Prolongation of Human Infancy

Prolongation of Human Infancy.—-Nevertheless, as Professor Butler has recently pointed out, the doctrine of the prolongation of human infancy, which Professor John Fiske has so ably shown to be part of the theory of evolution, was anticipated by Anaximander of Miletus, who flourished about 565 b.c. Professor Butler’s discovery, however, was itself anticipated by Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy (95, p. 74) by a couple of years. Burnet, after quoting the Theophrastean account of the sp...

 We are Ultimately Responsible for Our Fate

Thus it is that (to ensure feeding and breeding), "Nature" during the aeons of experimentation which we call "Evolution" has developed a variety of fixed preservative instincts, traits, and characteristics in the animal world. From the animal world, we as animals have inherited such of these instincts, traits, and characteristics as were necessary or most favorable to Man's survival and present dominance. "Gifts": Peculiarly Human. In addition to these, man lias acquired, attained, or bee...

 Members of a Species Work Together

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense—not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest devel...

 Differences Between Humans and Apes

It is well-known that both rude and civilized peoples are capable of showing unspeakable, and as it is erroneously termed, inhuman cruelty towards each other. These acts of cruelty, murder and rapine are often the result of the inexorable logic of national characteristics, and are unhappily truly human, since nothing like them can be traced in the animal world. It would, for instance, be a grave mistake to compare a tiger with the bloodthirsty exectioner of the Reign of Terror, since the form...

 The Argument Against Man Being a Social Animal

From the time of Aristotle it had been said that man is a social animal: that human beings naturally form communities. I couldn't accept it. The whole of history and pre-history is against it. The two dreadful world wars we have recently been through, and the gearing of our entire economy today for defensive war belie it. Man's loathsome cruelty to man is his most outstanding characteristic; it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous and cannibalistic origin. Robert Hartmann pointed ou...