Preface

THE CIBA FOUNDATION arranges many small international conferences, most of them concerned with highly technical, specialized and fundamental aspects of medical research. This book contains the papers and discussions of an exceptional conference. ‘The subject—based on a suggestion first made by Dr. Pincus—could however be looked upon as a reasonable extension of the Foundation’s main interests; the aim of all our meetings is to stir the imagination, speed the flow of information, and generally hasten the progress of work in medical and biological research. The world was unprepared socially, politically and ethically for the advent of nuclear power. Now, biological research is in a ferment, creating and promising methods of interference with “‘natural processes’? which could destroy or could transform nearly every aspect of human life which we value.

Urgently, it is necessary for men and women of every race and colour and creed, every intelligent individual of our one world, to consider the present and imminent possibilities. They must be prepared to defend what they hold good for themselves and their neighbours, and, more importantly, to use the immense creative opportunities for a happier and healthier world. This book should make people think.

The occasion for this unusual symposium was the first use of a new conference room at the Foundation’s house in Portland Place, London. We are very grateful to the 27 distinguished contributors for their time, effort and imagination—and their co-operation in the preparation of a text which has been modified to some extent in favour of the lay reader. The editor also records his great indebtedness to many others who gave essential and valuable help in the organization of the symposium and the production of this book: Anthony and Marjorie de Reuck, Peggy Cameron, Maeve O’Connor, Julie Knight, Nancy Spufford, John Rivers and William Hill.

The Future of Man — Evolutionary Aspects (by Julian Huxley)

The evolution of this planet as a unit in the cosmic process  has been going on for perhaps 5,000 million years. Life was evolved here after about half of this huge span of time, and has itself been evolving during the later half of the period—to be more precise, for some 2,750 million years. We, like all other living organisms and all other features of the earth, are products of this process of evolution. We men belong to the latest dominant type to be produced, and are now responsible for the future evolution of the planet, which, according to the astronomers and geophysicists, is likely to continue for at least another 2,750 million years.

We are privileged to be living at a crucial moment in the cosmic story, the moment when the vast evolutionary process, in the small person of enquiring man, is becoming conscious of itself.

Evolution can be defined as a natural process of transformation, self-operating and irreversible, which in its course generates novelty, greater variety, more complex organization, and eventually higher levels of mental or psychological activity. And we are discovering that all reality is, in a perfectly legitimate sense, a single and comprehensive process of evolution.

But this comprehensive process falls naturally into three main © sectors. The first is the inorganic or cosmic sector, operating by physical or simple chemical interaction, and resulting in the evolution of elements, nebulae, stars and planetary systems; the second is the organic or biological sector, operating by automatic natural selection superposed on physico-chemical interaction, and resulting in the evolution of plant and animal organisms—from fungi and flowers to monkeys and medusae; the third is the human or psychosocial sector, operating by mind-accompanied psychosocial pressure superposed upon natural selection, and resulting in human societies and their products—from machines and works of art to sciences and religions.

On this earth (and presumably in a few other isolated spots in the universe) there have thus been two critical points in evolution, when it has entered on a new phase, with new properties and characteristics. The first was when, thanks to the evolution of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and genes, material organizations became self-varying and self-reproducing, and the biological phase began to operate. The second was when, thanks to the evolution of conceptual thought, symbolic language and the cumulative transmission of experience by tradition, mental or mind-accompanied organizations became self-varying and _ self-reproducing, and the human _ phase emerged.

In the psychosocial phase, the process of evolution is predominantly cultural. Its results are manifested in the variety of societies, and of their organs, like philosophies, legal codes, and social systems.

In this phase a new mechanism for securing continuity and change has been added. In addition to the biological basis of inheritance and variation provided by the gene-complex in the chromosomes, man has a cultural basis, in the shape of the complex of ideas, beliefs and purposes and their transmissible results which is broadly called tradition. With its aid, he can accomplish something impossible to any other organism—he can transmit experience cumulatively down the generations and incorporate its results directly into the evolutionary system.

In cultural evolution, there is no sharp distinction between germ-plasm and soma, between genetic basis and its phenotypic results. True, the main stream of tradition is constantly shedding some of its pathological and lunatic fringe, just as the main stream of material germ-plasm is constantly shedding some of its pathological and unhelpful mutants; but in general, culture is simultaneously manifested and transmitted.

The mechanism of biological evolution is now, in broad outline, established. But we are only beginning to study psychosocial evolution in the same operational way. Some things, however, are becoming clear. In the first place, the basic elements in cultural transmission and transformation are psychological: they are patterns and systems of thought and attitude expressed or formulated in transmissible terms, from concepts to values. For want of a better word I shall lump them all together and call them zdeas. ‘The material elements transmitted—paintings, documents, machines, jewels—are normally vehicles or products of ideas in this loose and general sense.

A more precise term than psychological would be psychometabolic. Man is equipped with two metabolisms, two systems for transforming the raw materials of nature in serviceable ways. Physiological metabolism utilizes the raw materials of objective nature and elaborates them into biologically operative physicochemical compounds and systems. Psychometabolism on the other hand utilizes the raw materials of subjective or mindaccompanied experience and elaborates them into psychosocially operative organizations of thought and feeling— including principles like causation, categories like space, abstractions like truth; precepts and concepts, poems and gods, myths and scientific theories, moral commandments and legal codes.

Psychometabolism introduces quality into a quantitative world, produces meaningful patterns out of the chaos of elementary experience, and enables us to grasp extremely complex situations as wholes. Psychometabolic processes may become diseased, as in schizophrenics; their products may be unrelated to the objective world, as with hallucinations; they may be built on false foundations, like racialist ideas; or they may be rendered out of date by the march of knowledge, like the notion of demoniac possession: but they are a necessary part of our psychosocial machinery, and it behoves us to study them thoroughly and understand how they work.

In psychosocial evolution the struggle for existence has been replaced by what might be termed the striving for fulfilment. The main operative agency in this phase of evolution is psychosocial pressure. ‘This is the resultant of the separate pressures of individuals’ loves and hates, desires and hopes, needs and purposes; but it is related to the conflicts and problems thrown up by the march of events, and given direction by some general organization of ideas and beliefs. It has to operate within an organized system of social institutions, which will have arisen out of past ideas and events, but which may often be out of step with later ideas and their results.

As Darwin first pointed out, there has been during biological evolution a general trend towards improvement—improvement in efficiency and in self-regulation. ‘This trend is inevitable, but is accompanied by much waste, suffering, and extinction. The trend towards improvement continues in psychosocial evolution, though again accompanied by suffering, horror and evil. Yet in spite of all the waste and misery, the total improvement achieved during the whole process of evolution, from the origin of life to the present day, is almost incredible—from a submiscroscopic pre-cellular viroid to a self-conscious civilized human vertebrate, throwing up on its way a fantastic profusion of organic and cultural variety.

This is both an encouragement and a challenge. The challenge is man’s obvious imperfection as a psychosocial being; both individually and collectively, he is sadly in need of improvement, yet clearly improvable. The encouragement derives from the fact of past improvement. If blind, opportunistic, and automatic natural selection could conjure man out of a viroid in a couple of thousand million years, what could not man’s conscious and purposeful efforts achieve even in a couple of million years, let alone in the thousands of millions to which he can reasonably look forward ?

The next point to note is that the process of improvement is not continuous. It takes place in steps, by a succession of successful or dominant types of organization, each endowed with new capacities and possibilities. Some once-dominant types become extinct, but many do persist, though in reduced numbers and a subordinate position.

In psychosocial evolution, the dominant types are organizations of thought and belief and of the mind-accompanied behaviour resulting from them: for brevity’s sake we may call them idea-systems. Thus in our own history, the early ideasystem based on magic and witchcraft became subordinated to the new theological and metaphysical dominant system of medieval Christianity, which in turn has become largely superseded by the scientific idea-system. Today, it looks as if a new dominant idea-system is in process of being born, a system that I will call “‘evolutionary humanism’’. Of course, the march of ideas is not an autonomous process, but interlocks with the march of historical events. History presents man with a series of stimuli, often in the form of painful shocks. Human powerlust and cruelty may get out of hand, human stupidity may be unable to take advantage of new opportunities; apparent advance may eventually become frustrating instead of rewarding.

We are now on the threshold of a truly critical step—into the phase of self-conscious evolution. The current phase of human organization is ending in a tangle of unresolved problems and self-defeating activities.

The organization of power in competitive national units has reached its logical conclusion in the confrontation of two great opposed blocs immobilized in the frozen grip of the cold war. Advance in the technical efficiency of weaponry has given us weapons so powerful that they cannot—we hope—be used: meanwhile the nations are spending so much on armaments that there is not enough to meet more than a fraction of other and more important psychosocial needs.

Increasing emphasis on material products has led to wasteful over-exploitation of nature and a threatened shortage of natural resources. The technical efficiency of agricultural and industrial production is producing surpluses which cannot be disposed of and is beginning to throw people out of work, and yet is unable to meet the essential requirements of the needy throughout the world. Medical science has become so spectacularly efficient that population is exploding and outrunning resources. Excessive preoccupation with quantity of material goods has led to neglect of quality in life. In general, man’s exploration and control of external nature has far outrun his exploration and control of his own nature.

However, there is one field in which real and decisive advance is being made—the field of knowledge and understanding. Here, for the first time, man is being given a reasonably comprehensive and reasonably correct vision of himself, of his own nature, and of his place in nature—in other words, his destiny: a broad picture of the unitary evolutionary process and of what his réle in it might be.

There have been many situations in biological evolution where a successful type of organization has apparently realized all the main possibilities open to it. Further advance can then only be achieved through the rise of a new type with a new pattern of organization and new possibilities of development. Today, the passage to a new phase is being made possible by this new picture of human destiny. In place of the conflicting aims of the present, our new vision is already indicating the single and over-riding aim of fulfilment—greater fulfilment for more individuals and fuller achievement by more societies, through greater realization of human possibilities and fuller enjoyment of human capacities.

This new vision inevitably results from our new knowledge, though only with the aid of intellectual and imaginative effort. It could and should provide the basis for an operational system of ideas and beliefs to support and guide us in the next phase of our psychosocial evolution. Thus we must make every effort to clarify this new vision of destiny, to follow out its implications, and set it to work. An obvious first task is to examine the outstanding problem situations of the present, in the light of this dawning idea-system.

There is first the increasing psychosocial pressure caused by the convergence of the psychosocial process upon itself. This, as Teilhard de Chardin pointed out in The Phenomenon of Man', is due to the apparently banal fact that man’s habitat is the surface of a globe. During his brief history, he has multiplied his numbers and improved his communications, until his societies have spread over the whole habitable area of the earth, and are impinging on each other politically, economically, and ideologically.

The world has become a unit de facto: sooner rather than later, it must become a unit de jure, by submitting itself to a unitary system of self-government. Since the human habitat is one and indivisible, its resources must be explored as a global whole. And since thought knows no frontiers, ideas of every kind are diffusing faster and faster all over the world’s surface, demanding recognition, posing questions, generating conflicts.

The units of organization which have proved most effective during biological evolution are bounded unit-systems of great internal complexity, whose components are engaged in a constant and vigorous interplay, leading to their mutual reinforcement within an integrated total pattern of activity. Such selfbounded and complex systems include the cell, the vertebrate individual, the social insect colony, and the brains of higher mammals and man. When such a system ensures the constant circuiting, summation, and interaction of nervous impulses, as does the human brain, it generates a high level of subjective experience.

Thus, since the advent of man, a new habitat has been opened up to evolving life, a habitat of thought: for this I shall use Teilhard de Chardin’s term, the nodosphere, until someone invents something better. This covering of the earth’s sphericity with a thinking envelope, whose components are interacting with a steadily rising intensity, is now generating a powerful psychosocial pressure favouring a solution of least effort, by way of integration in a unitary organization of ideas and beliefs. But this will not happen automatically: it can only be achieved by a large-scale co-operative exercise of human reason and imagination.

When we look at the whole sweep of man’s history on earth, as now revealed by the labours of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, we see that everything that properly deserves to be called progress has depended on new knowledge and new organizations of knowledge in the shape of ideas. Agriculture, monotheism, mathematics, marine navigation, the scientific method, the industrial revolution, the conquest of infectious disease and the prolongation of life—all have depended upon the growth of knowledge and its better organization.

We have discovered that each advance may lead us into difficulties, but also that evolution is a dialectic or cybernetic process operating by feedback, in which new difficulties can be surmounted, but only with the aid of new discoveries and new applications of knowledge.

During the past three centuries the most powerful agency for providing new knowledge has been Science. I use the word, spelt thus with a capital letter, in the continental sense to include all branches of organized rational enquiry, including the natural sciences, the social and psychological sciences, and the various humanistic sciences, such as history and philosophy, aesthetics and comparative religion; and as opposed to all speculative and a prior: philosophies and untested explanatory systems.

Today, science too is being bent in on itself by the earth’s sphericity. Its spectacular advance since the Renaissance has been achieved by successive invasions of separate fields of enquiry—mechanics, astronomy, physics and chemistry, natural history and geology, physiology and biology, anthropology, psychology and sociology. This type of separate and sometimes competitive scientific expansion is now reaching its limit. There are still some vacant areas to explore, like space research or extrasensory perception; but science as a whole cannot escape the pressure towards integration.

In place of separate subjects each with their own assumptions, methodology and technical jargon, we must envisage networks of co-operative investigation, with common methods and terminology, all eventually linked up in a comprehensive process of enquiry. This, of course, will mean a radical reorganization of scientific teaching and research.

If man is responsible for the future of this planet, he must pay more attention to ecology—the science of relations between organisms and the resources of their environment.

Human ecology involves finding out what resources are available in our environment and how to make the best use of them. We have to think first of all of material resources— minerals, water-power, soil, forests, agricultural production— but we must also think of the non-material or enjoyment resources of the habitat, such as natural beauty and solitude, interest and adventure, wild scenery and wild life.

The two types of resource are interlinked. Thus in eastern Africa, the assemblage of splendid large mammals and birds, the last remnant of the climax community of prehuman evolution, is one of the world’s unique enjoyment resources. But it is of immediate financial value, through tourism, to the local inhabitants. It is also of physiological value: large areas of the dry savannah lands of the region degenerate if cultivated or used for grazing cattle. But if they are properly managed, their communities of wild animals yield large amounts of “ wild protein’ for human food—larger than can be obtained from domestic stock.

During much of man’s evolution he has been busily engaged in ruining his own habitat. We have been doing so in Britain, for instance, by polluting our rivers. The Thames was once a fine salmon river, and Henry II is said to have fed the polar bear given to him by the King of Norway by letting it out from the Tower of London at the end of a rope to fish for itself. The river was also famed for its oysters. Today, almost its only abundant animal is the little red worm Tubzfex, which specializes on survival in dirty oxygen-poor mud. Detergents and heated cooling water as well as sewage and general filth are ruining one river after another.

A new ecological threat of man against his own habitat has recently appeared, in the shape of pesticidal chemicals, both insecticides and herbicides. As Rachel Carson has brought out with devastating clarity in her book? The Silent Spring, these are now destroying the ecological pattern of the countryside. Apple and clover crops are failing because their pollinators, the bees, are being wiped out. Pesticides are depauperating the plantrich verges of our country roads, and killing off lovely and harmless flowers as well as so-called weeds. By killing caterpillars, they have caused the virtual disappearance of many of our butterflies and have sadly reduced the population of cuckoos and various songbirds. Numbers of birds are killed directly by eating poisoned grain, and others rendered sterile by the poisoned flesh of the insects and other creatures they eat. Enjoyment as well as material resources are being threatened; as my brother Aldous said after reading Rachel Carson’s book, we are exterminating half the basis of English poetry!

Scientific ecology gives the basis for good land use. I have already pointed out how important a proper land-use policy is in underdeveloped countries like Africa. It is equally important, though for rather other reasons, in overcrowded and highly developed countries like our own. In Britain, for instance, we have an actual shortage of space, and there is constant pressure on the land’s surface for a variety of different and even conflicting forms of use—for house-building, for communication, for industry, for military purposes, and for enjoyment. Somehow different forms of land use must be amicably co-ordinated, so that one form of use is paramount in one area, another in another. Proper land-use planning is applied human ecology.

Biologically-minded planners must also think about longterm ecological changes affecting the human habitat. Thus it appears probable that the present interglacial and relatively mild climate will continue for well over 5,000 years, with consequent melting of ice-caps, raising of the absolute sea-level, and threatened flooding of large areas of coastal flatlands (except in the arctic and subarctic, where isostatic recovery will continue to raise the land and lower the relative sea-level for about 4,000 years); but that, on the basis of Milankovich’s and van Woerkom’s calculations, this will be succeeded, a little over 10,000 years from now, by the onset of a new cold period of increasing glaciation.

Man lives in three kinds of habitat, the planetary, the social and the psychological. The planetary habitat, the concern of ecology in the ordinary sense, I have just been discussing. To deal with the problems of the social habitat, which man has created himself, we need a science of social ecology.

The outstanding social habitat is the city, the habitat of civilized man; as Lewis Mumford has so beautifully demonstrated in his great book3, The City in History, the history of cities is also the history of civilization. However, cities are now becoming self-defeating; if the growth of human civilization is to be fostered and not frustrated, it will be necessary to devote more and more attention to the social ecology of cities. Thus mere increase of size and numbers beyond a certain point brings its own problems of traffic congestion, commuting, and general frustration, and bad planning in the past necessitates so-called urban renewal in the present.

The city also can provide important enjoyment resources, not only as a centre for entertainment and the arts, but also in visual enjoyment of good planning and fine architecture.

Next we come to psychological ecology—the mind’s investigation of itself and its own psychological habitat. We must explore qualitative inner space as well as quantitative outer space. This, of course, includes the exploration of our own individual minds and their operations, and also exploration of the noosphere, the realm of thought and feeling which our minds create in interaction with the fact of experience, the psychological habitat in which we live and on whose resources we must draw.

As regards our individual minds, the main aim must be to canalize their development so as to reconcile or transcend conflicting drives and impulses, and to develop effective psychological bonds with other individuals and with nature around us. Much of this will be psychotechnology.

This will help us to correct various unfortunate tendencies— the tendency to find scapegoats for one’s own guilt, the tendency to put off one’s own responsibilities on to someone or something else, as when we ascribe our own wishes and purposes to the State or to God. It will help to prevent us discharging our aggressive impulses and our hates in wrong and dangerous ways, and help us to avoid reification—erecting abstractions to the status of real entities, thinking that there is any such thing as “truth” or “‘virtue”’.

We need co-ordinated research on all methods of attaining states of self-transcendent experience: on yoga, both physical and psychological; on directed meditation; on hypnotism in all its extraordinary manifestations; on dreams and their possible control; on apparent “‘possession”’ by an alien personality or spirit, as in medicine-men or shamans, or as in Haitian voodoo; on ecstatic or trance-like experiences produced by dancing, as in many tribal societies. In many cases, joint participation enhances and socializes the effect; this is so in voodoo, in tribal dances, and in the confraternities of dancing dervishes.

Meanwhile, physiology and biochemistry are indicating new areas for us to explore. For instance, it has now been shown that in man as well as in animals, electric stimulation of a particular area in the brain can produce an overwhelming sense of happiness or well-being in the whole organism. It has even been found possible to make one half of the body feel happy, while the other half remains in its normal state. To some people this seems somehow too materialistic; but after all, electric happiness 1s still happiness, and happiness is very much more important than the physical happenings with which it is correlated.

Perhaps even more exciting possibilities are being opened up by drugs, like mescalin, lysergic acid, and psilocybin, which can produce astonishing results in minute doses. They are called ““psychedelics”’ because they reveal new capacities of the human psyche. They appear to do this by modifying the psychometabolic machinery which builds up our perceptual world. In schizophrenia, some chemical substance, itself possibly due to a genetic error of metabolism, is apparently interfering with this process, so as to produce disorderly perception. Psychedelic drugs, on the other hand, seem to release the process from the need to check its results against outer experience. No longer forced to achieve coherence with the outer world of sense, it can produce inner experiences of great intensity and variety, with a coherence of their own. With some people in some circumstances, the experiences can be horribly distressing, but with others, perhaps the majority, they can be intensely releasing and satisfying.

The ritualization of shared transcendent experience to serve as a communal bond is a frequent feature of so-called primitive societies, as in the mescalin-induced but essentially religious peyote ceremonies of some North American Indians. We need to discover how it could be utilized in our more elaborate civilized communities. My brother Aldous has made some suggestions about this in his practical Utopia, Island [4].

Then there is the problem of economics. Our present economic system is rapidly becoming self-defeating. It is all geared to the supposed need for growth—a steady increase of production. The Western economic system, which is steadily invading new regions, is turning into what has been called consumerism. As one American writer has put it, the Western economy depends on persuading more people to believe that they want to consume more products. This is leading to over-exploitation of resources which ought to be conserved; to excessive concentration on advertising of saleable products; to the neglect of recipes for healthy and happy living (compare the large amounts still spent on advertising cigarettes with the small amount devoted to advertising their harmful effects in promoting lung cancer) ; and to the dissipation of talent and energy into non-productive channels. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, we have what may be called productionism, partly to satisfy the obvious consumer needs of the population, but largely to keep up with and eventually to outstrip the United States in industrial efficiency.

The system leads to local over-production combined with world maldistribution. It is now being threatened by its own over-efficiency, first in respect of mass-production and now of automation. This is leading to underemployment (which is already serious in countries like India, and will shortly become serious in the United States and Britain) and to more compulsory leisure. Even if it were decided to stop the armaments race, nobody seems to know how to adjust our economy to such a drastic change.

I am not an economist: I would only suggest that we start looking at the problem from the other end, and aim at a worldwide system based on the idea that progressively fewer manhours will be needed to furnish the material substructure of life, but progressively more man-hours for occupying the time that is freed, a system in which the stigma of not being employed full-time would be removed. In other words, we need a fulfilment economy, aimed at providing opportunity for everyone to find some interesting or significant occupation during the half or more of their time which will not be gainfully employed in production.

This will be as radical a change as that from a barter to a money economy, or from a regulated system of production and trade to latsser faire capitalism: but what an exciting opportunity for the economists and sociologists!

Another urgent field for evolving man to explore is that of his own population increase. This is posing the most serious problems for his future, not merely in the long term but also in the short term of two or three generations only. The situation, in brief, is this. In the past half-century there has been an unprecedented population explosion, the result of so-called death control. Modern medicine and health measures have been so successful that they have drastically reduced mortality and much increased the expectation of life (though not the total life span). The human population only reached the thousand million mark early in this century; it is today just about 3,000 million; and whatever measures we undertake now, will more than double itself by the year 2000, within the life-time of many of us alive today. Not only has the absolute number of human beings been increasing, but also their rate of increase. The compound interest rate of world population-increase cannot have exceeded one-tenth of one per cent per annum for many millennia. It reached one per cent only in the present century. Today it is more than 1-8 per cent, and is still apparently going up. Several countries have even achieved the unenviable record of 3 per cent, which means doubling in 23 years.

As a result, the world’s population is beginning to press harder and harder on the world’s resources. Even now, perhaps half the total number of people in the world are inadequately nourished; in developed countries like Britain or Holland there is pressure on mere space; in under-developed countries, more and more marginal land is being cultivated, more and more forests are being cut down, more and more soil is being eroded.

What are we to do about it? Some people have suggested that we should export our surplus to other planets: they can never have thought quantitatively about the problem. This would mean shipping off a hundred human beings every minute. One thing is certain: the process cannot go on unchecked for more than two or three generations at most without leading to disastrous trouble. ‘Thus, it is impossible to industrialize underdeveloped and already densely populated countries if too much of the capital and skill needed for the process are swallowed up in feeding, housing and looking after too many children. A country like India must cut its birth-rate in half within half a century if it is to achieve successful industrial development: it is salutary to realize that, even if it did so, its population would still be increasing faster than Europe’s in its nineteenth-century heyday.

Over-multiplication may also lead to aggressive imperialist expansion. This happened in pre-war Germany, with its claim for Lebensraum ; it happened with pre-war Japan; and it rather looks as if it is happening now in post-war China.

The fall-out from the population explosion is already affecting us in many unpleasant ways. Over-increase of population leads inevitably to over-large cities; and this, as we see for ourselves in our daily London lives, leads to traffic paralysis, to frustrating rush and long hours of commuting for millions of men and women, and to the city-dweller being more and more completely cut off from nature. More and more elaborate bureaucratic regulation becomes necessary, and might all too easily lead on to some form of authoritarianism.

The problem also has important psychological aspects. In rats and other mammals, excessive crowding seriously distorts behaviour: there is much fighting, and the normal processes of reproduction are interfered with. There can be little doubt that some comparable neuroendocrine disturbance occurs when human beings are overcrowded: there is increasing frustration and irritation and the resultant tension can readily lead to outbreaks of violence and other anti-social behaviour.

The world needs a population policy. We must stop thinking in terms of a race between the production of food and the production of people; we must begin thinking in terms of a balance between people and the various resources they need. To achieve this, we must balance death-control with some form of birthcontrol, with the immediate aim of reducing the rate of population- increase and the ultimate aim of achieving a balanced adjustment instead of an unbalanced maladjustment.

To do this we must first of all overcome a great deal of moral, ideological and religious resistance. This can only be done by helping people understand that to oppose proper methods of birth control is radically immoral since it condemns an increasing number of human beings to increasing misery, frustration and ill-health.

Meanwhile, all advanced nations should devote an increasing amount of scientific and technological manpower to discovering and perfecting simple and acceptable methods of birth-control, and making their discoveries freely available to the rest of the world. For another thing, international aid should take account of what I may call the demographic credit-worthiness of the recipient. If the aid is likely to go down the drain of excess population, the recipient country should be encouraged and helped to initiate an efficient policy of population-control, and some of the aid should be devoted to seeing that the policy is effective.

We must also make the world at large aware that the whole future of mankind is endangered: if present trends continue unchecked man will become the cancer of the planet instead of the guide and director of its further evolution.

The population explosion is making us ask the fundamental question—so fundamental that it is usually not asked at all— what are people for? Whatever the answer, whether to achieve greater efficiency or power, or, as I am suggesting, to find greater fulfilment, it is clear that the general quality of the world’s population is not very high, is beginning to deteriorate, and should and could be improved. It is deteriorating, thanks to genetic defectives who would otherwise have died being kept alive, and thanks to the crop of new mutations due to fall-out. In modern man the direction of genetic evolution has started to change its sign, from positive to negative, from advance to retreat: we must manage to put it back on its age-old course of positive improvement.

The improvement of human genetic quality by eugenic methods would take a great load of suffering and frustration off the shoulders of evolving humanity, and would much increase both enjoyment and efficiency. Let me give one example. The general level of genetic intelligence could theoretically be raised by eugenic selection; and even a slight rise in its average level would give a markedincrease in the number of the outstandingly intelligent and capable people needed to run our increasingly complex societies. Thus a 1:5 per cent increase in mean genetic intelligence quotient (I.Q.), from 100 to 101-5, would increase the production of those with an I.Q. of 160 and over by about 50 per cent.

How to implement a eugenic policy in practice is another matter. The effects of merely encouraging potentially wellendowed individuals to have more children, and vice versa, would be much too slow for modern psychosocial evolution. Eugenics will eventually have to have recourse to methods like multiple artificial insemination by preferred donors of high genetic quality, as Professor Muller emphasized a quarter of a century ago, and I re-emphasized in my recent Galton Lecture. Such a policy will not be easy to execute. However, I confidently look forward to a time when eugenic improvement will become one of the major aims of mankind.

Education is another subject of basic concern for human evolution, for it transmits and can transform the tradition in and by which we live. There are many disputes about education, but no dispute that it needs radical improvement if it is to do its job successfully in man’s rapidly changing life.

In the first place, education must aim to give an overall picture of the world we have to live in and of ourselves who have to live in it, instead of dishing up a curriculum in a series of separate “‘subjects’’. It can sketch in the broad outlines of such a picture at a very early age, provided that a general approach is used from the outset; and it is quite possible to give a coherent picture and some real understanding by the age of 15 or 16, provided that no attempt is made to present children with a premature doctrinal synthesis and that the curriculum is properly planned so that subjects (or as I would prefer to say, fields of study) are not overburdened with details, do not compete, but reinforce each other in a total pattern.

In such an integrated curriculum, the evolutionary-historical idea could provide a central core and the ecological idea could cover the branching interrelation of subjects, while the idea of science, art, religion and literature as psychosocial organs would bring the sciences and the humanities into partnership. Such a curriculum would go a long way, not only towards bridging the gap between C. P. Snow’s two cultures, but also towards making the process of learning much more interesting and enjoyable. I remember Bertrand Russell once exclaiming “‘Isn’t it nice to know things!”’: our educational system ought to ensure that the average boy and girl can echo this sentiment.

Of course education must also equip people with specialized knowledge and specialized skills, but we must beware both of excessive and of premature specialization.

In addition to a curriculum of subjects, we need something quite new—a properly thought-out curriculum of experience: discovery through projects and travel, through group studies and adventure, through participation in activities felt to be worth while. In such ways, education could provide for greater fulfilment as well as for better learning.

In particular, education in the next phase should pay a great deal of attention to non-verbal education of all sorts. It should help children to explore the possibilities of their own bodies, of perception, of imagination, of creative activity, of the enjoyment of beauty and art. Though art in the broad sense is one of the major functions of man, the arts are lamentably neglected in our educational system, especially in its higher reaches.

Man is the most variable of all organisms, and the new education must take full account of this basic fact. Human variety is a source of strength to society, and we must encourage it and not try to impose uniformity. The educational system should take Roger Williams’ dictum Free but Unequal as its motto, and make Varied Excellence its aim.

At the moment we are encouraging verbalizers and discouraging visualizers, and also encouraging quick and docile learning and discouraging imagination and creativity. We need an Education Council to initiate research into this and every other aspect of the educational process.

One fundamental aim of education should be to help children to develop an integrated personality. For this to be successful, the educational profession will have to take full account of modern psychology and psychiatry, and to do a great deal of research on the best methods of enabling children to by-pass or transcend conflict and to arrive at a better integration of their inner selves.

Education should also help to transform cultural tradition. It can do this if the basic idea-system which it puts before growing minds is an evolutionary one, in which the ideas of possible improvement and the vast extent of unrealized possibility are implicitly and explicitly stressed. If it provides boys and girls with opportunities of fulfilment during their school career, this will make them protagonists of a real fulfilment society in the future. In such ways, education could become an efficient agency of further human evolution.

I would have liked to say something about the situation in other organs of evolving man—about art as simultaneously creating and interpreting complexity and variety in ways impossible to logic or discursive exposition; about religion as a psychosocial organ relating man in some significant way with the powers and forces that move him from within and batter on him from without, an agency for expressing, affirming, and struggling with his destiny in mingled awe and adoration. But I have neither the competence or the space.

Let me summarize my theme. First, we biologists have to think of the future of man in the unfamiliar terms of psychosocial or cultural evolution.

Looking back, we see that evolving man has lurched from one crisis to another. Great empires have collapsed, whole civilizations have been violently destroyed; thought has been muzzled, common people cruelly exploited, habitats ruined. One dominant phase of psychosocial evolution after another has reached a limit and has had to crumble and be remodelled or replaced if human advance was to continue. Yet in the long term there has been advance, and new advance has always sprung from new ideas, new knowledge and its applications.

The present phase of the process is rapidly becoming selflimiting and self-defeating. If we fail to control our economic system, we over-exploit our resources. If we fail to prevent atomic war, we destroy civilization. If we fail to control our population, we destroy our habitat and our culture. However, our increasing knowledge is indicating how we might remodel our psychosocial organization and escape from the apparent impasse.

The new and central factor in the present situation is that the evolutionary process, in the person of mankind, has for the first time become conscious of itself. We are realizing that we need a global evolutionary policy, to which we shall have to adjust our economic and social and national policies.

To succeed in this we need to reorganize our science—to switch the various branches of science out of their separate channels, and bring them together in a co-operative effort. In particular, we must switch more and more of our scientific efforts from the exploration of outer space to that of inner space—the realm of our own minds, and the psychometabolic processes at work in it. It is here that the greatest discoveries will be made, here that the largest and most fruitful territories await our occupancy. All branches of science and learning, from biophysics to social anthropology, from psychiatry to aesthetics, can join in this great venture of exploration.

We should set about planning a Fulfilment Society, rather than a Welfare Society or an Efficiency Society or a Power Society. Greater fulfilment can only come about by the realization of more of our potentialities. Once people grasp what a small fraction of humanity’s potentialities are actually being realized, and what vast new possibilities are waiting to be elicited, we shall have a new and powerful motive to activate our future.

Our knowledge of the evolutionary past makes it clear that any new psychosocial system should be open-ended, not liable to become self-limiting. Like science itself, human evolution must become a self-correcting cybernetic process.

Our present civilization is becoming dysgenic. To reverse this grave trend, we must use our genetical knowledge to the full, and develop new techniques of human reproduction, such as oral contraception and multiple insemination by deep-frozen sperm from desired donors. Eventually, the prospect of radical eugenic improvement could become one of the mainsprings of man’s evolutionary advance.

Meanwhile, since evolutionary advance depends on knowledge, we must try to secure the widest possible dissemination of modern knowledge and ideas about our evolutionary role and the possibilities of fulfilment, must raise the level of education in all sections of all nations, and must remodel our educational systems so that they can promote transformation as well as transmit tradition.

To me, it is an exciting fact that man, after he appeared to have been dethroned from his supremacy, demoted from his central position in the universe to the status of an insignificant inhabitant of a small outlying planet of one among millions of stars, has now become reinstated in a key position, one of the rare spearheads or torchbearers, or trustees—choose your metaphor according to taste !—of advance in the cosmic process of evolution.

The present is a challenging moment, when for the first time we can see ourselves in the long perspective of that extraordinary process, can get a better view of its operation and direction, and can bring all our resources of knowledge and will to bear on the dual task of avoiding immediate disaster and realizing new possibilities in the long future. In this dual task, only scientific method and a massive deployment of scientific manpower can prevent disaster and ensure evolutionary improvement.