The Nomadic Alternative – Page 14

exclusion of natural selection and altered feeding habits weaken

the stock and disrupt the genetic character of civilized peoples

once they have passed the days of their virile youth. Over soft

conditions favour the growth of undesirable decadent social para-

sites, whose deviate behaviour gives them an unfair advantage

over their fellow men. “These parasites”, wrote Lorenz in 1943,

“can be compared to tumours and their pathology.” It is, I need

hardly add, Lorenz’s opinion that the biologically respectable

must dutifully perform a drastic surgical operation to ensure the

continuity of progress in the hands of the chosen.

But not all efforts to plot the ebb and flow of history in terms

of Mendelian genetics are so malign. Some are hilarious. An Oxford

botanist and expert on chromosomes recently visited similar pastures

of unreason. “The aristocracies of Europe”, wrote Professor C.D.

Darlington in his Evolution of Man and Society, “through inbreeding,

have retained an addiction to the horse, a genetic and adaptive

habit that enabled their ancestors to win wars. But on more

recent battlefields it has carried them … headlong to disaster.”

One is asked to imagine the pleasured response of an infant heir

at his first whiff of the Royal Mews.

Another variant of the myth of progress relates the use of the

manufacturing hand to the intelligent brain. Again this argument

was aired in Plato’s Academy. Anaxagoras attributed man’s superior

intelligence to the use of his hand; for Aristotle the hand was

proof of his superior intelligence. Using evidence of physical

anthropology, the modern version suggests that man distinguishes

himself from other animals by his ability to make tools and trans-

mit their use to following generations. Moreover, some skeletal

remains of early man indicate that the hand capable of holding and

making tools developed its grasping power before the enlargement

of the brain-case. This is to say, human intelligence is a product

of human technology; we should adapt ourselves to the acquisitions

of technology rather than make technology serve us. This theory