Heredity and Individual Growth

Just as it has been the habit of the Calvinist to accept the Biblical miracles while insisting that the age of miracles has ceased, so it has been the habit of our era to start from evolutionary principles and yet to regard man, just as he is, as the fine fulfillment of a cosmic process, the apex of destiny. The self-containedness and the value of personality are such evident realities that the incompleteness, the indeterminateness, the becomingness of personality have been almost ignored. The potentialities from which personality springs change with each generation.

For at least three types of evolutionary process are going on today. First there are endless recombinations of germinal tendencies through crossings, the disappearance of old types, the creation of new ones. It is easy for the biologist to watch this process in large-scale racial mixture and in the mixture of contrasting stocks within a race. It is only here and there, as in studies of homogamy (the tendency of like to mate with like), that the psychologist has taken hold of the problem. If individual response, individual organization, depend in any degree upon the stuff one is made of, the shuffling and recombination of genes entail the same biological necessity for new chemical and neural results as for new results in skin or bone; new gene groupings mean new personality potentialities.

Second, the differential birth rates are already yielding striking data on selective factors. We have to do not only with reshufflings but with shufflings out and shufflings in, the weakening or disappearance of some strains and the strengthening of others, in accordance both with the ancient laws of survival and with the more salient modern laws of struggle for standards of living, social ascendancy, political power. Such results are almost infinitely complex, and the degree of their significance is necessarily a matter of inference from the biology of the individual rather than a matter of laboratory demonstration. The tragedy of the situation lies not in the hopelessness of the problem but in the vapid propaganda of the racialists, who have proceeded (with no genuine evidence) to identify the problems of human biological individuality with the problems of national or racial ascendancy. This, in an era of progress in the cultural sciences, has resulted in a general disgust, on the part of psychologists, with the biological approaches to individuality; the individual baby has been thrown out with the racialist bath.

Third, the cultural forces themselves redefine the significance of biological traits. The same biological dispositions that result in rage, courage, or persistence at a level of hunting or individual or group combat may, in an industrial society, result in indiscriminate savagery or the butting of one's head against the impersonal wall of a frustrating social institution. The consequence is that the biological selection goes on in different terms today from those in which the traits were originally developed, with the probable result that different kinds of men are tending to appear in different subcultural areas, in different social classes. It is an axiom of the stockbreeder that one generation gives only a starter, an intimation; but in a hundred years the domestic strains of swine, cattle, and poultry have been enormously altered, rendered stronger, hardier, more resistant to disease, different strains being developed for different requirements. Tryon needed only a few generations to get non-overlapping "bright" and "dull" strains of rats (in a maze problem) through inbreeding; Hall needed only a few to get well-defined bold and timid rats.

As always, of course, it is the individual that is selected and bred with another selected individual. But with human genetics we have scarcely made a beginning; we are still forced to use animal analogies. A humanity saddled with the most chauvinistic conceptions of racial or national superiority and a humanity suffering from the conviction that cultural situations may indiscriminately make anything out of any human material have, between them, lost the significance of individual protoplasm. When the individual appears he may be obeyed, believed, worshiped; gut it would be sacrilege to inquire as to his origin.

In the meantime, for our own infinitesimal project this situation has a clear result: since most of the inquiries about the facts of personality have been made in terms of the learning process, we must, whenever we emphasize established principles, place emphasis upon cultural dynamics. But wherever we have biological information we shall use it, and in using information from the social sciences we shall try to relate the data to the biological individuality of the persons involved. For just as there is no biological process which is today. completely independent of the social conditions of life, so there is no social science process except in and between the individual tissues of persons. Human evolution, then, as it goes on, yielding new biotypes, new personal potentialities, not only reflects but in subtle and obscure fashion plays a part in guiding the more dramatic and obvious changes in social forms.

Civilization could be sublime in the manner of Assyrian art, gentle in the manner of kittens' play, but culture would express feline rather than simian needs. What, for example, shall we say about the right of free speech? Watch the simians in the field, forest, or zoo, as they chatter. For the great cats, the right of free speech would yield to the right of personal combat. to this "simian world," chatter is so important that we assemble in vast buildings the collections of canned or bottled chatter which the ages have accumulated. We are speaking now, of course, of very raw impulse. Mankind puts an incredible amount of effort into shaping this mass of impulse into integrated and symbolic activities adapted to fantastically complicated social requirements. Everyone born into this world, however, begins with a set of tissues which goes back far beyond the ice age in their primordial demands, their basic insistences, their raw impressions as to what life is about. To forget the stuff of which man the organism is built may facilitate the construction of ideal patterns --in both senses of the term--but adjustment to these patterns may involve tensions or, often enough, biological contradictions.

This does not in any sense mean that society needs to be more apish, more feral than it is. Rather, the argument is that the highest of which man has dreamed is itself ultimately an expression of the kind of tissues of which he is made up. Indeed, we should go much further. We shall try to show in later chapters that organized society has overlooked much of the gentleness, tenderness, sensitivity, and sympathy which are actually the birthright of simian stock. But our chief concern here is to make sure that attention is given to humankind as a species; for whatever we shall have to say about individuality, the traits which enter into it are derivatives of human biology and continuing human evolution.