Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/90

80 men and to the anthropoid apes." But he observes that u although perhaps nowhere distinctly formulated, his (Mr. Darwin's) whole argument tends to the conclusion that man's entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same manner and by the action of the same general laws as his physical structure has been derived." This conclusion Mr. Wallace considers to be "not supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts."

I will not endeavor to reproduce the whole of Mr. Wallace's argument on this subject, but will present what appears to me to be the pith of it; and I do this with the greater satisfaction, because what is here advanced seems to harmonize with what I have already written in criticising the phrase survival of the fittest.

Let us confine ourselves, for simplicity's sake, to one human faculty, namely, the mathematical. The problem is, how to produce a mathematician by the process of natural selection. The reader must bear in mind clearly what the theory of natural selection is, as already expounded. It is the survival in the struggle for life of those individuals which possess variations from their fellows favorable to their preservation. In order, therefore, that the mathematical faculty should be evolved by the process of natural selection, it is necessary to suppose that those individuals, which have an advantage in the possession of rudimentary mathematical faculties somewhat in excess of their fellows, should be the survivors in the struggle for life. The mere possession of this rudimentary advantage must be an aid toward life preservation. This in itself is hard to understand; but it becomes harder still when we bear in mind the rareness of the mathematical gift. In our own time it would be perhaps an overestimate to say that the mathematical faculty existed in any marked degree in one per cent of the population; assume such a proportion to have generally held in human history, then it would be necessary to suppose that these rare specimens of rudimentary mathematical ability had some very decided advantage in the struggle for life: but what ground is there for such a supposition? Grant that ten men in a tribe of a thousand had discovered how to count upon their fingers, or suppose them to have discovered some elementary geometrical theorem, how would this help them when a neighboring tribe attacked them, or when famine and pestilence were abundant? It is difficult or impossible to say.

And the same argument would seem to apply to other human faculties, music and all forms of art, writing, even speech. Consider speech for a moment as the most universal and most