HUMAN EVOLUTION AND LIFE.

Hokitika Guardian, 27 December 1929, Page 6

HUMAN EVOLUTION AND LIFE.

Goldwin Smith once wrote that man, as he grows older, feels more and moire that Hie great fact of life is death. Perhaps we might have agreed with him, had he said that death was one of the greats facts of life. Surely the greatest fact of life is life itself, and nothing else than life. The difference in thought is well illustrated by the following sentences of a well-known anthropologist: “Man has given a vast amount of thought to his- life after death, but only relatively little to his future on this earth. That attitude, however, is undergoing substantial change, due to the teachings of. evolution.” The anthropologist believes that “sfan will slowly become ever.more a helper and in a sense a co-creator in his further evo! :l i-.j n. 1 he actual future changes of m -a can i.,0 foreseen for only a limited time to come. They will effect ln.s stature, skull, and face and some of t'-o i '.torn 1. effectiveness and endurance of the brain and nerves.” In other words, if by selective processes we can breed a rust-resisting wheat, or a cow which will yield more milk than its ancestors, we can also improve the human race as a whole, due to the fact that the human body. the institution of matrimony and tile act of procreation are still regarded as sacrosanct. Nevertheless, geological discoveries are yearly increasing our knowledge and the movement called Eugenics is beginning to educate parents to a sense of responsibility in breeding children.

5Ye most praise man’s indomitable spirit in conquering a hostile world, v,ur globe itself is due to the collision between two stars grazing each other as they passed on their endless circlings; and on this glowing cinder now filmed over we live in a mere parenthesis of Time, on a chalk shelf made by marine insects, and first planted by stray seamews. In this stern environment man came to birth after a long ancestry of shark, carnivore, and ape. He is now, at last, master of bis fate and no longer solely a puppet of chance and circumstance.

The time for infantile wishes for success by magical means is now over and old taboos are vanishing like ghosts at crockcrow. Henceforth, man’s heroic business is to conquer the future by applying tbe science of life so hardly striven for.