed of in God’s Good Book.

The starting point of Darwin’s speculations was the Galapagos Islands, a small group of volcanic island rocks in the Pacific some sixty miles form the South American cost. In the Galapagos some particular species of bird are confined to some particular islands. Many birds of the Galapagos Islands, while not the seem species as those of the South American continent, are clearly related to them; the related South American species not being found on the Galapagos.

The inference which Darwin drew was that the species on the Galapagos, having been separated for a considerable period of time from their mainland relatives, had developed separately from them by adapting to the different circumstances of their island home, into different species. Their adaptation on the volcanic islands had led to such phenomena as the use of twigs as tools by the Galapagos Finch. Darwin made the logical conclusion, devastating for established religion, that the Galapagos Finch, along with other species, had adapted to its environment and evolved into a different species. God had not created this species at all; it had evolved through Time and in Nature.

It had already been observed that there existed flightless species of birds with rudimentary but useless wings. What could God have been thinking when he gave the Ostrich or the Emu flightless wings? And why are human beings equipped with the useless and potentially lethal appendix? Educated Victorians must have been aware that several species which had survived so long as their ecology had not changed were being decimated or even made extinct in the face of human progress. The Dodo and the Great of man. The Dodo, a kind of flightless giant pigeon resident on the island of Mauritius, was driven into extinction within a hundred years of its discovery. It laid eggs on the ground, which were eaten by rats which came with ships, and it was flightless, which meant it was defenceless against anyone who wanted to kill it. It seemed strange that God had created its useless wings out of a more or less sadistic joke, for had the Dodo or the Great Auk been able to fly, their chances of survival would have been greater; indeed the related Mauritius pigeon and Little Auk, which can fly, have survived till today. Apparently someone believing that the bird was a witch battered the last living specimen of the hapless Dodo to death. So much for God’s entrusting Adam with His creation! Had these two species also been flightless at the time of their discovery they would doubtless have met the same fate as their cousins.

The fact that species could be decimated by natural catastrophes, which at the same time gave new species or new families of species the chance to occupy a vacant niche, is implied in the Biblical tale of the great flood. The story of Noah hints at the existence of cataclysms in the history of this planet.

Just as an individual comes into being is generated by parents, enjoys a term of life and dies (having perhaps or perhaps not passed on his inheritance to descendants) why not may a species do so as well? But the implications of Darwin’s observations go further than this, for according to the logic of evolution, each latest species is “linked” to those, which preceded it in an unbroken chain. Also we are linked to every other species by a distant common ancestor/life force. This means that we belong to the natural world as a species in a manner which is unacceptable to Christianity, for Christianity places Man above creation and apart from Nature. This special place accorded to Man and which Christians call the “dignity of Man” denies that Nature is our Mother and releases us a species from a sense of intimate relationship with the natural world.

Darwin’s theory implied a humility and an arrogance: humility that Homo sapiens comes from nature, arrogance in that he has come to dominate nature not as a gift from God but through the power of his own imperative to survive. But Christianity at least argued that man was entrusted with the world in which he was born. Darwinian arguments give him green light to do what he likes. Although theoretically returning man to his place in nature, in practice Darwin’s contribution to man’s social development was to increase his arrogance as a species. That is a bitter fruit. But however deleterious the results of what he had to say about the genealogy of species may have been, subsequent arguments against the facts of his hypothesis have been unconvincing, although inevitably many details of his theories have been successfully challenged. Darwin is dangerous but that does not mean that Darwin is wrong.

Against Darwin it is argued that there is no evidence of animals in a transition phase from one species to another. On the contrary. Such developments move slowly in relation to recorded history, so that we cannot see that many species are indeed developing into something else. It is also true that many species remain unchanged for aeons. There is no Darwinian law which says that all species change all the time. What is more, and this has come to light since Darwin made known his discoveries, species mutation is quite likely to be not gradual but abrupt, brought about by an environmental change which is itself abrupt. So while some species do develop very slowly or cast off extraneous elements very gradually, there may also be changes which are very rapid. Various races of birds we can observe today are on the way to becoming separate species. Classifying a race or a species is in transition cases a matter of scientific opinion and not clear cut. For example, in Europe the Corsican Nuthatch (Sitta whiteheadi) replaces the Common Nuthatch (Sitta europaea) on the island of Corsica. The two are usually classed as different species, whereas the Common Crow (Corvus corone corone) and the Hooded Crow (Corvus corone cornix) are usually not. The two races of crow occasionally interbreed, which impedes the process of evolution into separate species, whereas the Corsican Nuthatch, separated from too much water for this weak flier to cross, has evolved into what most ornithologists classify as a distinct species. The decision to classify two kinds of plant or animal as races or species is often a matter of controversy, all the more where fossil evidence is concerned. Species and familial relationships in the animal and plant kingdoms may help to confirm accounts of the Earth’s history. Anyone acquainted with the world of birds will be struck by the parallels between South American and African birds, entire families having “first cousins” across the Atlantic: toucan/hornbill, humming bird/sun bird. Changes in the geological or climatic situation can be the event which prompts an evolutionary spurt. One species may be destroyed by a calamity which gives to another species the opportunity to strengthen its position and develop. The name of the game in every case is survival, living beyond one’s own life, pursuing the existence of one’s own kind, ensuring that one’s own image is reproduced and not forgotten. That is what all animals do in their instinctive struggle against death and in their urge to reproduce. The meaning of life is a never ceasing struggle against oblivion.

Another objection to Darwinism is that in nature we do not witness a struggle for survival but a harmony in which each creature has a special role to play. This argument is made for example in Yockey’s Imperium. …“there is no Struggle for existence in nature; this old Malthusian idea merely projected Capitalism on to the animal world. Such struggles as do exist are the exception; the rule in Nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for the herbivores to eat and there are plenty of herbivores for the carnivores to eat…” (pp 69/70).

But the struggle is not between species but between individuals of the same species.

Darwin made another important observation on the Galapagos: that animals adapted to different environmental situations and acted accordingly. From the theory of adaptation developed the theory of natural selection, which is simple and rational. More successful characteristics (the classic example is the stretching neck of the giraffe to reach for food) are passed on for the very reason that they are more successful and that the animals possessing them survive in greater numbers. The joke was made years ago that if Darwin’s theory holds true we should be witnessing a change in the behaviour of hedgehogs, since in the age of the motorcar, rolling up into a ball at the approach of danger is not a successful tactic of survival. It is certainly the case that species better able to adapt to new environments are better equipped to survive than those which are more specialised. A case in point would be that of the two European species of marten, the Pine marten (Martes martes) and the Beech marten (Martes foina). These are closely related species, but because it is more adaptable in its habits, the Beech Marten is much better able to cope with the expansion of human activity, especially building activity, than the Pine Marten and is now a relatively common species while the Pine Marten is in decline.

This may seem obvious but it is counter to religious dogma. Darwin wrote to his friend the botanist Hooker that admitting to the suspicion that species were not, after all, immutable, was “like confessing to a murder”. The words are apt. Darwin was killing the Lord of hosts, killing him as surely as if he had taken a stake and driven it through the heart of the jealous God of Abraham. Convinced Christians know this. They revile and fear Darwin. They argue, not without reason, that accepting Darwin means rejecting all revealed religion. If the identity of a species is not fixed and sacred, what is fixed and sacred and what can be revealed with certainty about the destiny of Man? For Darwin, a species, was not, as it was for Linneus, who created the system of species classification, a fixed biological classification, but rather a term of convenience to describe a group of closely related individuals. Neither a species nor a race is a fixed entity for all time, which is not to say that their existence is an illusion. That is an argument concocted by those who wish to abolish them for their own ends. The common belief today that races “do not matter” is no more or less acceptable than the argument that “species do not matter”. (Matter for what? To whom?) But for all the acceptance of Darwin’s nineteenth century progressivist optimism, his unbelief that species are fulfilled and immutable, paradoxically enough, is not widely accepted. A fanatical belief in the unbridgeable separation of Homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom has little changed since de Bréau wrote his treatises against Darwin in the 1840’s, in the conviction that the “human race” is unified and, so to speak, a “race apart” from other life forms.

Opponents of Darwin today are those who are opposed in principle to the plausibility of any model of progress or mutation. These include all religious traditionalists and many of those who believe in cyclical theories of history. An edition of Georges Gondinet’s traditionalist publication Totalité in the 1980’s was uncompromisingly entitled Darwin :Crime contre l’Humanité. Writers like Gondinet reject Darwin because they believe that human history, indeed all history, does not admit of progress and Darwin is seen as the biological prophet of atheistic progressivism. Evola for example praised Bachofen’s work on matriarchy by setting up a paradigm (of tellurian versus solar power) which had nothing to do with a model of progress. (See Evola’s Bachofen e il Matriarcato Edizioni Lupa, Capitolina Padova 1985) The problem with this and similar arguments is that it confuses material with spiritual “progress”.

For the Victorians, it is true, spiritual progress followed from material progress, the one was dependent on the other; but the events of the following century suggest that progress in technology and the ability to kill effectively had advanced more rapidly than cultural or spiritual abilities in Man. If we take a material object, a weapon let us say, and observe the history of that weapon within the context of that weapon alone, then progress in human history can hardly be denied and on the very principles which Darwin sketched in his theory of the genealogy of species, namely adaptation in reaction to circumstances and the survival of the fittest. Medicine has been progressing/advancing since the Middle Ages (although not in a steady line and not without losing much valuable wisdom on the way). Similarly in the history of warfare, there has been a progress in the art of creating the means to kill. A handful of mulattos equipped with modern weaponry could destroy an army of Vikings equipped with swords. The longbow replaced the crossbow as a weapon of war because it was more efficient. From the point of view of the aim of creating death and mayhem, the object in a battle, the long bow constituted “progress” in relation to the crossbow and the gun constituted “progress” over the longbow.

Progress in one field of human endeavour however, says nothing about progress in an another; what is improvement of one aspect may be deterioration of another. A simple example: improvement in the ability to produce larger quantities of apples and reduce the proportion spoiled by pests may be, and indeed usually is, accompanied by a regression in the quality of the produce. This is what the champions of Progress like to ignore. The environmentalist challenge to Christian and post-Christian humanism is ultimately made on this basis: that change is multi-faceted and their argument comes from rejecting the assumption that the history of humanity is one of unremitting progress.

Arguments for and against progress therefore suffer from a lack of consensus about the relative importance of the various fields in which progress takes place. Technical efficiency has certainly been improving by leaps and bounds, at an accelerating rate in fact, for example in medicine, transport and computer technology, but is this an unqualified amelioration of everything in the world? Recent advances in medical knowledge and operation techniques have notably reduced the risks to human life of various forms of brain tumour. The list of diseases which have been defeated by man is a long one, from leprosy to glaucoma. On the other hand, the success of medicine in helping human individuals to “thwart the intentions of nature” and defy the grim reaper for another 40 years (and “progress” is being made all the time in the medical battle to defeat the ageing process, with the implication that humans one day will be able to live for ever) is a major factor in the over-crowding of the planet with human individuals, many of questionable quality. The billions of Homo sapiens who by weight of numbers or a self ordained belief in “human dignity” and “human rights” are wiping out many of the other animals with which our species shares the planet, are, we are told, proof of human “progress”. But what is indeed progress for one species or race or group may signify decline, regression and ultimately oblivion for another.

Progress was the liberal cry of the nineteenth century as development is today, both descriptions originating in the confusion, already mentioned, between material and non-material improvement and a failure to clearly focus on the subject of improvement (specifically, the tendency to argue for improvement and progress in general rather than in a specific context). Here in one important respect the traditionalists are right: it is quite wrong to argue that “progress” is inevitable. So to argue is to deprive man of his freedom of action. Furthermore, the survival of the fittest and progress are not interchangeable terms. A species or individual may keep fit without changing. An individual is healthier as a result of having certain pressures put on him or it-physical exercise make a man slimmer and fitter and likely to live longer and the pain of physical exercise can be described as a kind of Darwinian trimming of the body in miniature: constant running makes the body fitter for running and so on. (And the extent to which we are compelled to create artificial exercise for ourselves to keep fit shows how we are underemployed in our biological lives). But keeping fit does not constitute “progress” for the body in any way. Natural selection is more often a case of maintaining an equilibrium than providing the motor for progression or change.

Change is not inevitable, as seems to be implied by the theory of natural selection. In fact not the theory of natural selection but the nineteenth century reading of it, insisted on the inevitability of change. Mounting fossil and geological evidence points to a biological history in which chance plays a role and in which many species may survive for millions even billions of years, with no change to their basic structure taking place. Until recently it was believed that dinosaurs died out through a process of natural selection ( a dubious theory given the fact they had thrived for millions of years). Recent evidence points to a catastrophe, perhaps a ten mile wide meteorite which struck the earth and plunged it into darkness. In 1979 Luis and Walter Alvarez presented their evidence that an extra-terrestrial object had indeed struck the Earth about 65 million years ago. A crater of a size and age to fit the hypothesis perfectly has been subsequently discovered off the Yucatan peninsula.

Darwin’s theory, it should be noted, concentrated on the theory of the origin of species and not on the origin of life. This is often overlooked, especially by Darwin’s critics. Life remained, science assures us, almost exclusively unicellular for the grater part of its existence on this planet to date. From the first recorded fossils (3.5 billion years old) to the first documented multi-cellular animals (600 million years ago) there is an enormous time gap. But Darwin was essentially concerned with the diversity of species and how such diversity could occur. In other words, he was trying to explain the variety of current life on this planet and not the emergence (or creation) of life itself. The explosion of species in the Cambrian era 570 million years ago, took place in the last moments of life’s current history. He suggested in public that God acted as a kind of ‘first mover’ who created the life giving force which later multiplied into the diversity which we know through evolution. In private correspondence however, Darwin speculated that life might have first emerged in an appropriate ‘bio-soup’ in the distant past. Returning to relatively recent times, the evidence is all the time mounting to indicate that species often die out suddenly (rather than gradually give way to new forms which supersede them), and as a result of extraneous forces, such as Ice Age, Meteors, Man. The abrupt disappearance of the large reptiles at the end of the Cretaceous period is hard to interpret in terms of the ‘gradualist’ theory of evolution. The dinosaurs evolved into nothing. They were so to speak, a dead end. But this means little. It was unlikely that it was in some way ‘their fault’ as earlier generations of Darwinians were wont to imply (“their brains were too small for them to adapt”). If one must borrow the language of human fortune it was their ‘bad luck’. They were ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’. But to argue that many species disappear as a result of dramatic extraneous interference (catastrophes) is not to say that all species disappear in this way. Some evolve. The evidence of evolving species is around us. It is race. Race is species-in-evolution. Humanitarian propagandists appeal to solidarity with a remarkable creature unknown to science which they dub “the human race”. This “race” is without a name for the good reason that it is without substance. There is no human race; there is a human species. A white and black man are as certainly of one species as they are as certainly not of one race. As the animal and plant world shows, race does not allow of clear cut lines; when it does so, we are already approaching the area of species and leaving race behind. Between one racial prototype and another, theoretically at least, all permutations are possible. The Arab peoples are probably a mixture of Caucasoid and Negroid races who have developed so far as almost to be a race in their own right. Races are not static; they are in a constant state of becoming. They are the living proof that evolution is the key to the origin of species and a living proof too that being “is.” not, “being is becoming”.

Man alone of the animals on this planet is able to freely choose the direction of his evolution. Free choice is the choice to halt one kind of evolution in favour of another or of none. To talk of “human progress” is more problematic than to talk of “human evolution” for progress implies a destination, evolution does not. What is more, evolution allows, even implies, the turning of a cycle, whereas progress implies that what is in progress is in the process of moving towards a set target. And just as the genealogy of a species is a cycle, so is the life of man, and if Spengler, Evola and the traditionalist authors are to be believed, so are human orders and ages. But there is nothing in the history of the earth which contradicts this: quite the contrary, the history of the Earth is a history of cycles, cold and warm phases, quiet and volcanic phases. At the same time changes take place which are irreversible: the Earth does not expect the return of the dinosaurs, at least not in identical form. One day the Earth will be roasted, for our Sun will not exist for ever but before it dies will expand into a red giant and consume this planet. Suns are born and die “like the rest of us”. The existence of historical cycles of the return of forms of civilisation and forms of man does not conflict with a theory of evolution as such, but it does contradict unilinear theories of evolution, that is to say those that argue that a species begins in one place and at one time and moves always in one direction and in one line from the point of departure. Evolution is not in contradiction with traditionalism but it is in contradiction with creationism, the argument that each species of plant and animal was generated (created) spontaneously in a moment by an extraneous force and for a certain purpose which cannot be changed. The belief that life was created in its variety by a higher being and the providence of life and death controlled utterly by that being, this indeed is incompatible with a belief that the variety of life is formed as the result of a reaction to the force of multifarious agencies and events working upon the natural object.

One of Darwin’s early supporters was the geologist Lyell, his discoveries pointing to the existence of different fauna in different eras and the fact that a species had a history. Similarly to Darwin, but less known, was the research of Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russell Wallace, who examined the link between species differentiation and geological history and reached the same conclusion as Darwin, that the adaptation of island species to different circumstances, pointed to a selective process to explain the development and variety of species. Like Darwin he argued that the struggle for existence compelled plants and animals to adapt to survive and that that success determined species development. From this it can be inferred that geological and climatic change are both creative and destructive of species. But what can hardly be gainsaid is that humans find solutions to problems when the problem is presented as a problem, that is as a challenge. Progress is the reaction to the pressure of events.

What was it that ensured that species reproduced their own kind? A German scientist, August Weissman, argued that the “continuity of the individual” (from parent to offspring) existed by virtue of what he called germinal plasm and which we today call genes. Originally, argued Weissman, the differentiation of sexual and corporal cells had been due to a simple division of labour in the simplest cell colonies. Termites, social bees and ants, among the insects, with their separation of drone and queen have returned to most primitive of reproductive mechanisms. The individuation of the single representative of the species is reduced to a minimum. (This was what Mandville so admired in his Fable of the Bees, an early call for a communistic utopia.) Changes are brought about by gender differentiation, by reproduction involving the coupling of two distinct individuals instead of the separation of one individual. The germinal plasm of two individuals is united and through this “amphimixis” as Weissman called it, a new germinal plasm, a new individual is created, which has characteristics from two, not one, generating element. What Weissman was doing was countering the argument that individuals acquire characteristics which they pass on to their offspring (Lamarck’s theory) with an argument for the existence of a kind of immutable code which is inherited by a multi celled animal or plant from its parents. Life forms arise, claimed Weissman in agreement with Darwin, by a process of selection. It follows from this that changes from one species to another will occur as the result of extraneous influences. Darwin believed that environment shaped us into what we are as a species but that different individuals carry within them the potential for different development.

At much the same time as Darwin was drawing conclusions about the creation of species through adaptation to the environment, there were a number of discoveries which suggested that “catastrophes” such as the Biblical flood, were recurring, not singular, events in the earth’s history. In the 1840’s Louis Agassiz discovered evidence in the United States and in Europe that the Earth had once been much colder and a large part of the northern hemisphere covered with ice. England had once been part of the Euro-asian land mass, North America and Asia had once been linked. It was it was suggested the cold climate which gave one branch of the human tree the Darwinian challenge to catapult it as a race to become the culture bearer to which is given the name “Aryan” just as it is suggested that it was the retreat of the tropical forest in East Africa which gave rise to Australopithecus, the man ape, better adapted than tree dwelling primates for life in open country.

In the eighteenth century Enlightenment (Illuminati) ideas, culminating in the Terror of the French Revolution, had insisted on the possibility of improving man through reason and without appeal to God. Supreme Reason governed the world, and hierarchy was culture distortion which prevented us from rediscovering the happiness which was once ours in a primitive state. Enlightenment thought, from Locke to Condillac and Rousseau, believed that human nature was constant and only distorted by the wrong kind of society. Lamarck cast doubt on this simple theory of human nature by suggesting that characteristics learned from experience may be passed on from one generation to the next. Darwin’s theory of evolution brought up the possibility that human nature was not a constant at all but something formed by its environment. And while the Enlightenment looked towards an increasingly unified humanity, the return as it were to a human prototype, Darwin’s theory of evolution pointed to a growing divergence of identity in time, in other words, organisms become more varied through a process of natural adaptation. If the eighteenth century idea of progress still by and large consisted in a return to a golden age, post-Darwin ideas of progress looked forward to a golden age in the future. Rousseau’s noble savage did not look alluring in the light of evolutionist theory. Nineteenth century discoveries of the true nature of the Black and Red savage appalled the Victorian white man, who was anyway disposed to consider that everything natural was inferior. In the last thirty years Jewish control of Western media along with the deterioration of the ecological system, has reanimated the eighteenth century nostalgia for the state of the natural savage, in the first case to attack the former white ruling cast, in the second case out of despair at the deterioration of contemporary life. Absent in either view is an acceptance of the right to be different. The deadly error of the white man was to seek to make others conform to his image. Had he let well alone, the greater part of the Americas and Africa would be beautiful national parks today, closed to colonisation and in which the natives would have been spared the benefits of Western civilization and been allowed to continue in their natural state. Without Western medicine and education, their numbers would have remained at eighteenth century levels. But if outside forces changed the nature of a species, ultimately transformed it into another species, the conclusion would inevitably be drawn and was drawn that men could improve societies not by changing society but by changing the people who made up society. With Darwin came the belief in social engineering. Victorian, Western man, was convinced he could do everything better. That inheritance I leave for the reader to judge.

A belief in the inevitability of progress on the one hand and the fatalistic impulse of our biological nature leads to liberal and conservative justifications (sometimes of an extreme kind) of social programmes based on the discoveries of our origins. If writers like Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) or Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) point to the programming created by our biological history as justification for the inevitability of property rights, inequality or domination in social order, (as E.O. Wilson famously said of Marxism: “great idea, wrong species”) so do eco-feminists argue that women are naturally protectors and that it is the over dominance of male genetic imperatives in society which has brought the human species, in fact the entire planet destruction, waste and now perhaps total annihilation. Criticising the Eco-feminists and conservative anthropologists alike, Donna Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinivention of Nature, London 1991) argues that ‘Nature’ as postulated by eco-feminist is itself a patriarchal construct and that taking the Darwinian concept of forms of life as being in constant flux, points to the emergence of mechanical and biological life forms. Machines are acquiring biological characteristics (computers have “intelligence” and suffer from “viruses” and “bugs”). For their part, with the advance of bio-psychology and behaviour analysis in which analysis is made on the basis of genetic data, human consciousness is being interpreted by many scientists as a kind of advanced computer program. Mrs Haraway draws on evolutionism to posit a future in which the duality of oppression is overcome by the blurring of distinctions created by the machine. In a wholly technical world, the distinction between female and male or natural and cultural will be meaningless. The human species will have evolved out of itself into a cyborg entity of well-being and prosperity. But just as conservative Darwinians play down the opportunities of free will on the part of the human subject to alter evolutionary destiny, or even to deny it altogether, so do liberal Darwinians overlook or underestimate the role of our biological heritage in making us what we are. The inventions of Homo sapiens still find their origin in the nature of Homo sapiens. Cyber technology is rampant with notions of domination, direction, force, capacity, capability, in short all the elements of nature which constitute hierarchy and domination. Any attempt to use the machine as a tool begs the question: a tool for whom and to what purpose?

The Victorians were not slow to see the political advantages which could be taken by applying the theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest to give scientific validation to the inequalities of the time. A leading protagonist of this “Social Darwinism” was Herbert Spencer (above).

Belief in the inevitability of progress was arguably the one core belief of all nineteenth century thinkers. It was symbolised in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which helped to shift the paradigm from “social improvement” to “human progress”. It was the Western nineteenth century too where distrust of children reached a high point, distrust that is of the undeveloped and undifferentiated. “Children should be seen but not heard”. Children remind us of our origins are not fully developed, adult. To be fully developed is the striving of civilised man. Just as man himself had emerged from among the primates in a successive steps of amelioration, so within man had Western man emerged as the superior model of human striving. When applied to the social sciences the implication of evolutionist theory is that the more successful are the “better”.

Cultural relativism today insists that there is not a better or worse culture or race, to which the obvious riposte is “better or worse in what way”? If we are discussing technical achievements for example, it should go without saying that White achievements far outshine Black achievements, indeed Black achievements in the technical field are so few as to have led some radical observers of the last century to question whether Blacks even belonged to the same species as Whites. Darwin’s discoveries offered welcome justification for theories for the superiority of a given race at a time that religion was increasingly inclined to look favourably at the implications of the equality of souls. Tom Brown, the hero of the anti-slavery cause, was after all, a fanatical Christian preacher. The Biblical justification for racial and class hierarchies was becoming increasingly difficult for intellectuals to maintain. Darwin’s theory provided an alternative argument.

The higher class and the higher race had “evolved naturally”, went the new, Darwinian argument, to the place for which Nature had selected it. The most influential adaptation of this view to the social sciences was made by Herbert Spencer, who argued that progress consisted in the increasing specification of human kind.

The individual played hardly a role in history: we are all subjects of fate and fate is taking us inevitably to the best of all possible worlds just as fate carried the species forward, awarding the more gifted in an inevitable progress upwards. But progress to what? Progress is frequently described as “inevitable” but how can it be inevitable when nobody seems to know wither progress is heading? There is here an original confusion between survival of the fittest and evolution. Darwin described the adaptation and survival of the fittest as the motor of evolution but he did not argue that change was inevitable. “One grows or dies, here is no third possibility” wrote Oswald.Spengler, but in fact many species do not change in the slightest for millions of years. Change in a species or culture is a reaction to changed circumstances years. Social stability however is only possible in an ethnically homogenous society. When utopias are depicted the social groups in the utopia are invariably depicted as ethnically homogenous.

In the nineteenth century what may be termed “liberal Darwinism” (survival of the fittest, ever improving understanding and material wealth, the falling away of prejudices as a result of scientific progress), and socialist Darwinism -(the oppressed will come into their own as a result of a struggle for survival in which they as the fittest to survive will survive) shared in common an unshakeable optimism in the future of the human species. But if Darwin’s theory of selection and evolution could and certainly was, interpreted optimistically as pointing towards indefinite progress for mankind, it could be argued, given the possibility to improve Nature’s work, that it would be possible to hinder nature’s work as well. The work of Mendel on hereditary pointed to the existence of “recessive” characteristics, that is to say characteristics which would be less likely to reproduce in succeeding generations than alternative possibilities. The chromosome responsible for blond hair for example is recessive, meaning that among the descendants of a black haired and blond couple there will be fewer blondes than dark haired individuals. Survival is therefore not just a matter of being the fittest; it is also a question of dominant genes. (Later scientists began to argue that evolution is the history of the survival of the fittest genes). These dominant genes find their origin in the natural propensity of the less qualitative to reproduce more easily. Blacks for example are more fertile than whites. Favouring dominant genes by favouring the least favoured in society means to introduce counter evolutionary programme into society. Using the very same arguments from Darwin it is thus possible to postulate a very negative view of human development. Species, which are too successful, might be visited by disaster. Not God but Nature may choose to punish mankind for presumptuousness. The Faustian legend after all presents the doctor as a man who has presumed too far.

Here we come to the debate about breeding and the arguments over selection. Darwin pointed out that species developed through a process of “weeding out” of those poorly adapted in a given environment to survive, a process he called “evolution by natural selection”. Simple illustrations of this process are all around us: sexual attraction is a mechanism to persuade members of a species to reproduce, just as hunger persuades them to eat and thirst to drink. Attraction is linked to health and identity. Animals of one species are seldom if ever sexually attracted to members of another species. In the case of Homo sapiens there is a tendency to diversification in the fact that different castes or races tend to choose mates among their own kind. To the extent that they do so they accelerate the process of separation which leads to species differentiation. In most mammals success in reproduction is linked to strength and endurance. Strength is linked to beauty. Both are manifestations of the complete functioning of the attributes with which a given species is equipped. In Homo sapiens the notion of beauty as a manifestation of aptness or health plays a key role in the choice of a mate. “Beauty is Truth” as Keats wrote, “that is all you know and all you need to know.” Beauty is, to use a hardly translatable German word, Vollkommenheit the “fulfillness” of what one deeply is. Unhealthy and unbeautiful are practically synonyms. They are a falling away from the fullness of potential. The attraction to beauty is the attraction to life, and ugliness recalls, decay, death, oblivion.. The total deviation from the fulfilment is death, when my organs have been so far destroyed or hampered they cannot fulfil the function of reproduction within the body, for the body itself reproduces itself the whole time just as the race reproduces, the species, the cosmos. When a form of existence can no longer reproduce, has lost the will to its own kind of beauty, it dies. Every form of life is beautiful to itself, although it may be ugly to that which it threatens.

The more an animal is concentrated on the art of destruction, the uglier it seems to the world around it. Ugliness represents danger to the beholder, the danger of being eaten, of being consumed, weakened, destroyed. That is why the depiction of dangerous forces are ugly and evil is portrayed a thing so ugly that it reaches the point of being even ugly unto itself. (At which point it consumes itself, as total evil must.) Beauty means harmony-all is in proportion to the whole and no part is overgrown, disproportionate, threatening. The disease of the body or the spirit (and we know that they relate closely to one another) means a disproportion or destruction of the natural role or function of a part and disease is naturally associated with ugliness although some diseases throw out a deceptive “Indian Summer” kind of beauty. As we evolve we refine ourselves in our adaptation to the world. This is natural selection. But our species has for many years and with increasing determination given itself over to the nurturing within its own ranks of the those whom natural selection would have weeded out whilst outside the ranks of his own species, a kind of unspoken Darwinian law of ruthless natural selection gives Homo sapiens the “natural right” to destroy whatever stands in the way of his pleasure of his will to grow. In Darwinian terms our species in its relationship to the earth has been compared to a cancerous cell, a force of growth which has lost harmony and whose health consists in feeding upon the healthy. Laws and social organisation points increasingly in the direction of dysgenics, the artificial encouragement of those who in natural terms would not have been selected to survive or at least to reproduce in greater numbers.

One part of this death wish lies within science itself. The molecular biologist Erwin Chargaff wrote ten years ago that “two decisive discoveries of science have marked my life: the splitting of the atom, and the work on the genetic code: in both cases there is a striking at the core, the core of the atom and the core of the cell. In both cases I suspect that science has opened a Pandora’s box it should have left well alone.” To which one can add that both discoveries would have been safe if the hands which opened them had been as a species long developed away from the upward path of evolutionary refinement which such advanced science would imply. what has happened is that an elite has dominated to the world of science and discovery itself has provided a hoard which others can work from without fully understanding so that scientific knowledge is in advance of the intelligence of scientists. In the meantime in society as a whole, the practical intelligence and level of all populations is falling, visibly falling for those with eyes to see. In fact humans are degenerating, becoming more like what they came from than what they are going to, reversing the history of evolution. Our species was on the point of developing into separate species at the time that the process of miscegenation began to take place due to human migration. In fact human races are living examples of the kind of missing link which anti-Darwinians claim do not exist, links between Homo sapiens and species which are coming into being. In Animals and Plants under Domestication Darwin drew the conclusion from long observation that “free crossing obliterates change”. The free crossing of races obliterates the chance to diversify, the chance to evolve. Interracial breeding is the planned attempt to eradicate humanity’s ability to evolve beyond the limitations of the species Homo sapiens. The personality of the human individual is determined by the race of the individual. Race, as Darwin well realised, is the beginning of specific separation. Black and the White are incorporations of the splitting up of the human species and bringing them together is a reactionary, pathological, anti-evolutionary act of self-destruction. Homo sapiens is turning in on itself, repudiating the process of differentiation which had begun. At the same time scientific knowledge has accumulated. The preparation, as already mentioned in this magazine is for a new species to develop by a process of genetic engineering, which will separate itself from the undifferentiated mass and milk it and rule over it and eventually destroy it.

Darwin, to whom lip service is paid by the established elite of the Western world, is repudiated by that elite in the essence of his theory, for the accepted wisdom teaches that the springboard of evolutionary mutation, the race, is biologically irrelevant. If race is unimportant then Darwin’s theory of evolutionary development must be wrong. And if racial difference is unimportant then why is species difference important? Marxists who proclaim the brotherhood of man shrink from proclaiming the brotherhood of primates and explain that apes do not have human rights because they are biologically different but they deny biological differentiation among members of the same species. “Here” they tell us “is biological difference, but over there, there is no biological difference. Never mind what your eyes and ears and even your nose may tell you to the contrary. Science knows better.” But the scientific history of our species points to the development of the species as a result of crossing a kind of “cerebral Rubicon”, with the emergence about 1.7 million years ago of Homo erectus. According to Richard Leakey Homo erectus made the great jump from ape to man, made it because he used fire, because he used tools, that is to say showed the first signs of controlling his own environment. Human evolution began as differentiation and adaptation.

If man is moulded by his environment and is capable of changing his environment improving it to meet his needs (and surely that is what the “Rubicon” which Leakey tells us Homo erectus or Homo humilis crossed means) then man is capable of changing the nature of man. He can control his own evolution and the species can develop through not only natural but also social evolution. For Marx evolution was a matter of economic dynamics. Man evolved through the economic balance of power but evolved inevitably towards perfection towards the state of freedom which is freedom from the dictates of nature. For biological evolutionists, the evolution of man could not be separated from nature because man was created by and through nature and will always be of nature, can be nothing else. The two conflicting theories here are those of social and biological engineering. A third “Darwinian” alternative rejects social engineering entirely in favour of social selection through freedom of competition or social Darwinism, whereby liberated from intervention by the state the individual enters a free-for-all in which the best adapted to survive and the “weak go to the wall”. But the fittest for what? Clearly the fittest for the society which exists. The struggle for survival therefore consists in not only the survival of individuals but in the survival of kinds of individuals, the survival of personalities. Personality cannot exist independently. Personality, culture, is rooted in biological differentiation, perfection, in a word, in race. Race is differentiation, is potential is a yearning for the future. The ruling force of the Western world, which works for dysgenics, is working for a society in which the economically fittest survive, the illuminated rulers of one world in which differentiation is a matter of social engineering.

There is inherent to monotheistic religions a strong tendency to deny differentialism in theory and be “sent by God” in practice to destroy it. Christianity and Islam believe in a “mission of the faithful” to convert other humans to the their teleology, a teleology which denies the particularism of their achievements. This is the core of Nietzsche’s revolt against Christianity which is also a kind of defence of Darwin or if one will, a Darwinist theology: namely that man is a free agent, his evolutionary leaps his achievements (wrested from the vicissitudes of fate at what cost at what suffering, and without God!) and that the essence of Darwinism is the ultimate justice of rewarding the worthy with the prize of survival and overlordship. And most wonderful of all is that the stamp of this power is beauty, for beauty is the result of a process and in the case of the living being, this beauty is created by evolution. The anti-Darwinians claim that Darwin is an “insult to humanity” but it is there belittlement of man’s achievements (thanks be to God) which is an insult to man.

This attack on differentiation is profoundly reactionary since its purpose is to destroy the upward evolution of man by destroying the options which genetic evolution has given man for his future evolution. The special is only possible with specialisation towards species evolution. Here for a moment it is necessary to take a look at our immediate past as a species. It might have been possible to have remained in innocence, to have remained as scientists would say as Australopithecus, the vegetarian, not so very intelligent man ape, in what Christians call the Garden of Eden, that is to a state of nature before man became man, a species conscious of his environment something which can be manipulated, to some extent mastered (hence the promise of the serpent “you will become as gods”). Instead man ate of the forbidden fruit of knowledge, which may well have been quite specifically, as the anthropologist Professor Dart and others have argued, the beginning of meat eating and cannibalism which quite possibly at the origins of human kind, the beginning of that terrible knowledge of good and evil which God forbade us to taste of. Australopithecus, so far as we know was a herbivore, Homo a carnivore. The pain of childhood as described in the book of Genesis is also a scientifically correct description of a fate peculiar to Homo sapiens for our species has evolved a large brain in such a short time that the female cannot bear it comfortably or safely. The knowledge, which we acquired, made us conscious of death and consciousness of death has haunted mankind form the beginning and will haunt him to the bitter end. We toil in the “sweat of our brow” to improve ourselves and do not accept our place in nature as it is. This is our fate. The Bible parable tells it well. The first sin of disobedience is wholly credible as a dangerous evolutionary leap into the unknown.

Where Homo sapiens extended his dominion he brought wide-scale destruction to other animals. This is not a matter of simply hunting for food but of the wholesale destruction of species. Homo sapiens destroyed entire animal species when he erupted out of Africa. Palaeolithic man in America destroyed many species. The Romans cleared North Africa and the Middle East of lions. Our species brought destruction but within our species there emerged a race from which emerged culture. It emerged with Cro Magnon, the name given to a small place in Southern France where the first cave paintings of Palaeolithic man were discovered. Cro Magnon man emerged in history about 35 thousand years ago. Later Cro Magnon was given the name Aryan, a word which has its roots in ancient Sanskrit and means friend and later noble. According to Edwin Clark (American Renaissance Vol. 7 12 December 1996 p.1) there are three central traits of the Aryans which continue to shape Western civilisation. The first is a sense of an immutable cosmic order, the second the restless dynamism that results in conquest, the third is individuality. The history of the Roman Empire is often cited as a clear example of what happens when the culture creative element of society is undermined. From Julius Caesar onwards Roman society steadily degenerated into chaos and horror. From Julius Caesar onwards, precisely from Caracella, the rulers of Rome were no longer Aryan. It was Caracella who declared the citizens of the Roman Empire Roman citizens and declared as it were the brotherhood of man, the religion of the man without race from the beginning of human history.

At the very time that our species stands at the threshold of the great leap into space it is challenged by its own anti-evolutionist elements. These elements are those opposed to biological evolution and which argue that evolution is a matter of social engineering, in other words, of education or social environment alone, as though such factors had nothing to do with nature. The conquest of space, like all great conquests will be not altruistic: the force behind it will be a hunt for spoils. But will the thrust be ethnocentric or will it be multi-dollar institutions which finance and ultimately control this critical phase in the evolution of Homo sapiens? Evolution, so much linked to a change of environment, will be profoundly affected by the exploration of space and the future exploration (or colonisation?) of other planets. There are others, notably the founder of socio-biology, E.O. Wilson who take the implications of evolutionary so far as to insist that we are hardly responsible for our actions since ultimately everything is explicable in terms of our genes. It is not education but biology which determines human behaviour. Sociological behaviour is explain din terms of evolutionary survival mechanisms. Love is simply a manifestation of the urge to reproduce etc. The genes. according to Wilson, ‘hold culture on a leash’. The socio-biological view of human culture as a kind of genetic superstructure is reminiscent of the Marxist view of culture as a superstructure built on the underlying reality of economic survival. They both ultimately deny free will and so ultimately free choice. In fact classic evolutionism has never satisfactorily explained human culture, which hardly seems to serve any purpose of genetic survival at all. The psychologist Susan Blackmore and others have argued for the influence of mimicry in the evolution of culture. (The name she gave to these entities is ‘memes’.) The power to imitate is one of the most powerful characteristics of our species. Just as genes are instructions written in code (called DNA) for building proteins, so are cultural mores instructions for building culture. While in the past history of life on this planet there was unconscious choice of imitation, whether genetically or behaviourally, which led to the development or mutation of life forms, so with human consciousness is it possible to choose what will be copied and what will be imitated. To be aware of the driving force of evolution means to be able to will an alteration in its course. To be unaware of the force means to be a subject of it, unconscious, responding according to genetic programme, as best one can. The will to change is absent from the socio-biological concept, which only admits to the will to survive. Writers like Ardrey and Wilson could only think of people as the agents of the survival imperative, but their views are mechanistic. We have the opportunity to assist in the unfolding of the cosmic will. Man is not descending form ape-men; he is lifting himself up from ape-men.

For many writers, evolution, at least human evolution, is not linear but circular. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, observed that “men of eminence” tend to have fewer children than others and it has often been pointed out that welfare schemes from the days of Ancient Rome to the present favour the very elements of society least adapted at surviving in the “struggle of existence”. By their very nature it seems, societies contain the seeds of their own ruin, just like any organism-this theory was developed with painstaking detail by Oswald Spengler in Untergang des Abendlandes. The successful become victims of their own success. Our species, so successful against other species and in terms of multiplication of numbers is in danger of dying from over-indulgence in success. Unlike non hominoid species however, we are equipped with free will, we can decide to a large extent on the course of our lives. It is very exactly the intention of the universalist ant-individual spirit of non differentiated man, which seeks to deprive the species of its ability to produce personality or to evolve into race. The profoundly reactionary movement of our time works to reduce us to a mass animal, to return us to the status of pre-hominoid man. Quite simply, the intention of the enlightened ones is to reduce Homo sapiens to the status of Australopithecus. This is done in the first instance by replacing the people with the mob.

The anti evolutionary drive of the modern world perverts the energies of those who might demonstrate the personality of race by addiction. The word originates in the meaning of being given up to a master. The dominant addictions of our time are sex and spectator sport, followed by drugs and alcohol. The characteristic of an addiction is that nothing changes unless it be the intensity of the dose. Addictions have no future: they are sterile. But the evolutionary process depends on fertility. Addiction is the condition to which the individual is reduced so that he does not perceive the reactionary force of anti-evolution, the destruction of his personality in the name of his individual rights, the sacrificing of the right of choice in the name of the right to indulge the senses. Addictions are the symptoms of disease and not the cause. They result from weakness. The weakness in this case is spiritual rather than simply physical. The individual has no evolutionary function other than as consumer and thus the source of profit for the machine of profit.

The original cause is the corruption of the aristocracy of blood, the only natural aristocracy, that is to say the only legitimate aristocracy. Aristocracy, the rule of the worthy, is the rule of a cast, which champions the cause of its own kind beyond representations of the individual life force. That is, if one will, evolutionary imperative. The hedonistic society of today, the rootless placeless society of personal addictions, is anti-evolutionary for the personality. It only talks to the individual sense and sensibility and ignores what is outside the restricted individual sphere. But while the personality is sinking in evolutionary terms, technological power and knowledge is increasing, even accelerating. Quite inevitably, this will create a society in which the overwhelming majority of members are without political power of any kind and become cattle at the disposal and pleasure of the enlightened leaders of the world state. One may say, ‘so then has nothing changed’. But this will have changed: the biological and technical knowledge of the future will give the rulers of the world state powers beyond death itself. But if the elite is an elite of parasites working within the parameters established by the priests of an elect, living from the imaginative genius of the white man, of a tiny minority of the world’s population that is, so will the parasite kill itself by killing its host and leave the planet a waste land or an inheritance in which machines continue to operate on a planet from which humans will have been banished.

Cloning, artificial insemination, the end of ageing, the creation of selective diseases and pests, the repression of hereditary viruses and defects, the creation of the biologically selective killer virus which can decimate one ethnic group and spare another, the selection of the desirable individual before birth and killing of the undesirable, the saving and the multiplication or destruction of life; all this will be the common currency of the century now begun. In a short time it will be possible to breed selectively in order to cultivate the seeds of a select race. Threatened animal species could be saved from extinction by human hordes a minute before their midnight. The white race, which in the course of events now moving, will be extinct within little more than a hundred years, could be saved by in the laboratories of the racialist technician or changed, utterly changed, by genetic manipulation and return to rule as the Ancient of Days again, transformed, transmogrified. Those who throw up their hands in horror at the future with its interference in the natural process, should have long ago thrown up their hands in horror, because the saving of lives which nature had condemned, was long ago established as a principle aim of medicine and medicine has been more successful in saving the lives of millions than in anything else. How many adults over the age of 40 today owe their existence to the advances of medicine? Human cloning is well known to Nature: we call the result twins. Nature promised us an early death. That is not to say that the ethical questions are easy or should be given a facile answer. Anyone who thinks the evolutionary issues which we are facing are easy should be treated with the deepest distrust! But nothing we can say will alter the fact that evolution is increasingly passing out of the power of natural uncontrolled forces into the power of human controlled forces. Not Nature alone but increasingly Man working for or against Nature but in part despite Nature, can determine the evolution of his species. But who is the controller and who the controlled? That is the ultimate question. It is for the answer to that question that our deepest yearning to struggle and change arises. To ensure that the world evolves not as “they” but as “we” wish it. Deciding on the “they” and “we” and then fighting for “we” is part of one and the same compulsion of the will. Those who do not know this are fated to remain the victims of evolution and not the shapers of evolution. We must create a system or evolve into other men’s. Those who have ears let them hear.

[The Scorpion]

Tags: Michael-Walker