Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
Abbott Laboratories, the world's biggest cyclamate producer, was quick to agree. At a press conference last week, an Abbott official declared that "cyclamate is safe for human consumption as presently used in the diet." Finch, too, had his doubts about the chick tests. "We ought to have more than two species before we indict an agent," he chided. "We can push too hard, too fast, and make statements that may or may not be true and create all kinds of problems...