_Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process_
But as we look still further into the matter, our mood is changed once
more. We find that this hideous hatred and strife, this wholesale famine
and death, furnish the indispensable conditions for the evolution of
higher and higher types of life. Nay more, but for the pitiless
destruction of all individuals that fall short of a certain degree of
fitness to the circumstances of life into which they are born, the type
would inevitably degenerate, the life would become lower and meaner in
kind. Increase in richness, variety, complexity of life is gained only
by the selection of variations above or beyond a certain mean, and the
prompt execution of a death sentence upon all the rest. The principle of
natural selection is in one respect intensely Calvinistic; it elects
the one and damns the ninety and nine. In these processes of Nature
there is nothing that savours of communistic equality; but "to him that
hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even
that which he hath." Through this selection of a favoured few, a higher
type of life--or at all events a type in which there is more life--is
attained in many cases, but not always. Evolution and progress are not
synonymous terms. The survival of the fittest is not always a survival
of the best or of the most highly organized. The environment is
sometimes such that increase of fitness means degeneration of type, and
the animal and vegetable worlds show many instances of degeneration. One
brilliant instance is that which has preserved the clue to the remote
ancestry of the vertebrate type. The molluscoid ascidian, rooted
polyp-like on the sea beach in shallow water, has an embryonic history
which shows that its ancestors had once seen better days, when they
darted to and fro, fishlike, through the waves, with the prophecy of a
vertebrate skeleton within them. This is a case of marked degeneration.
More often survival of the fittest simply preserves the type unchanged
through long periods of time. But now and then under favourable
circumstances it raises the type. At all events, whenever the type is
raised, it is through survival of the fittest, implying destruction of
all save the fittest.
This last statement is probably true of all plants and of all animals
except that as applied to the human race it needs some transcendently
important qualifications which students of evolution are very apt to
neglect. I shall by and by point out these qualifications. At present we
may note that the development of civilization, on its political side,
has been a stupendous struggle for life, wherein the possession of
certain physical and mental attributes has enabled some tribes or
nations to prevail over others, and to subject or exterminate them. On
its industrial side the struggle has been no less fierce; the evolution
of higher efficiency through merciless competition is a matter of common
knowledge. Alike in the occupations of war and in those of peace,
superior capacity has thriven upon victories in which small heed has
been paid to the wishes or the welfare of the vanquished. In human
history perhaps no relation has been more persistently repeated than
that of the hawk and the wren. The aggression has usually been defended
as in the interests of higher civilization, and in the majority of cases
the defence has been sustained by the facts. It has indeed very commonly
been true that the survival of the strongest is the survival of the
fittest.
Such considerations affect our mood toward Nature in a way that is
somewhat bewildering. On the one hand, as we recognize in the universal
strife and slaughter a stern discipline through which the standard of
animate existence is raised and the life of creatures variously
enriched, we become to some extent reconciled to the facts. Assuming,
as we all do, that the attainment of higher life is in itself desirable,
our minds cannot remain utterly inhospitable towards things, however
odious in themselves, that help toward the desirable end. Since we
cannot rid the world of them, we acquiesce in their existence as part of
the machinery of God's providence, the intricacies of which our finite
minds cannot hope to unravel. On the other hand, a thought is likely to
arise which in days gone by we should have striven to suppress as too
impious for utterance; but it is wiser to let such thoughts find full
expression, for only thus can we be sure of understanding the kind of
problem we are trying to solve. Is not, then, this method of Nature,
which achieves progress only through misery and death, an exceedingly
brutal and clumsy method? Life, one would think, must be dear to the
everlasting Giver of life, yet how cheap it seems to be held in the
general scheme of things! In order that some race of moths may attain a
certain fantastic contour and marking of their wings, untold thousands
of moths are doomed to perish prematurely. Instead of making the
desirable object once for all, the method of Nature is to make something
else and reject it, and so on through countless ages, till by slow
approximations the creative thought is realized. Nature is often called
thrifty, yet could anything be more prodigal or more cynical than the
waste of individual lives? Does it not remind one of Charles Lamb's
famous story of the Chinaman whose house accidentally burned down and
roasted a pig, whereupon the dainty meat was tasted and its fame spread
abroad until epicures all over China were to be seen carrying home pigs
and forthwith setting fire to their houses? We need but add that the
custom thus established lasted for centuries, during which every dinner
of pig involved the sacrifice of a homestead, and we seem to have a
close parody upon the wastefulness of Nature, or of what is otherwise
called in these days the Cosmic Process. Upon such a view as this the
Cosmic Process appears in a high degree unintelligent, not to say
immoral.
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