EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK

•   Once given the existence of a substance which reproduces itself and has the feature of metabolism, and which therefore finds itself in competition with every other manifestation of the same features, then the entire process of evolution necessarily follows. It is not necessary to speak about any purpose to life or instinct of reproduction. Either the qualities of successful metabolism and reproduction will prevail or there will be extinction. And the very elements which determine the continuation are these two.

•     The achievement of successful features is the path to sexual expression, at all levels, in all species.  This is the relation between sex and evolution.

•    The modern role of sex, and the general impression one takes from its urgent character in all levels of evolutionary development, suggests that even metabolism is subordinate to it.

•      Both sexes have the capability of limiting fertility. Lesbianism, women’s liberation, promiscuity, prostitution, drugs are the major agencies for the female. Homosexuality, impotence, incapacity to work, drugs are prominent in the male repertoire for sterility.

•    That all of the development takes place during the time of the nurture is on its face alone ground for suspecting that a very powerful and pervasive relation exists between parent and young in the formation of the development.

•  We are ready to believe that the unusual experience of the parents is communicated to the offspring so as to cause variation, in some not necessarily external aspect.

•   The agency for the production of appropriate variation is as much a feature of protoplasm as is its metabolism or its reproduction or its genetic conservatism.

•    It is worth taking a second look a what appears to be a fact at least at the present time: it appears that it is not the direct economic question which produces an active development of consciousness, but questions more closely related to reproduction, or the frustration of reproduction.

•   I believe on general grounds that it is not merely hardship, economic struggle which gives rise to the familiar flourishing of consciousness.

•    It is seemingly, in human evolution, the overcoming of obstacles to fertility that produces the adaptive changes. Not metabolic, but reproductive obstacles.

•    It is not consciousness as such, but change of consciousness, which is the method of human evolution.

•    The free expression of an instinct leaves no mark upon the "consciousness." It is the thwarting of an instinct, the placing of obstacles in the way of its expression, which causes the appearance of consciousness, which may be described as the agency for the circumventing of the obstacles. The more complex and difficult the obstacles, the more elaborate and effective the instrument developed for their overcoming.

•     The successful assimilation of the contemporary division of labor (of a role in it) precludes innovation.

Our contention is that the failure to accommodate to some role in the contemporary division of labor is the product of the reproductive distortions noted above.

•  The premature orientation towards reproduction is the specific agency of the interruption of development which is the basis of variation.

 •   The process of gestation is the instrumentality by which the events external to the parent can exert themselves upon the development of the young. In the end the formative role of the parent generation is the very causality of evolution itself.

 •   The separate individuals of a species do not all occupy the same setting. There is a range of conditions occupied by the species; and in some places organisms are comfortable, in another surfeited, in still another suffering from the beginnings of competition, and finally some, dwelling on a precarious periphery, for whom competition is radically severe. The last is producing variation in abundance, which however does not become selected and characteristic unless this condition proves to be typical. In the first setting the standard character is achieved without being strongly marked, a placid, comfortable but not vigorous population results. The surfeited could not survive in the setting of the first group, and exhibit a tendency not even to develop the character of the species and abandon the achievements won through lengthy struggle by the species. The third group have the full character, and also outstanding hardihood resulting from struggle, as befits the characteristic body of the species, which has fully earned its right to place its mark upon the new generation. The last group, barely surviving, responds with a shrunken social fertility, but an explosion of new qualities, which are ancient resources of the species, appearing in a new context. It is full of variation in which everything old is being reexplored within the matrix of the later established character. Its individuals are not very healthy, viewed from the standpoint of sexuality, comfort, sense of accommodation, sense of success, certainty of direction, sense of appropriateness to conditions, but it is characterized by a wide range of vitality, from a manifestly self-lethal proclivity, to a furiously intense, frenetic vitality or at least energy, which in the end represents the instrumentality of the transformation of the species, if the alien conditions encountered here prove to be finally the prevailing conditions whose persistence constitutes the new life setting for the whole species.

•     In a time of crisis the antagonism between reproduction as the agency of life, and as the agency of starvation is the  mainspring of evolutionary change.

•    And this must be so (reproductive crisis as  the central evolutionary question) on general grounds, for metabolic crises in the end are a reflection of the too rapid expansion of the protoplasm.

The metabolic crisis, the crisis of competition, is in fact a reproductive crisis expressing too much fertility for the adaptations.

•   The conception most often offered as the sole alternative to the genetic account of the origin of variation is that there is a molding of the species by nature so to speak in its image, a molding which causes the species to change adaptively and to transmit this change to the next generation, which continues the adaptive tendency, until a new form appears as the result of a lengthy accumulation of such directed changes. This idea involves the conception of the inheritance of acquired characteristics or Lamarckism, which has often been refuted.

•   But in fact the process is rather more complicated than this. The species cannot "adapt" strictly speaking: the fund of its possible transformations is precisely the series of genetic forms which it assumes in the course of its development in its recapitulation of the history of the development of its predecessors; and no degree of mal-adaptation can do more than draw upon these inherited resources by an emphasis or rearrangement of certain of them.

•   The only lack of adaptation which becomes an experience of species instead of just an experience of individuals is the condition which produces an excess of numbers over the food supply.

Fatality due to accidents and parasites is part of the adaptation of the species.

•     It cannot be doubted that there is a fundamental connection, the very one that we seek to connect sex with evolution, between intraspecific competition and the conversion of sexual expression from developmental determination into some other form.

•     What is the close relationship between frustrated development, between the thwarting of the development of the young, and their heightened genital activity?

•    The liaison function is the role of the modified female.

•    The behavior of each female is connected thus with the behavior of every other: the accessibility of some females dooms others to sterility; and if for this reason alone the opening of the womb is a act which reverberates throughout the species.

•   There is a remarkable inversion in both sexes with the achievement of maturity: in the female the development of the generalized negative sexual tendency as the actual condition for maternity in the family setting. And for the male: there must develop the definite recognition of the nurture function before the real reproductive relation can be established with a female.

•    The nature of the distortion is to convert the daughter into a male and a consort, and the son into a consort.

And these are possible because the genetic constitution contains these potentialities as the instruments for the social reproductive organization.

They have the effect of reducing intraspecific competition by causing sterility, partial or complete.

•    Considering the immediately foregoing ideas on fixations, it is worth considering whether, in the male, the form of sterility does not the character of of an incapacity to enter into this selection of the female, but to respond, as in the earlier condition, generally to all or nearly all females.

•     Obesity and leanness represent the double error - late and premature weaning?

Not the ingestion but the capacity to utilize starches, caused by the correct pace of the weaning?

•   On originality, creativeness. In the end a realization of what has to be an intrinsic potential of life itself, to make the radical accommodation to the radically alien setting. It does not appear when it is not needed. It appears under conditions of great adversity, not of the individual, but of the species. It has minor echoes for individuals. Its product is rich and profoundly novel only when it does respond to the adversity of great parts of the species. Evidently the requirements of one individual, in the small locality, and the response to this, only by a considerable accident could constitute a fundamental new direction for the species, which requires a common accommodation, an expression common to a great many of its individuals. And the individual success can only be an expression of success in the prevailing setting. Originality is a species phenomena, the result of a widespread need and impulse shared by very many.

•    On the question of the nature of consciousness: we distinguish two elements or principles. Every organism makes a characteristic selection of the ambient materiality according to its physiology, its metabolic arrangements. This selection, this continuously present field of sensation or awareness, this characteristic selection of stimuli to which the organism is constantly responding, is often erroneously described as 'consciousness" in human beings. But all organisms down to the most primitive are related to reality in just this way, and if this is to be called "consciousness," then another term must be invented to describe what is different about the human relation to reality — for there is something different, in degree if not substance.

What is different is the capacity to alter the selection from reality of another being, to acquire a new field of stimuli, a new selection, and to cause others to acquire it also.

•   The origin of consciousness (the development of the so-called “voluntary” muscle) is evidently connected with the development of the capacity to refrain from the stimulus-response mechanism characteristic of all protoplasm.

What is essential is not the faculty of response, for that is well established, nor yet the conditioned response, for that too is a universal function: but the abstention from response is the “voluntary” aspect.

•     The temporal separation of response from stimulus is the biological innovation which distinguishes the realm of the conscious from that of the non conscious.

The so-called voluntary expressions amount to a postponement of response, and consciousness is the accumulated effort to overcome what has been interposed between the stimulus and response.