THE SUNDAY STAR Washington DC January 10,1971
Man – Is He Just a Collection of Hereditary Characteristics?
By CARROLL QUIGLEY
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND SOCIETY. By C D Darlington, Simon and Schuster, 753
pages, $12.96
This book is an embarrassment, not, apparently to its author, but certainly to
any reviewer. The author is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Sherardian Professor
of Botany and Regius Professor of Biology at Oxford University, Director of the
Innes Horticultural Institution, and Keeper, of the Botanical Gardens at Oxford.
He is regarded as a specialist in the genetics of cultivated plants.
The book is a mass of factual errors, omissions, deficient thinking, and
careless 'verbal expression. Part I, with three Chapters, is concerned with
human evolution, while the remaining 26 chapters largely ignore the important
subject of the evolution of human society, offering instead, a third-rate
history textbook.
It is generally agreed today that the evolution of man has been a process,
covering over 1.5 million years, by which a primate which was almost
totally dependent for its survival on inherited characteristics, was changed
into a primate whose survival is today almost totally dependent on learned
behavior. There is no similar agreement on the nature of social evolution, but
many would feel that the subject should cover the process by which human social
groupings changed from cooperative bands to kinship groups, culminating in large
tribes, then went on to larger and more powerful organizations based on religion
(in two distinct stages, which we might call Archaic Kingships and Providential
Imperial Monarchies), which were succeeded, after
several abortive efforts, by secular states (a period also capable of division
into stages such as feudal monarchies, dynastic monarchies, national states,
and, today, ideological blocs. I would be prepared to accept any evolutionary
stages Darlington might suggest, on their merits. However, he suggests none,
because he never discusses the subject. He also omits almost all discussion of
human evolution.
The Hybrid Theory
This book does not deal with either of the subjects suggested in the title
because Darlington does not believe that man or society evolved in the sense
that most people would use that expression. All he believes happened is that men
moved around more and more and, as a result, got more and more hybridized. To
him
men, like hybrid plants, are simply collections of genes, the units of
hereditary characteristics, just as they were millions of years ago. Each
individual has his own distinctive gene assortment, which is planted, not in
soil, but in his particular social environment. If that social context, like sun
for a plant, is favorable, he will develop the characteristics he inherited from
his ancestors. But if the social environment is not of the kind necessary for
his gene assortment, like a plant in poor soil, he will be distorted and
crippled in his growth. Darlington is no more interested in the evolution of
society than he, as a grower of plants, is concerned with the geological
evolution of the soil into which he puts his seed. As for man, Darlington has no
conception of the evolutionary process by which man obtained a less and less
fixed and an increasingly plastic potentiality capable of learning a wider and
wider range of behavioral patterns depending on the environment he grows in.
That would mean men are free; to Darlington they are not free at all, but either
develop in the way their hereditary genes indicate or are unable to do so and
are distorted.
Darlington carries his belief in inherited characteristics to an extreme degree,
believing that all man's activities are inherited, including language, the tools
he uses, and all social organizations. When I was living in Oxford in 1961, I
heard him argue for an hour and a half that all human traits were inherited. He
told me that "a pure Negro" whose family had lived in America for centuries
still inherits the ability to speak the Bantu languages of Africa and can learn
to speak English only with great difficulty, and “never correctly." I told him
that the most beautiful English I ever heard spoken was by a Negro poet,
Langston Hughes. Some years ago, the acting French Ambassador here told me that
the most eloquent speakers of French were Negro and that the two best poets in
French were Senegalese. Darlington waved such objections aside. I left his
laboratory in 1961 without understanding his position; now, from reading his
book, I understand it, but I find it less convincing than ever.
Position on Language
His position on language is stated here (pp. 35-37). But he goes much further:
even use of tools is inherited. Thus, among the ancient Jews, the Tribe of Judah
used spear and shield, while the Tribe of Benjamin used bow and slings because
these tribes were of different "racial origins" (p. 174, n. 3). Yet Darlington
is not really a racist, even though he believes in "pure races," for, like any
expert on cultivated plants, he believes in hybridization and is all for it.
Until this is achieved for all men, he wants what he calls "stratified
societies" where persons with different inherited talents can find specialized
activities to use these, as, he says, the Mafia were able "to grasp the
opportunities of the modern world. . . . They came to America" (p. 610).
Throughout this book, the word "hybridization" is used instead of
"evolution." The volume consists largely of unproved assertions that what
happened in the past was the result of mixtures of genes. Many of these
statements are demonstrably untrue, irrelevant; or outrageous. These changes in
gene pools resulted from man's Increased hybridization, which came from his
increased moving about, caused by the climatic changes of the last million
years, according to Darlington. As a result of these changes and hybridization,
man constantly finds himself in situations where his inherited characteristics
do not fit his environmental context and he is called upon to live in situations
which distort his "instinctive" abilities.
Darlington's obsession with hybridization as the key to all past events makes it
unnecessary for him to examine what happened in the past or why it happened
because he already knows. As a result, this book is filled with errors. There is
no space to list them but I can give a few: he speaks of the history of
"alphabets" (p. 101), when he means the history of writing, since he lists as
the first example "Sumerian ideographs," which are a thousand or more years
before the first alphabet; he says that Sumerian was a "tonal" language, which
it was not (p. 100); he uses "Aryan" when he means "Indo-European" and thus
speaks of "Aryan invaders" of Italy in the Bronze Age (p. 235); he says
"monkey", when he means "primate" (p. 21) and lists the evolutionary changes of
the lemurs as changes in "monkeys."
Students of man and societies today are very careful to use different terms for
race, language, customs, and chronological periods; Darlington uses the same
word for all of them, without discrimination, because to him they are all gene
pools. Thus he speaks of paleolithic men, paleolithic languages, paleolithic
customs, paleolithic times, and, even "paleolithic plants" (p. 75). All hunters
of today are "paleolithic," and any man, like Lenin, who likes to hunt is "paleolithic"
(p. 558). Be believes that the lower classes of our society are made up of
paleolithic people and "nothing but hybridization will change such hunters (p.
30). Their customs (he calls them "habits") are genetic and "can be described
most exactly in terms of the genetics of colour blindness" (p. 29).
Accordingly, if Darlington wants to know what the hunters of 20,000 years ago
were like, he does not have to investigate archaeological works; he can just
look at modern hunters, who, be believes, will be the same because it is the
same combination of genes.
By concentrating on human evolution only in the last million years, when most
human evolution took place between 19 and 1 million years ago, Darlington leaves
out almost all the story (and makes the error greater by calling his few
erroneous comments "human origins"). Thus he has nothing on the shift from
tree-living to terrestrial living, or from forests to grasslands, or upright
posture and bipedalism, or on the development of the hand, loss of hair, changes
in diet and, teeth (except for one erroneous remark on canine teeth), or changes
in emotions, growth of cooperation and mutual dependence, and much else. His
misunderstanding of the process of human evolution is revealed in his reference
to the only physical change he more than mentions. This is the great increase in
the size of the human skull about 700,000 years ago. He says (p. 24), “Woman's
pelvis grew no larger and pregnancy remained at the same length at about 38
weeks." The length of the gestation period, either before or after the increase
in head size is something of which we know nothing, but what Darlington says is
impossible. We believe that as the skull grew larger, any tendency toward
premature birth became an advantage in survival of woman at the cost of
increased infant helplessness and increased adult need for cooperation and
mutual dependence..
Errors in History
The historical portion of this book is filled with errors. I shall restrict my
comments to the few pages concerned with Islam, not that this is worse than
other parts (the pages on ancient Greece are much worse) but simply because the
errors on Islam could have been avoided fancily simply by looking up a few words
in the single volume "Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam" which is available in the
libraries of every major city including Oxford.
On Islam Darlington has 23 errors of fact in seven pages (333-339). Mecca, he
says, had 36 clans; the Ka'ba shrine in that city, in the sixth century, was " a
great stone cube"; Muhammad's revelations were passed on in secret so that a
secret brotherhood was created." When Mecca rejected Muhammad, says Darlington,
"Muhammad with his faithful band took refuge in flight They escaped to the north
to a rival commercial settlement high up on the mountain ridge. It was a place
called Yathrib, with a rich cultured governing class using the Hebrew alphabet
for a Yiddish kind of language."
That last quotation has five errors in it: Muhammad fled with no band, but with
a single companion; they went to a purely agricultural oasis with no commercial
interests, which was on a flat plain so extensive that the view to the south,
according to Buhl, the standard biographer. of Muhammad, "stretched away farther
than the eye can reach." The Jews in the town spoke and wrote the same language
as all other Arabs there and were not distinguishable from them except by
religion. The idea that they spoke anything remotely like a Germanic dialect
such as Yiddish is a fair sign of Darlington's ignorance of languages, a subject
on which he has published a number of scholarly papers, although this book is
full of errors of fact on languages. If Darlington had merely looked up
four words in the "Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam" (Mecca, Medina, Muhammad, and Ka'ba), he would not have made these nine errors: Mecca had about ten clans; in
the sixth century, the Ka'ba was still a wooden enclosure without any roof, and,
when it burned in the early seventh century, was rebuilt, with a roof, with wood
from a ship wrecked in the Red Sea; there was nothing secret about Muhammad's
mission from the beginning, which is why he was called "the Messenger" (which is
the title of Bodley's biography, the one most frequently met with and used in
Oxford): From the first revelation Muhammad saw his mission to warn the people
of Mecca of the Last Judgement, which be believed was probably imminent.
There is no need to labor Darlington's errors on all aspects of the subject of
this book. His conviction that he has the single key, "hybridization," which
will unlock every event of the past, explains the basis of these errors. But it
does not explain why he is a world-famous "scholar," was invited speaker at the
tercentenary of the Royal Society in 1961, and holds two professional chairs at
one of the World's greatest universities.
Carroll Quigley’s “Tragedy & Hope: The World in Our Time” was published by
Macmillan in 1966. He teaches history at Georgetown University.
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