_Some of its Effects_
In doing this, natural selection has unlocked a door and let in a new
set of causal agencies. As Homo Alalus grows in intelligence and variety
of experience, his helpless babyhood becomes gradually prolonged, and
passes not into sudden maturity, but into a more or less plastic
intermediate period of youth. Individual experience, as contrasted with
ancestral experience, counts for much more than ever before in shaping
his actions, and thus he begins to become progressive. He can learn many
more new ways of doing things in a hundred thousand years than any other
creature could have done in a much longer time. Thus the rate of
progress is enhanced, the increasing intelligence of Homo Alalus further
lengthens his plastic period of life, and this in turn further
increases his intelligence and emphasizes his individuality. The
evidence is abundant that Homo Alalus, like his simian cousins, was a
gregarious creature, and it is not difficult to see how, with increasing
intelligence, the gestures and grunts used in the horde for signalling
must come to be clothed with added associations of meaning, must
gradually become generalized as signs of conceptions. This invention of
spoken language, the first invention of nascent humanity, remains to
this day its most fruitful invention. Henceforth ancestral experience
could not simply be transmitted through its inheritable impress upon the
nervous system, but its facts and lessons could become external
materials and instruments of education. Then the children of Homo
Alalus, no longer speechless, began to accumulate a fund of tradition,
which in the fulness of time was to bloom forth in history and poetry,
in science and theology. From the outset the acquisition of speech must
greatly have increased the rate of progress, and enhanced the
rudimentary sociality.
With the lengthening of infancy the period of maternal help and
watchfulness must have lengthened in correspondence. Natural selection
must keep those two things nicely balanced, or the species would soon
become extinct. But Homo Alalus had not only a mother, but brethren and
sisters; and when the period of infancy became sufficiently long, there
were a series of Homunculi Alali, the eldest of whom still needed more
or less care while the third and the fourth were arriving upon the
scene. In this way the sentiment of maternity became abiding. The cow
has strong feelings of maternal affection for periods of a few weeks at
a time, but lapses into indifference and probably cannot distinguish her
grown-up calves as sustaining any nearer relation to herself than other
members of the herd. But Femina Alala, with her vastly enlarged
intelligence, is called upon for the exercise of maternal affection
until it becomes a permanent part of her nature. In the same group of
circumstances begins the permanency of the marital relation. The
warrior-hunter grows accustomed to defending the same wife and children
and to helping them in securing food. Cases of what we may term wedlock,
arising in this way, occur sporadically among apes; its thorough
establishment, however, was not achieved until after the genesis of
Humanity had been completed in most other respects. The elaborate
researches of Westermarck have proved that permanent marriage exists
even among savages; it did not prevail, however, until the advanced
stage of culture represented by the Aztecs in aboriginal America and the
Neolithic peoples of ancient Europe. As for strict monogamy, it is a
comparatively late achievement of civilization. What the increased and
multiplied duration of infancy at first accomplished was the
transformation of miscellaneous hordes of Homines Alali into organized
clans recognizing kinship through the mother, as exemplified among
nearly all American Indians when observed by Europeans.
Thus by gradual stages we have passed from four-footed existence into
Human Society, and once more I would emphasize the fact that nowhere do
we find any breach of continuity, but one factor sets another in
operation, which in turn reacts upon the first, and so on in a
marvellously harmonious consensus. Surely if there is anywhere in the
universe a story matchless for its romantic interest, it is the story of
the genesis of Man, now that we are at length beginning to be able to
decipher it. We see that there is a good deal more in it than mere
natural selection. At bottom, indeed, it is all a process of survival of
the fittest, but the secondary agencies we have been considering have
brought us to a point where our conception of the Struggle for Life must
be enlarged. Out of the manifold compounding and recompounding of
primordial clans have come the nations of mankind in various degrees of
civilization, but already in the clan we find the ethical process at
work. The clan has a code of morals well adapted to the conditions amid
which it exists. There is an ethical sentiment in the clan; its members
have duties toward it; it punishes sundry acts even with death, and
rewards or extols sundry other acts. We are, in short, in an ethical
atmosphere, crude and stifling, doubtless, as compared with that of a
modern Christian homestead, but still unquestionably ethical.
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