The Unpopular Review (Volume 19-20)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1918. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... WAR FOR EVOLUTION'S SAKE IN its last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting and degrading methods of its conduct bear the made in Germany stamp, so does the NeoDarwinian conception of evolution and its method bear the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to the winner, nothing to the loser. In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning, wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth. Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and the all-mighty and all-sufficient factor is natural se...