"THE FACTS OF LIFE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 785, 6 August 1954, Page 5

"THE FACTS OF LIFE"

Sir,-Iin his pretace to ine facts of Life (reviewed in your issue of June 18), C. D. Darlington expresses the hope that his readers may find some parts of the book entertaining. Some parts of it certainly are, though these are probably not the ones he had in mind. The scientific part of the book is interesting enough, though Darlington, like most geneticists, cannot see the organism for the genes, But the author is mainly preoccupied with questions of ethics and politics. He wants us to jettison a moral code that is two thousand years old, and therefore hopelessly out of date, and allow humanity to be scientifically controlled in accordance with the maxims of humanitarian biologists. He is not very explicit on the point, but he obviously wants people like himself to be appointed as studmasters to the human race. If the’ biologists ever did control: our destinies in the manner advocated by Darlington, the outlook would indeed be grim. It suffices to recall the roaring time they had in Belsen and Buchenwald, and Darlington’s own description of the happiness of individual human beings as "an ephemeral detail." In the chapters in which Darlington attempts to deal a death blow to such relics of folklore and medieval ignorance as belief in free-will and immortality, his philosophical equipment is so negligible that one could liken him to a

a big game hunter on safari with a peashooter or a man setting out to mill timber with a knife and fork.

G.H.

D.

(Palmerston North).