Word: darwins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...concept of liberty" by reading the works of Lord Acton and De Tocqueville. Then, in Renaissance literature, they will be concerned with the development of the individual, and later, when they get into the Reformation, with the individual in relation to God. Their biology may begin with Darwin's Origin of Species, their psychology with the writings of Pavlov; their physics will include the works of Von Helmholtz. Even their foreign languages will be involved in the study of ideas-Voltaire in French, Cervantes in Spanish, Dante in Italian...
...Species? Grandson Darwin shakes his grey head over this hope. Birth control, he says, is possible biologically but not sociologically. In accordance with a kind of sociological Gresham's Law,* the people who restrain their birth rate will be supplanted by those who do not. Backward but ambitious races are sure to defy the birth rules and increase deliberately at the cost of their prosperous, birth-restraining neighbors...
...would take drastic action by a strong world government, Darwin says, to limit the earth's population, and no strong world government is likely to last for more than a few centuries. As soon as it weakens even slightly, rebellious races or creeds will use the wombs of their women as weapons of social aggression...
...Darwin's conclusion is that the human race will have all sorts of ups & downs, perhaps even some more temporary Golden Ages. But the philoprogenitive pressure of its sociological molecules will undo it in the end. No matter what science, government and religion try to do about population, humans will increase like fruit flies in a geneticist's breeding bottle. Stability will come only when starvation sets an impassable limit...
There is one distant ray of hope. By Darwin's reckoning, the average animal species continues for only about a million years without major change. After that time the human species, still very young, may have produced a new species. Perhaps the neo-humans will be able to keep their numbers adjusted to their food supply without the help of starvation...