Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/82

76 the sociologist is, in the matter of selection, more inclusive, and more exhaustive of selective possibilities, than that of the biologist.

In our fourfold classification we have left out the term "natural selection." For its narrower, specific meaning "lethal selection" is decidedly preferable. Might not the older phrase be used as the generic name for all the forms of selection? Usage seems to favor this. "Selection," without a qualifying adjective, is logically the generic term, but is not yet so established as to be unquestionable. Natural selection is therefore convenient as a make-shift or substitute general term. It is familiar, and all the forms of selection do occur in nature. So, despite the implication of Darwin's practise in relation to sexual selection, natural selection might be used roughly for all four classes, though with a saving clause against including such a thing as purposive breeder's selection.

In the attempt to apply selection to man, clearness of conception has often been lost. Two sorts of mistakes have been made. The complexity of life in civilized society, as compared with the simplicity of nature's conditions, has invited, on the one hand, to extensions of meaning, by which processes have been described as natural selection which are not selection at all. In particular, it has been supposed that segregation by economic or social success is selection. It is rather selective dissociation. This is an important preliminary to selection, but the incidence of the latter may as well be unfavorable as favorable to the survival of those who rise in the social scale.

There are, on the other hand, sociologists who deny that natural selection, meaning by that lethal selection, is of much significance for man. Such are likely to develop and emphasize contrasts between natural selection and what they chose to call "social selection." This is a conception for which the writer finds little use. Social selection should mean selection by society, and since society, unlike "nature," is to some degree conscious and purposive, social selection should mean more or less conscious selection by society. Whatever selection there is of this sort may still be brought under one of our four forms. But there are more, and more important, non-teleological sorts of selection resulting from characteristically social processes. And such phenomena of selection in society are what those who talk of social selection have chiefly in mind. These are provided for in our classification, though in distinguishing types use has been made rather of the method of the selection. To attempt to distinguish forms of selection according to the varieties of selective conditions would give an almost endless list, and the differences would not be of explanatory or scientific importance. We may speak of military or religious or industrial selection if we will, but these are descriptive terms rather than logical categories. This fact has not been perceived by those sociologists who,