Essays of a Humanist [antikvár]

PREFACE| l 'I':':All my life I have been interested in evolution and its manifestations. Even at school I became a convinced adher-IY ,ent of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and||i 'remained a firm Darwinian all through the curious phase of anti-Darwinian prejudice which beclouded the minds of many avant-garde biologists for the first three decades of the present century.KWhile still a young lecturer at Oxford I became convincedjof the necessity of extending the general theory of evolution/to cover the manifestations and processes of human nature as well as those of nature in the customary sense, but at the same time of the folly and indeed danger of simply extra-ipolating biological principles into the human sphere. Thusi'!in some public lectures which I gave in 1913 while Professor of Biology at the Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Texas, I formulated the concept of a critical point between the biological and the human or psychosocial phase of evolution, a threshold whose crossing involved a radical change in the methods and the results of the process.Since then much of my energy has been devoted to a further working out of this idea and its consequences, and to an attempt to clarify the workings of evolution as a process, both in its biological and its human phase. Thus the most important chapter in my first book of essays, Essays of a Biologist, forty years ago, was devoted to the idea of Progress, in nature and in man.Out of all this, there gradually emerged what I believe to be a reasonably true, reasonably comprehensive, and reasonably coherent framework or system of ideas, which I call Evolutionary Humanism. And it is to the exposition and more detailed development of this idea-system that this present volume is mainly devoted. Beginning with purely biological evolution, it passes through ethology and the evolution of mind to the operations of the psychosocial