Ethology: History and the Genes

Man is at once the product and the prisoner of his genes. Civilizations flourish and decay, like dinosaurs, in obedience to irreversible genetic decrees. All the marvelous fruits of man’s distinctive intelligence, of his ascent from the apes, owe their conception not to reason but to the unreasoning mandates of heredity. The human evolutionary course is determined by the microscopic chromosomes that constitute the only true inheritance passed from one generation to the next.

These provocative opinions appear in The Evolution of Man and Society (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London), the latest book by Cyril Dean Darlington, 65, a British geneticist, Fellow of the Royal Society and Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford. None of these academic credentials describe Darlington’s true vocation. He is an intellectual maverick, dedicated to setting the scientific Establishment on its ear. His new book is the culmination of the author’s long assault on the complacent conviction, still defended by many social scientists, that man represents a kind of dead end on the evolutionary trail: a resplendent terminal species that, if not perfect, is at least complete.

Cultural Evolution. This position rests on the argument that, some 25,000 to 100,000 years ago, modern man, Homo sapiens, was developed by biological evolution. Since then, goes the theory, cultural evolution has taken over.

The opposite side of the argument is that culture itself is genetic—that is, hereditary. “What I am trying to say,” explains the author, “is that what people call social behavior always has a biological basis. The character of individuals, families, groups, classes, nations —right underneath these things are the biological foundations.” Biological evolution has not been replaced by cultural evolution; it is actually responsible for it.

Darlington states, for instance, that the incest taboo, which is not only common to all human societies but is regarded as a moral decision to avoid the hazards of inbreeding, is, in fact, instinctive. Just as evolution forbids self-pollination to the hermaphrodite flower, so evolution prohibits incest in man. “In a stable world,” he writes, “[inbreeding] allows, it even guarantees, success. But in a changing world it brings disaster. For the inbred race in plants, animals or men is uniform and predictable like a variety of potato. Faced with new situations, new environments, it is quickly displaced in competition with the adaptable out-breeding races or species.”

In developing this point, Darlington traces the fall of past dynasties and kingdoms. They vanished, he argues, for fundamentally the same reason: once a ruling class fixed itself in power, it sought to conserve that power by inbreeding—by denying the infusion of new genetic patterns that might have refreshed the stock. It was this habit, says Darlington, that expedited the decline of the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies and the Caesars.

“Every invention in the course of history,” Darlington says, “from the first right down to the present-day computer, has required a mental effort to exploit it. It has therefore exerted a selective pressure against the less intelligent. This pressure has been responsible for the evolutionary improvement of the human species throughout time.” Indeed, evolutionary chance rather than human design accounts, in Darlington’s view, for the entire spectrum of human intellectual progress. One example he gives is the celibacy of Roman Catholicism, a medieval practice. By preventing the inbreeding that this ruling class might otherwise have practiced, it compelled the steady recruitment of hybrids into the church, in a diversity as wide and invigorating as medieval society itself.

Darlington supplies his own definition of social class as “A group of people who breed together because they work together and work together because they breed together.” With this definition in hand, he sorts peoples, nations, cities and even craftsmen into indigenous tribes. “Nothing on earth will make them come to terms with the general body of society,” he writes of the Cosa Nostra, whom he classifies as hereditary criminals. “They are a race apart.”

Spurious Scale. Darlington’s colleagues will certainly quarrel with his view of history, as he himself cheerfully admits. “I represent an extreme minority view,” he says. “I’m trying to overcome the idea that heredity doesn’t matter, that all behavior is social, that it’s the result of education—the whole general humbug.” Like controversial Psychologist Arthur Jensen (TIME, April 11), he is astonished at the willingness of educators to assume that all their students arrive in class with approximately equal intellectual endowments. Any test of this, in his opinion, invariably demolishes the assumption. “Some people are teachable and others are not, and the difference is genetic.”

In an earlier book, Genetics and Man, published in 1964, Darlington argued that races differ in every imaginable way, and that these differences do not form some spurious scale of merit: they simply and eloquently assert evolution’s demand that the species come in as many styles, shapes, personalities and characters as possible, so that the survival of the fittest, in an unpredictable environment, will never be in doubt.

The Evolution of Man and Society carries this argument to the next logical conclusion. “We have now learned that intelligence is of many kinds,” Darlington writes. “It has to be measured not on one scale but on many.” It is in such diversity, in fact, that he places the only hope for human survival—a diversity not just among societies but among the men who compose them.

“Individuals owe their individuality to genetic recombination,” he writes, “and this individuality is continually reacting with changing conditions to produce effects which, though unexpected, are often far-reaching.” Inbreeding, in contrast, forbids the range of human individuality that can often affect human destiny: “It is impossible to suppose that Alexander’s decision to turn east, Columbus’ decision to turn west, and Caesar’s decision to turn north, all due to the characters of these three men, are not today continuing to have their effects, albeit unintended effects. They did not alter the rate of change in history; they altered the course of history.”