Rest in Peace to Aaron Swartz beloved friend of the

internet, defender for freedom of speech and information,

May your struggle not be in vain, the earth is 4.5 billion
years, mankind has been around 160,000 yrs and the
average span of an individual is just 70, but the idea of
free universal knowledge can never die.

WHY CIVILIZATIONS
SELF-DESTRUCT
ELMER PENDELL

WHY CIVILIZATIONS SELF-DESTRUCT

ELMER PENDELL
Giant intellects like Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee have
gi\'en us complex and tortuous reasons for the decline of civilizations. Dr. Pendell presents us with a simple one. Civilizations
fall because the less capable slice of the population regularly
outbreeds the more capable. In precivilized times nature weeds
out the unfit and eventually produces a superior variety of men
",hose intelligence and industriousness are channeled into constructing an advanced social order that defeats nature's best-laid
plans by protecting instead of eliminating the unfit. The outcome is that in several generations the protected outnumber the
protectors.
Dr. Pendell scours the annals of history to prove his point,
after beginning his seminal study with a remarkable analysis of
the inborn, polarized egotistic and altruistic drives which are
the biological basis for both the building and unbuilding of
civilizations.
Most illlportantly, Dr. Pendell offers us ways and means to
stop the historic and hitherto unstoppable processes of social entropy. One of his most intriguing-and most controversialremedies is a genetically oriented marriage law to raise the
birthrate of ollr better human specimens and substantially lower
the proliferation rate of the civilization-destroying people who
can neither provide for themselves nor their offspring.
Cover Illustrations: Reconstruction of the Ziggurat of UrNammu and Shulgi at Ur (Third Dynasty, .2200-2100 B.C.) ,
drawing by Claude Abeille after a model by Wooley. The Ziggurat today (photo by Andre Parrott) .

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Why Civilizations
Self-Destruct

Elmer Pendell

HOWARD ALLEN

CAPE CANAVERAL

Contents

Preface
The Individual on Center Stage

Vll

2 The Legacy of Instinct

14

3 The Social Appetite

23

4 Speech: The Tool of Sociality

41

5 Constraints on the Social Appetite

48

6 Death-the Servant of Life

57

7 Evolution in the Ice Ages

73

8 The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

86

9 The Fall of Civilizations

102

10

The Heredity Factor

116

11

The Squandering of Genius

133

12 The Self-Destruct Principle at Work in America 149

13 A Ratchet for Reproduction

158

14 The Author Meets His Critics

172

Index

189

Preface
A pygmy on a giant's shoulders can see the farther of the two.

I make no claim to being a pygmy, but in writing these

pages I have stood on the shoulders of giants of scholarship, first in one and then in another of the many colorful
subdivisions of learning. I had to cover so much territory
because the tragedy of our time is not apparent in partial
or short-term contexts. The folly of our political, social and
economic policies can be clearly seen only if they are evaluated according to their overall results-delayed results as
well as early results, obscured results as well as obvious
results.
Related to the shortsightedness of our policies are our
attitudes toward the structure of society. Hopefully the
reader will realize, as he gets further into the subject, that
social structure is what holds civilization together.
How we as individuals came to be what we are, came to
have such thoughts and abilities as we have, will be emphasized, perhaps overemphasized, in the early chapters of this
book. This is because the ups and downs of civilizations
depend in large part on predictable changes in the abilities
and ideas of individuals.
We must learn a little about ourselves before we can
understand what we have done and are doing to ourselves.
Elmer Pendell

Acknowledgements

To Dr. Alta Millican, Dean of Library Science at Jacksonville State University and her efficient staff.
To Dr. Paul S. Clarkson, Curator of Rare Books and
Special Collections at Clark University.
To Dr. S. Colum Gilfillan, author of The Coldward Course
of Progress, who took time out from his own writings to
criticize my manuscript in detail.
To Dr. Max Rafferty, Dean of the School of Education
of Troy State University.
To William G. Simpson, scholar and friend, for early
constructive criticism.
To Dr. Jacob O. Kamm, member of Ohio Board of Regents, who suggested important improvements.
To Dorothy Boicourt, poet, who prompted helpful
changes.
To The Honorable Bill Nichols, U.S. Representative
from Alabama, for his assistance in obtaining needed
source material.
To the faculty members and staff members of Jacksonville State University whose discussions contributed more
to my thinking than they realized.
To the Census Bureau and to the uncounted scholars
whose writings were building blocks for my own findings.
To Mary Klinefelter, for excellent secretarial work.

Chapter 1

The Individual on Center Stage

The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot wheel and said,
What a dust do I raise.'
Francis Bacon

Everyone has struggled with the question, Who am I? It

has been said that, if we could come up with the answer,
"everything else would fall in place."
Our minds have two phases, which are often in conflict,
though not to the extent of turning us into Dr. J ekylls and
Mr. Hydes. One phase generates motivations of the kind
which look after self and glorify the I. The other generates
social dispositions, such as sympathy and the desire for
approval. To learn about civilizations, we need to understand the social side of mind. But to know the social side
we have to know the ego side too. So we will first focus our
attention on the latter.
Are you-for your purposes-on center stage? Is the world,
as you appraise it, centered on you?
You might ask, how could it be otherwise? You have to
make your value judgments, your comparisons, your appraisals, from your point of view-from your place on the
axle of the chariot wheel.
The seat of your self-importance is your consciousness.
Could life have any meaning to you-to anybody-without
consciousness? To comprehend life and to "know thyself"

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

require that in some measure we understand the meaning

of consciousness. Let's try.
Consciousness, a functioning of brain cells, is an awareness, a receptivity, a state of readiness. We have to be ready
to record experience. If we say we have an inborn tape
recorder, only the word "tape" is a figure of speech. Consciousness not only records experience; it plays back previous expenence.
Other functions of consciousness are comparing, choosing, classifying, evaluating, controlling, deciding, analyzing, discriminating, distinguishing, guiding, managing, organizing, planning, predicting, synthesizing, summarizing
and systematizing. Some of these overlap. Most imply purposive action. Since your consciousness is the organizer of
your mental workshop, if you are not efficient, blame it on
your orgamzer.
Remembering is a crucial part of consciousness, that is,
the process of recalling information from the subconscious.
Before you make up your mind about something, the subconscious may be commanded to check on similar decisions
in the past. More often, you accept conclusions shaped by
your attitudes, and make your present decisions accordingly, at a great saving in time and mental energy.
A derivative function of consciousness is remembering
for its own sake, for the sheer nostalgic fun of it-singing
the old songs, mooning over the pictures in college yearbooks, rehashing the victories and defeats of days gone by.
You are not limited to the satisfactions of the present. Even
if today goes badly, you are able to take pride in the
cumulative successes of the past. Your consciousness is the
safety deposit box of your most treasured moments.
The level of consciousness depends on intelligence. He
lives most who thinks most. The more intelligent you are the
better your consciousness functions. The better your consciousness functions the more intelligent you are.
Our neural systems operate, at least in part, on a form
of electric energy. Consciousness itself seems to run en-

The Individual on Center Stage

tirely on electricity. Sometimes, when calling upon the

brain and nerve cells needed to look up a word in a dictionary, it narrows down and acts like a spotlight. At other
times, it penetrates a problem like a laser beam. Then,
performing as a spotlight again, it may be checking over
the individual's preparations to leave for home in the rain.
In all cases consciousness is organizing, organizing, organizing. Though literary critics speak of a stream of consciousness, its sudden changes of content make the spotlight metaphor more apt. Not until you go to sleep does
the light go out.
Sleep itself deserves some consideration. It is the absence of consciousness-as darkness is the absence oflight.
The young child may resist his nap, considering it an interruption of his existence. He fights to retain consciousness
as one might fight to retain life. It is a bitter struggle-between the hereditary urge to remain conscious, to hang on
to life, and the hereditary urge to let go, and go to sleep.
Consciousness is inherited in the sense that it is an attribute of specialized brain cells. Its efficiency is partly inherited, and so are its tendencies, which differ among individuals. Consciousness is not passive, it does not wait for
outside forces to act upon it. It has an inborn and persistent
searching drive, which often intensifies into curiosity and
less frequently into a desperate urgency, as to the what,
where, why or how of certain facts. This searching drive is
the reason we are restless, dynamic, and often frustrated,
self-starters.
Fantasies may serve, at first, as tentative explanations for
the what, where, why or how. They amount to hypotheses,
which must be tested. But when and if the fantasies are
transformed into convictions, they become a part of the
self-and a challenge to them is a direct challenge to
us.
Some of the work of consciousness is accomplished in
the subconscious. The processing involves classifying and
mulling over the day's experiences. This sorting out, which

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

might be described as a struggle for consistency, also includes dreaming. This struggle for consistency became a
part of both consciousness and the subconscious because
it has survival value. It is a method of deciding what has
and what does not have practical applications for everyday
life.
The analysis of experience takes place in the interpretive
cortex, which is located in the temporal lobes of the brain.
Part of the sorting goes on in the back office (the subconscious) and some of the records never get to the front office
(consciousness).
There is a less accessible mental reference file called "the
unconscious," of which hypnotists and followers of Sigmund Freud have made some use. Some writers make no
distinction between the subsconscious and the unconSCIOUS.

Consciousness came into play because it helped to keep

our forebears alive. It helped to decide which berries to eat,
and how many, and which to avoid. It helped us to choose
which path to take, which companions to trust, who had the
greatest strength and the widest knowledge. It helped us
to predict how broad a gulley could be jumped and how
small a branch would bear our weight. It told us how to
avoid stepping on thorns and what to do if we stepped on
one. Such knowledge determined which individuals survived and which perished. And the ultimate traits of a species depended on which individuals survived.
The earliest forerunners of consciousness, tropisms,
which work somewhat like magnets, cause some single-cell
animals to approach or avoid light and heat. Tropisms exist
in plants too. The young trees lean toward the sun. The
bean vines send tendrils exploring in the wet earth. The
plant that devours insects has what must be a mutated
tropism. It is an educated guess that a half-billion years ago
in some single-cell animals mutations occurred which
yielded intense tropistic reactions that were preserved and
amplified because they favored survival. Time passed.

The Individual on Center Stage

Some cells, as they divided, bunched together and some

of these became specialized, developing into nerve cells
and conducting electric current more readily than others.
Reflexes protected the complex organism, as tropisms had
protected the single cells.
In a later gradation certain stimulating situations required, for the survival of an organism, relatively complicated response patterns. The organism was stimulated
by a feeling, and action followed. If the action was appropriate, the organism survived. The feeling was a desire for
something different, and we call it an instinct. Any organism
in a comparably hazardous circumstance without it did not
survive. Consciousness and instinct seem to have been
identical in their dim beginnings: an unease, a yearning, a
need. At first there was probably a feeling of discomfort,
resulting in movement to restore the status quo ante-in
other words to terminate the pain and so the awareness of
it.
But the experience was not lost. The scar from the discomfort may have been the beginning of the subconscious-a track to lead back to painlessness if discomfort came
again from the same source.
One of the warning feelings that aroused primitive consciousness was coldness; another was hunger. The discomfort and its cure would have left an effect, chemical or
electrical, on membranes, constituting a basis for response
to subsequent similar experience. Results of experiences
would accrue, like data fed into a computer.
Consciousness, having survival value, has influenced
behavior from its beginning. And behavior never could or
can be adequately explained without reference to consciousness. That doesn't mean that the work of behaviorists
has been a total loss; merely that such work has been incomplete and that those behaviorists who denied the importance of consciousness or who gave it the silent treatment were woefully mistaken.
Very gradually, by means of many life-saving mutations,

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

consciousness broadened to include precepts, concepts,

memory, decision-making and purpose. When it reached
this stage, the precepts and concepts would be organized
for the defense of the consciousness and the cells in which
consciousness resided.
Success in the struggle for survival has depended on a
self-centered orientation. A consciousness has to be somewhere. Where is it? It is in the brain cells of the organism
it serves. It is where afferent nerves can register their messages and efferent nerves instruct muscles or glands to act.
For routine matters there are lesser centers called "plexuses," which receive afferent signals-such as those having
to do with the digestive process-and send instructions
over efferent nerves. If anything goes wrong, the plexus
does what a computer does-sends an "error" signal to the
brain.
The young boy asks, in Wayne Miller's The World is Young,
"What part of me is me?" The answer is the most authentic
part of anyone is centered in his consciousness. Thinking
of experiences is like thinking of the stars in a planetarium;
there has to be a point of reference. In the planetarium it
is earth, where the viewer is sitting. In the individual it is
the self.
Yet the boundaries of self are amazingly elastic. We identify self not only with our mind and our ideas, our emotions
and attitudes, but with our nose, our voice, our dog, even
our rich uncle. Our family is the most important family. Our
town is the nicest town. We feel closely bound to a professional football team in another state or with a quarterback
who used to win football games for our college, though our
hero is now with a team half way across the country. If
someone criticizes his country, he suffers because something which is partly him is damaged. In a sense, a country
is part of self. And, as we keep repeating, the center of self
.
.
IS conscIOusness.

The Individual on Center Stage

Does a dog's consciousness operate from center stage?

It could operate no other way. But a dog learns early that
he must cooperate with humans and that where judgments
or wishes clash with his master he must yield. His dominance is limited to other species than Homo sapiens and to
some other dogs.
Systematized activity has to be keyed to consciousness,
which is to say, to self. No other orientation is possible or
perhaps even imaginable. We have sometimes heard a person say, "If I were he, I would do thus and so." What he
really meant was, "If I, with my background of experience
and ideas, were in his position, I would do thus and so."
Does inborn self-centeredness affect social behavior?
How many love songs emphasize: "You, you, you, only you;
and what I'll do for you!" The singer wins you over by
emphasizing your self-importance.
A political candidate finds it helpful to remember names
of voters. Remembering a name is recognition of the separateness, the identity, the individuality of its owner. How
the politician may stand on the issues means less to many
voters than his habit of remembering their names.
Various groups have been sure they are "God's Chosen
People." That helps meet the instinctive center-stage demands and is especially comforting if the self has had some
rough going. If consciousness is unsuccessful in maintaining status, there is compensation in the peripheral glories
of being part of something successful.
Once upon a time there was Gulliver. The Lilliputians
tied him up, without realizing what good things he could
do for them.
Lothrop Stoddard was Gulliver and the Lilliputians were
the small-minded, anti-hereditarian behaviorists of his
time. His most important work The Revolt Against Civilization
was published in 1922, and a few years later, as the book
began to take effect, the Lilliputians massed for collective

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

action against it and the rest of his writings. They won, at

least for half a century. The following from page 52 of
Stoddard's book is one of his most important paragraphs:
Every individual is inevitably the center of his world, and instinctively tends to regard his own existence and well-being as
matters of supreme importance. This instinctive egoism is, of
course, modified by experience, observation, and reflection, and
may be so overlaid that it becomes scarcely recognizable even by
the individual himself. Nevertheless it remains, and subtly colors
every thought and attitude . . . . Each individual feels that he is
really a person of importance. No matter how low may be his
capacities, no matter how egregious his failures, no matter how
unfavorable the judgment of his fellows; still his inborn instincts
of self-preservation and self-love whisper that he should survive
and prosper, that 'things are not right,' and that if the world were
properly ordered he would be much better placed.

After the anti-hereditarians had discredited Stoddard,

the self-centered nature of man seems to have been widely
neglected. It was revived in a roundabout way in 1961 by
Robert Ardrey in African Genesis, in the introduction to his
chapter, "The Romantic Fallacy."
The rule that whatever is appraised has to be judged on
its relationship to self may involve standards already set up
by the self. Time, energy and interest are limited, so most
of the details are merely lumped together. The practice
applies to the selection of clothing, books, movies, autos,
friends, almost everything.
When you put certain people in an unfavorable category,
others who would classify them differently will accuse you
of prejudice and discrimination. In many instances you are
prejudging, reaching conclusions before you have considered the essential facts. Usually your critics are prejudging
too. They have not dug for the truth any more than you.
You will probably defend your classification without think-

The Individual on Center Stage

ing through the particular circumstances. Your critics will

similarly argue for their ideas rather than test them.
A superiority feeling is not a complex, but the primordial
state of consciousness. While we may sometimes bolster
our own egos by ridiculing what seems to be the pretensions of our neighbors, let's not lose sight of the fact that
the feeling of superiority is an aspect of putting self in the
center of things, an act required by consciousness for coordination. After one has been jolted a few times by experience, he is likely to reassess himself, and to see himself as
others see him. Or he may lean over backward and develop
an inferiority feeling. The latter can appropriately be referred to as a complex because it sums up a variety of
experiences. But an egocentric position will remain the
major basis of orientation, no matter how small a speck of
dust man believes himself to be.
W. 1. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki in Polish Peasant in
Europe and America, a sociological classic published in the
early 1920s, investigated "four desires" that emanate from
a self-centered orientation.
The desire for security needs no elaboration.
The desire for recognition is a wish for attention, a gratification at seeing our name in the newspaper, a compulsion
to "show off." One of the manifestations of this wish is the
urge either to be in style or to rebel against style. Attention,
of course, is more welcome if it is favorable, but for many
people even mildly derogatory publicity is preferable to
none.
Somewhat different, though springing from the same
source, is the desire to be effective, "to get results." This, in
its constructive phase, is what Thorstein Veblen has called,
the "instinct of workmanship." Most people would prefer
their actions to be beneficial, but the craving is so strong
that what the craver does may be actually harmful. The
young boy lights a firecracker, the older boy engages in
vandalism, the college student starts a riot, and Arthur

10

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Bremer tries to kill George Wallace. Others may channel

their desire to be effective into more constructive channels,
such as putting a man on the moon, or working on a plan
to bring water to Los Angeles from the Snake River.
Another result of the ego-pointing aspect of consciousness is the desire for dominance. Life is competitive and individuals work their way up or down to a rank or status
which is determined by their performance. Usually status
is an informal, not a rigid, classification.
"Peck Right" is a term indicating the order of ascendancy
in certain species of animals or birds, the concept having
been first crystalized by observation of the social hierarchy
among hens. Robert Ardrey in African Genesis entitles his
chapter on consciousness of rank, "Who Pecks Whom."
"Every organized animal society," he says, "has its system
of dominance."
Usually status is established among members of an animal or bird group by some sort of competition, such as a
show of strength. But once dominance is established, the
challenges to it are few. Among the baboons, the older
ones retain their lofty status for years after they have lost
the strength to defend it.
Status contributes to survival in some species by preventing interminable struggles for leadership. In species where
dominant males have plural mates it improves genetic quality.
Stratification of human beings does not conform to the
American tenet that "all men are created equal." But, as
Vance Packard showed in The Status Seekers, stratification
exists everywhere in our society. The lines were formerly
drawn according to income, family hackground and leisure.
More recently they have been drawn according to people's
functions in the production of goods and services. Class
lines become more, not less, visible as American business
and industry become more bureaucratic.
Status depends less on family background, now that mobility is so great that families rarely remain together. Lei-

The Individual on Center Stage

11

sure no longer serves as a status symbol, because the man

who wields the most power often works longest.
According to Packard, we have developed a five-class
system with a college diploma serving as a minimum requirement for the top two classes. The highest class is
composed of top management and professional people.
Though most of us are vague about class divisions in this
country, by the time we are forty, we have found our permanent niche in the class structure and have grown accustomed to it. Packard writes:
Status distinctions would appear to be inevitable in a society
as complicated as our own. The problem is not to try to wipe
them out-which would be impossible-but to achieve a reasonably happy society within their framework.

To what, besides self (and immediate bodily needs), does

consciousness give direct attention? For some the mere
flow of life may monopolize their attention. For most people, however, a sense of purpose, which derives from their
conclusions about the appropriateness of their activities,
will keep some order in daily life. Purpose is likely to reinforce some habits, which in turn reinforce purpose. Since
it gives persistence to motivation, it has, at least in the past,
improved our chances of survival.
In a modern setting, in the short run, a sense of purpose
has little to do with individual survival, since civilization
takes care of the indigent. In the long run, however, a sense
of purpose-or better a strength of purpose-determines
the level of civilization. If individuals had no sense of purpose their behavior would be unpredictable, and social organization would be impossible. Proceeding from hunting
and agricultural stages to village and city living, individuals
have coordinated their behavior and the resulting social
patterns have become a framework in which the sense of
purpose of newer group members takes shape. The inherited tendency of individuals to formulate and persist in

12

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

their various purposes is necessary to successful city organization. If birthrates, emigration or immigration are such
as to result in a large proportion of the inhabitants of a city
being of low intelligence or lacking purpose, urban conditions deteriorate.
As to the hereditary tendency of men to be purposeful,
it seems to belong to that aspect of intelligence which has
to do with the power of anticipation. Purposefulness, moreover, involves considering the influence of present actions
on future results. As Leonard Hobhouse said in Mind in
Evolution, purpose "involves an idea of an end." A sense
of purpose has aided survival in many ways, primarily perhaps by stimulating the preparation for winter in prehistoric times and in laying in supplies for lean years.
Armed with the perspective of a strong purpose, decisions are relatively easy. Random impulses, which may be
competing or conflicting, are subordinated or excluded.
Anything that does not contribute to the main effort is
ruled out. To a person with a central purpose, boredom
is rare. Life is intense, fascinating and consistent. And in
working for an ideal, the individual can be confident and
comfortable that he is standing in the center of things.
Later when we investigate the requirements for building
civilizations, we shall see the parts that egocentricity and
consciousness play in the formation of social structure. In
chapters immediately following, however, we will continue
to examine our mental equipment for the reason that the
state of a civilization depends largely on what is in the
individual's mind.
In recent times, in part because of the influence of John
Dewey and Benjamin Spock, unlimited human egotism has
come to be considered the whole story, as if all the world
must yield to the tantrum throwers. No longer are serious
endeavors made to mold the individual to fit society. Important decisions must be made "at once." Everything
must have an immediate interest.

The Individual on Center Stage

13

Any drive is, and has to be, restrained in some measure,

either by other drives and values, or by other people. In
spite of the space we have lavished on ego in this chapter,
we shall find that it does not constitute "the whole person"
on which civilizations are built.

Chapter 2

The Legacy of Instinct

A fire-mist and a planet,

A crystal and a cell,
A jellyfish and a saurian,
And caves where the cavemen dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty,
And a face turned from the clod,Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
William Herbert Carruth

Anyone who tries to understand the rise or fall of civilizations without attention to biological evolution is plunging
into a labyrinth without "a clue or a sword."
The structure of our minds is just as much a product of
evolution as our bones, glands and muscles. Mind and body
evolved together, and they work together. Mental patterns
are geared to body form and functions. We are born with
a network of mental inclinations which accompanied,
guided and protected us in our multimillion-year journey
"up from the ape." Man's mechanisms for concepts and
emotions, as well as the efficiency of his reasoning, are as
surely the results of evolution as are his body traits.
The hand, for instance, was functional way back when
our habitat was mainly in trees. Contemporaneously, babies probably developed a reflex which caused them to

The Legacy of Instinct

15

grasp what touched their hands-the fur on their mothers'

back or the branch that would keep them from falling. So
when we came down out of the trees, more than twenty
million years ago, the hand and the mind were ready to pick
things off the ground instead of merely working together
for the purpose of hanging on to mothers and trees. Now
the hand-mind partnership was ready to grab stones and
clubs. But our reflexes have also received help from more
complex sources. "What shall I do with my hands?" asks
the young man going to a party. Since his hands were
originally used for grasping, they adjust readily to a girl's
waist, as they have previously adjusted to a baseball bat,
to a fishpole, an ax, a hoe-to almost anything but emptiness. To be empty-handed is what makes our young man
uncomfortable.
There is another mental pattern which must have
become fixed in heredity at the time the grasping reflex was
developing. That is the fear of falling. Whether we label
this a drive, urge, wish, instinct or appetite is not important
-so long as we recognize acrophobia as inherited and
derived from mutations in the hundreds of millions of years
of our evolutionary span.
Here we might say that mutations are changes in genetic
patterns. We have learned much about them from studies
made by H. J. Muller (1890-1967) of evening primroses,
fruit flies and human beings. Radiation is one cause of
genetic changes. There may be others. Muller brought
about heritable changes in fruit flies by the use of X-rays.
The eventual effects of mutations are unpredictable, but
they are more often harmful than helpful, just as random
deviations in any system are more likely to be inharmonious than harmonious. Through the eons of biological evolution the harmful mutations, which led to inefficient or
otherwise inappropriate behavior, made their possessors
more prone to extinction. Even though the adverse mutations might outnumber the beneficial ones 100 to 1, the

16

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

ultimate result would be greater adaptability to the environment, since the harmful changes would be eliminated
while the beneficial changes would be cumulative.
Many people have rejected evolution because they have
not read enough about it to understand it. Having heard
that harmful mutations outnumber helpful mutations, they
find it hard to believe that human beings could have developed by evolution from less efficient creatures. The essential which they have overlooked is that in a fiercely competitive evolutionary situation handicapped competitors
cannot survive. If the competition is between individuals,
the handicapped individuals are eliminated. If group cooperation protects those individuals for a few generations, the
group itself falls victim to the harsh competition.
The upshot is that when and where evolution prevails,
"only the fit survive." Even though many more harmful
than beneficial mutations appear in a species over a period
of time, in the long run the species will represent and be
represented by the beneficial mutations, or else the species
itself will disappear-along with the dodo birds.
The study of instincts properly began in 1859, after Darwin had discovered that species of animals evolved from
earlier species and that human beings followed the same
law.
But in the 1920s a few psychologists gained prominence
by claiming that human behavior is fully explained by conditioning. Their theory was known as Behaviorism. They
demonstrated that people could be conditioned to do
things they never would have done otherwise, and they
claimed that nothing "comes naturally."
Of course everybody agrees that some conditioning enters
into almost all human behavior, but these psychological
dramatists made it seem to many that heredity plays no
significant part at all in man's makeup. People with axes to
grind have kept this mythology alive to the present day.
Many sociologists followed the lead of the behaviorist

The Legacy of Instinct

17

psychologists, and it was not long before the disparagement of instincts became an academic vogue. One sociologist who bore a great deal of responsibility for the trend
was Dr. L. L. Bernard, then of the University of Chicago.
He published widely on instincts and authored the article
on the subject in the 1932 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.
Bernard concluded that instincts play practically no part
in "the cultural elements in human behavior," a conclusion
he reached by definition. He defined instinct as "a specific
and definite inherited or unlearned response which follows
or accompanies a specific and definite sensory stimulus or
organic condition that serves as a release to the inherited
mechanism."
Examine Bernard's wording. According to him an instinct is an inherited response-not a specific and definite
sensory or organic condition. It appears that, in Bernard's
thinking, the efferent aspects of experience constitute the
totality of instinct. The afferent part, "the sensory stimulus
or organic condition," is not, in Bernard's view, a part of
instinct itself. Consistent with his emasculated definition of
instinct, Bernard could then claim that instinct had little or
no part in inducing human behavior. Thus, shutting his
mind on what is dynamic in heredity, he became a crusading behaviorist.
Bernard dismissed other writers who had used "organic
conditions" as inherited bases of cultural behavior with one
sweeping sentence: "The pro-instinctivists began to rearrange their broken legions in the form of redefinition and
of substitute categories, such as drives, desires, wishes,
harmonic urges and prepotent reflexes . . ."
What the "pro-instinctivists" had really done was to
recognize that in human beings the follow-through part of
instincts had been mostly replaced by intelligence. At the
same time they asserted that we still inherit, in full force,
the motivational part, the drives themselves. Bernard chose
to sweep their work under the rug.
The gap between reality and the theory of the anti-

18

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

hereditarian behaviorists seems to be related to their avoidance of the concept of consciousness. Having not developed any concepts to explain the reality of consciousness,
they decided to ignore it.
We can't exclude consciousness and its elder brother,
the subconscious. That's where the urges are, and the fears,
and all the other emotions. To omit consciousness and the
subconscious in the explanation of behavior is not to mention the engine when explaining the operation of an automobile. Actually, consciousness serves as a guide and
monitor of our actions.
There are specific inherited fears other than the fear of
falling. Some people have claustrophobia, a fear of closedin places. And some scholars are convinced that we have
an inborn fear of snakes. If so, we acquired it in our treeclimbing stage. Snakes constitute a great danger to
monkeys, but monkeys don't have to be told of the danger.
They have a built-in warning mechanism with neural connections always at the ready.
Less specific fears are also instinctive, from vague uneasiness to sheer terror, each triggered by a wide variety of
circumstances which spell danger. From the dawn of time,
fear has saved innumerable lives-and it still does.
Does the terror of a nightmare have any survival value?
Maybe so. This is not to say that the content of a dream
has any similarity with the events that initiate it. For instance, you may return late to your college dorm and enter
your room quietly and stealthily, so as not to disturb your
sleeping roommate. The sleeper's extrasensory perception
cues him only to the fact that something or someone is
there. In his dream, lions may be about to pounce upon
him. If you had walked in normally, there would have been
no alarm in your roommate's dream and probably no
dream at all. It was fear of the unknown that triggered the
minor nightmare.
Intelligence arose as a supplement to instincts and Leonard Hobhouse elucidates this genesis in his book Mind in

The Legacy of Instinct

19

Evolution (pp. 90-106). He tells of the efforts of two wasps

to put two dead spiders in storage. One looked at her
storage hole, then at the spider, then went back to the hole
and made it larger before attempting to put the spider in
it. After moving the spider in, she tried to cover the hole
with different objects-a stone, a lump of earth, a leaf and
finally a dryer leaf, which was easier to drag. Altogether she
worked an hour on the project. The other wasp crammed
her spider into her storage hole, wedged a few pellets on
top of it, pushed dust over them, smoothed the surface and
finished the slipshod job in five minutes.
Hobhouse provisionally calls this problem-solving ability
of wasps "the play of intelligence within instinct." He
writes:
The more an instinct becomes suffused with intelligence the
greater the proportion of the whole course which may be grasped
as a conscious purpose. In "pure" instinct, each stage by passing
brings on the next, and the instinct must run through its course
by a prescribed series of stages or not at all. It cannot, outside
narrow limits, adopt alternatives. Intelligence, on the other hand,
grasping the ultimate aim, is indifferent as to the method by
which it is reached. Thus as intelligence rises, the fixed processes
of instinct dissolve. But intelligence does not spring into being
fully armed from the head of Zeus. It is born within the sphere
of instinct, and at first grasps only a little bit of what instinct
prompts. It apprehends, say, the next stage, and, ordinary means
failing, guides some special effort to reach that stage, the next
stage, not the ultimate end, being the purpose understood and
realized by the animal. It is easy to see how from this point it may
develop, taking remoter stages or ends into account, until it
grasps the final purpose and meaning of conducl. Clearly also,
as this development proceeds, the need for detailed determination of response by heredity disappears.

The scope of reason is very narrow at first, allowing only

one or two alternatives in the event of a mental impasse.
Hobhouse explains:

20

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Intelligence . . . arises within the sphere of instinct; indeed we

can draw no sharp and certain line between them in nature . . . .
At first narrowly limited in scope, intelligence deals with proximate ends. As it expands, it comes to embrace the remoter and
at length the ultimate end to which action is directed. Along with
this advance the power of choosing the means best suited to the
purpose expands, and the determination of successive stages of
action by hereditary structure simultaneously disappears.

And how does Hobhouse define instinct?

Instinct is an enduring interest determined by heredity and
directing action to results of importance to the organism without
clear prevision of those results.

The first part of that definition has particular relevance

for humans. Instinct is "an enduring interest determined
by heredity." In men, however, instincts have little to do
with programming the details of procedure. Habit, custom,
conditioning and intelligence take over.
But what a vast importance there is in those "enduring
interests," otherwise defined as moods, emotions and dispositions. In triggering motivations, a large proportion of
the initiative is still instinctive. Consciousness and the subconscious mind are still largely organized on the basis of
inherited impulses and longings. Says Hobhouse:
Heredity lays the foundation of our entire mental life. We
inherit not only capacities for sensation and emotion, but also
capacities for distinguishing, analyzing and combining them
. . .. We have contrasted intelligence with instinct, referring
to intelligence as the work of the individual, and to instinct as
the product of heredity . . . . but intelligence as a capacity is also
hereditary.

My own definition for intelligence is brief. Intelligence

is the ability to solve problems. It is based on the heredity
of brain cells, but its development is markedly influenced

The Legacy of Instinct

21

by environment. What Intelligence Quotient (IQ) shows

is a combination of the two. If your IQ score is very far
above the general average, which is expressed as 100, you
have a favorable helping of both nature and nurture.
In The Mind, one of the interesting books published by
the Life Science Library, Dr. Catherine Morris Cox has
estimated the IQ scores of some of the prominent men of
the past. Here are the top dozen:
Goethe
Newton
Voltaire
Galileo
Da Vinci
Descartes

210
190
190
185
180
180

Kant
Luther
Johnson
Mozart
Franklin
Rembrandt

175
170
165
165
160
155

I should like to nominate about fifty others for that list.

Probably you would too. And I should guess that some of
those whom Dr. Cox studied would have had higher or
lower scores than those she arrived at.
Part of the talent for problem solving is "creativity."
Some psychologists think that the IQtests currently in use
do not measure the creativity function very well, if at all,
and they are working on more specialized tests. However,
I believe that creativity is useful only if it is combined with
a higher than average IQ Otherwise the creative person
is likely to lack the balance to see the long-range results
of his creativity, which may be more destructive than constructive. So I think there is a social risk in giving special
responsibilities and worldwide recognition to individuals
whose intelligence is so narrowly concentrated that it
leaves its possessor with an unimpressive IQ score.
A great many emotions belong to our psychological repertory because at various stages of our evolution they have
saved lives. Fear, dread, abhorrence, revulsion, disgust,
anger, rage, hate, envy, greed, frustration, impatience,

22

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

grief, guilt, remorse, surprise, curiosity, joy, superiority,

inferiority, love, respect, adoration, loyalty, happiness,
yearning, hunger, sorrow, loneliness, drowsiness, appreciation, satisfaction, feelings of urgency, security, smugness, freedom, gratitude-each must have had a life-saving
function. The list is not intended to be either exhaustive
or precise, merely a reminder that life is very largely motivated by inherited emotions-and the actions authorized
by inherited brain cells. Intelligence replaced the end
stages of instinctual behavior, for the simple reason that
flexible responses had a greater survival value than rigid
responses.
There are also a formidable number of antagonistic feelings which have slipped into our survival mechanism because they stimulated our ancestors to escape or avoid dangers of various sorts. The friendly feelings are more fully
explained in the next chapter and the unfriendly feelings
in a later chapter. Both have their roles in civilization.

Chapter 3

The Social Appetite

To understand and to be understood make our happiness.

German Proverb

The need for companionship demonstrates the inheritance of the social appetite. This readiness for association
is regularly present in the subconscious and frequently
inches its way into consciousness. One name for it is gregariousness. The same root is found in the word congregate-to collect into a flock, herd, mass, crowd.
Some scholars have treated gregariousness as if it is only
one instinct. Such reductionism is inappropriate. The vast
sweep of the milky way is not "a star." The gregarious area
of feeling constitutes an agglomeration of motivations to
the extent of involving a whole "mind-set." Very largely,
our feelings as well as our behavior patterns have developed in harmony with group living-starting many millions
of years before our ancestors were human beings. Neural
connections and chemical flows stand by in each of us,
ready to give meaning to cooperation and group participation. Our feelings range from a mild appetite for association to a fierce hunger for it.
Darwin, in his Descent of Man (Chapter IV), considered
the major characteristic of "the social instincts," as he
called them, to be sympathy. Probably just as important,

24

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

within the galaxy of socially inspired emotions, are desires

for recognition, for companionship and for social approval.
We are lonely and unhappy when we are by ourselves too
long. We look forward to getting back to the pack.
One outgrowth of the social appetite is friendship. Time
magazine (june 8, 1970) reported that there are 311 aphorisms on friendship in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. In Benham's Book of Quotations, freedom and liberty together constituted only 81 entries while friendship had 362. The only
subjects which produced more quotations than friendship
were women, love and death. I suspect that these statistics
demonstrate basic, inherited feelings. Of the four, only
death reflects an ego feeling. Not only friendship, but love
and women represent, at least in part, social attitudes.
A characteristic closely linked to the mind and evidence
of the inherited nature of the social appetite is the tendency
to blush. A blush, says the dictionary, is "excited by confusion, which may spring from shame, guilt, modesty, diffidence or surprise." In general we blush as a reaction to
what we think others are thinking. I suppose, since the
specific physical response is inherited, the term "blushing
instinct" would not be inappropriate.
We must examine the social demands for attention, recognition, acceptance, companionship and approval, and
weigh them against the ego demands for air, water, food,
warmth, sex and sleep.
Both the ego and social demands exert a pull on consciousness. In the process of their fulfillment the ego demands arouse feelings of satisfaction. The activity stimulated by the social appetite, in contrast, is gratifying only
because it improves or should improve the prospect of
obtaining outside approval. Usually "duty" or "what people expect" or "what is good for" the college, the village
or the nation triggers the action, though the action itself
may be unpleasant.

The Social Appetite

25

I have classified sex as one of the ego feelings, though

it is often considered as a social emotion. It is best described as a "bridge" that gets its force from both areas of
the mind, notwithstanding that in the case of rape, egoism
seems to be the sole factor.
Touch may tell us something about the social appetite.
Sensitiveness to human touch seems to have a gregarious
base. If we already have a degree of intimacy with another
human, a light touch usually heightens it. The handshake
is an illustration, but a hand on the arm or a pat on the back
can be even more magnetic.
A curious phenomenon, associated with the self-centered nature of touch, yet dependent also on the inherited
social urge, is that, although another person can tickle you,
you cannot tickle yourself.
Another aspect of inherited social appetite is demonstrated by the desire for approval. Your mind is only partly
yours. Your unconscious reaching for other minds shows
that part of your mind belongs to the group. You were born
that way. You always have a subservient streak because
without subservience you would be very, very lonely.
Although there is not necessarily any survival value in
particular acts sparked by a gregarious emotion, survival is
greatly enhanced by group unity. One twig is weak. A bundle
of twigs is surprisingly strong. Neural and mental mutations which lead to correlated action have so increased
chances of survival that they appeared in parallel evolution
among many kinds of bugs, beasts and birds, even fishes.
Ants, bees, ducks, sheep and various other gregarious
species have become so socially dependent they arc badly
disorganized if denied the opportunity to function cooperatively. An ant is almost as united with his colony as if he
were a cell in a single organism, and his mind doubtlessly
reflects this selflessness. The bee is a little less dependent.
A sheep can be happy only when doing what other sheep
are doing. Most mammals, and all primates including man,

26

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

are geared to a life common to their kind. The proportion

of life that is socially oriented varies with the species-and
to a much smaller extent with the individual.
Suggestibility also demonstrates the inheritance of the
social appetite. The home of gregarious traits is the subconscious level of the mind. As I walk along a campus path,
a young lady is approaching, whom I know, but cannot
name at the moment. I struggle to recall her name, but my
mental files are too cluttered. So I give the job to my subconscious. Five minutes later, when I am no longer thinking
of her, her name "pops into my head."
Names and facts can be usefully recalled out of the subconscious level; even organizational and mathematical
problems can be solved subconsciously. These functions
of the subconscious are important, but since we are emphasizing gregariousness, our focus here is on suggestibility.
There were many early pioneers in psychology and sociology who studied the social drives of man. Among them
were Karl Pearson, Lester F. Ward, Gustave Le Bon and
Boris Sidis. Pearson was perhaps the first to crystalize the
social appetite concept-in three studies: The Grammar of
Science, National Life from the Standpoint of Science and The
Chances of Death.
Ward, in Pure Sociology, discussed what he called an "instinct of race safety" out of which "all the more important
human institutions" had developed.
The Frenchman Le Bon examined mob psychology in
The Psychology Of Crowds. He treated suggestibility as a form
of mob psychology. Emotion stirs easily at football games.
We sit on the edge of our seats, sing, yell ourselves hoarse
and feel we have gained a personal victory when our team
makes a first down. It is almost the same at a political
convention. We purr with pleasure in front of our TV set
when "our" candidate puts down "their" candidate. In the
mind of the mob the world is made up of us good guys and
them bad guys.

The Social Appetite

27

In panics, riots and revivals suggestibility is at its height.

It is also present, though less dramatically, at PTA meetings and birthday parties.
Advertising depends on suggestibility. Le Bon's idea of
the power of repetition has become a money maker for
Madison Avenue. Slogans loaded with suggestion produce
sales. "Grapenuts; there's a reason!" Weare seldom told
what the reason is, but we buy them anyway.
In the 1950s we learned about subliminal suggestion.
Without our knowledge some of us were apparently being
turned into psychological guinea pigs. Movie theaters
flashed ads about the candy and popcorn at their concession stands-so briefly that nobody really knew what was
going on. Yet sales increased some fifteen percent. When
the report came out, people marveled, but felt uneasy.
Maybe there ought to be a law against it.
Dr. Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of
California Medical Center in San Francisco, whose experiments were reported in Science News (Dec 30, 1967), theorized that brain activity must persist at least half a second
in order to register on our consciousness. Electrical impulses of less duration directed into the sensory cortex had
no effect on consciousness, yet yielded localized motor responses. Dr. Libet reasoned that unconscious experiences
even of some complexity may be retained and accumulated
as reflex memories to initiate, supplement or reinforce
ideas.
Politicians are faithful partisans of suggestibility, using
sloganized concepts to prove they belong to the herd. They
glorify heaven, home, and mother and they yield to no man
in their opposition to sin. Lately, too, they have become
"compassionate" and are surer than ever that "all men are
created equal."
Like Le Bon, Boris Sidis, author of The Psychology of
Suggeshon, put his emphasis on panics, revivals and similar
occurrences. Man is social, said Sidis, "because he is suggestible."

28

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Suggestibility goes far in explaining fads, fashions and

the contagious nature of fear, happiness and other emotions and moods. Mimicry, a common trait of children, and
consequently a common method of teaching, obviously
leans heavily on suggestibility. The power of suggestion
often influences both feeling and action, and sometimes,
as in hypnotism, it produces the action without the feeling.
Like the social appetite itself, suggestibility reveals a
hereditary cast of mind.
The advantage of suggestibility in evolution is its ability
to induce homogeneous responses. For hunted animals it
may trigger the collective reaction of flight. For hunting
animals it may improve the chances of the kill. As Kipling
expressed it, "The strength of the wolf is the pack and the
strength of the pack is the wolf."
In the early stages of suggestibility (which may have been
two or three hundred million years ago), the reasoning
faculty was still in its incipient stages. Consequently mutations favorable to suggestibility and leading to unified
group behavior would have survival value and become
hereditary. Man didn't need to reason that cooperation was
helpful, if collective responses made him feel less lonely or
more secure or more comfortable.
"[I]t is evident," says Wilfred Trotter in Instincts of the
Herd in Peace and War, "that the members of the herd must
possess sensitiveness to the behavior of their fellows. . . .
not only will the individual be responsive to impulses coming from the herd, but he will treat the herd as his normal
environment. "
Herd suggestions impinge on the individual because
what the herd does, if it does not stray too far from standardized behavior, is ordinarily taken to be right. And if
something "isn't being done," then the individual will normally avoid doing it-with no thought as to the reason why.
An impulse triggered by group suggestion is strengthened, as it occurs, by the value of rectitude. No argument
or evidence is necessary, because an act or opinion which

The Social Appetite

29

keeps the individual in line with the herd has an air of

finality, though it may differ from what was "right" on a
previous occasion. It is, of course, not the act or the opinion that is inherited. It is the wish, the drive, the longing
for group sanction.
Hypnotism offers further proof that the social appetite
is inherited. Its discoverer was Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer,
which is why it is also called mesmerism. Mesmer was an
Austrian who began to practice medicine in Vienna in
1765. He was a highly respected and influential citizen until
he discovered hypnotism in 1777. Soon after, the Vienna
Medical Society forbade him to practice. From Vienna he
went to Paris, where he again was quite successful until the
French Academy of Medicine forced him into retirement.
Mesmer had no idea of the extent of the gold mine he
had stumbled on. He didn't know he was prospecting in
the depths of the subconscious, that area of the mind which
is a link between the individual and the group. What he did
know was that he was alleviating the suffering caused by
nervous disorders.
Mesmer had the idea that the stars exerted a magnetic
influence on people. He wondered if an ordinary iron magnet would do the same. When he passed a magnet over a
patient, the patient often became more obedient. Then he
learned that making the passes with his hands alone had
the same effect. His followers later found that merely to
suggest sleep would often suspend a patient's consciousness and that orders given during a trance would be carried
out after the trance.
In the 1840s James Braid, a disciple of Mesmer, called
trances "hypnotism." French physicians correctly came to
the conclusion that hypnosis was a consequence of hypersuggestibility.
In the early 1800s it was found that hypnotism could
prevent pain. British surgeons John Elliotson and James
Esdaile performed major operations in which the patients

30

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

were put to sleep by hypnotism. That was before the practice of anesthesia was heard of.
Elliotson, born in 1791, got his medical degree in 1821.
In 1831 he was appointed Professor at the University of
London. He became an enthusiastic student of mesmerism,
which he featured in his classes and later used in a hospital
which he established in 1840. He also started a magazine
devoted to mesmerism.
Esdaile was born in 1808, obtaining his M.D. in 1830.
The next year he went to Calcutta for the East India Company. In 1838 he was put in charge of a hospital at Hooghly.
Having heard of Elliot son's works, he mesmerized a Hindu
convict who needed a painful operation. He brought about
"a complete suspension of sensibility" in the patient for the
operation and for a follow-up operation a week later. After
a careful investigation, the government put a small hospital
at his disposal, where native assistants mesmerized patients
under his supervision. In all, Esdaile performed 261 painless operations himself and supervised many others. After
chloroform and ether came into use about 1850, hypnotism
has been used only rarely as an anesthetic.
Why was hypnotism so effective? When the ego phase of
mind is dormant the social phase has a monopoly-the run
of the house.
Altruism, another facet of the gregarious urge, involves
doing something for the benefit of others. It is on the same
order as unselfishness. When a child shares his precious
candy with a schoolmate, the act is altruistic. Altruism can,
on occasion, demand the most serious sacrifices. Though
there may be no direct survival value for the doer in the
extreme form of altruism, the willingness to risk death for
the benefit of others increases the chances of survival of
children, wives and fellow citizens. The hero, whether he
survives or not, is always the object of adulation. In any
case, whenever someone risks his life for another, the ego
drive clashes with the social inclination, with the result that

The Sodal Appetite

31

the herd feeling supersedes the will to survive and the wish
to avoid pain.
Robert Ardrey relays a report from Eugene Marais of an
event in a troop of 300 baboons which the latter had been
studying for three years. At dusk a leopard was taking his
time choosing his dinner from the cornered and terrified
troop. Although a baboon has no chance at all in a fight
with a leopard, two male baboons crept to a small ledge
about twelve feet above the predator, and suddenly
dropped on him. One tried for the throat; the other for the
spine. A slash from the leopard's hind claws ripped open
the body of the baboon holding on to his throat and his
teeth tore loose the other one. Both baboons were killed
in seconds. But the one at the leopard's throat had reached
. the jugular vein, and the predator died with his victims.
Tennyson tells of some altruistic British soldiers in "The
Charge of the Light Brigade," and an awesome feature of
World War II was the performance of the kamikaze of the
Japanese Air Force. The suicide tactics of the latter was the
most dramatic example in modern times of group love
triumphing over self-love.
The ~rall Street Journal (Oct. 13, 1972) reported that in the
last sixty-eight years the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission
had awarded medals and cash payments totaling $12 million to 5,939 heroes or their families. Six investigators
searched every reported case of heroism in great detail.
The social appetite was noticeable in the reaction of witnesses to acts of heroism. The Commission said they often
expressed a sense of guilt for not having acted themselves.
Since altruism is one of a whole array of inherited drives
it may be submerged, in some circumstances, by other feelings. At Princeton University, Dr. John M. Darley and Dr.
C. Daniel Batson set up an experiment in which forty theological students were asked to prepare a short talk. Every
fifteen minutes one student was told to go to another building to have his speech recorded. On the way he passed a
man lying in an alley, an actor who was groaning and moan-

32

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

ing and pretending to be in great pain. Would the student

stop to help?
The students were divided into three groups. Each student in the first group was told to take his time getting to
the recording session. Members of the second group were
instructed to hurry. Those in the third group were told they
were late and had to rush.
Altruism came into play in proportion to the time each
student was given to meet his schedule. In the first group
sixty-three percent stopped to help; in the second group
forty-five percent; in the third ten percent.
Conscience, another of the many components of gregariousness, is "the still small voice," the herd's monitor of
the individual's mind. It forces the individual to heed the
standards and objectives of the group and makes him feel
guilty if he deviates. Conscience, if you look it up in the
dictionary, "generally refers to the feeling of satisfaction
or approval that follows action regarded as right and the
feeling of dissatisfaction or remorse resulting from wrong
conduct. "
You think of your conscience as a second self, a more
honorable self than the ego. The truth is it is your social
self. The ego, by comparison, is more erratic, whimsical,
spontaneous, noisy, demanding and unpredictable. It
claims more attention, but seems to work without system
or plan.
The contents of conscience are not inherited, and the
behavior requirements for "a clear conscience" are not
innately programmed. What heredity does supply is a desire to keep in good standing with the group. If the group
standards are fixed, compliance is an objective of the social
self. Since the basis of morality is the group code, the
on-duty policeman is the conscience.
Here it might be added that actions proposed or
prompted by the ego are often interpreted as evil and sinful, in other words, "unconscionable." These value judg-

The Social Appetite

33

ments are easily applied to members of an outgroup. Actions supposed to be beneficial to an ingroup are interpreted as good.
Good and evil, right and wrong, depend largely on group
standards. Sometimes, since the altruistic drive is partly
directed by reason, what is good or bad depends on the
decisions of individuals. Group standards were developed
during two hundred million years in which death sentences
were handed out by the herd or the environment to those
transgressors who treated the code too lightly. Deviation
from the group pattern resulted in loss of group protection, which was frequently tantamount to loss of life.
Consequently, after all this time none of us is born without
great sensitivity to the collective discernment of society.
Religion is rooted in and receives its nourishment from
our social inclinations. The fact that religiosity, as a psychological trait, is universal is the best evidence that it is part
and parcel of our biological heritage.
Man as an individual is and feels incomplete. He seems
to sense the fact that he never could have become man by
himself, only in cooperation with his tribesmen. The tribe
has been his helper, his partner, his protector and his companion. His most intense desires, vague as they are, have
been for the attention, the approval, the companionship
and the sympathy of the tribe.
These deep-seated feelings, firmly engraved on everyman's genetic code, were there for millions of tribal years,
pre-human as well as human. Any deviant who did not long
for the company of his fellowmen was in danger. A harsh
environment would quickly put an end to him and he would
leave no offspring to pass on his aberration to subsequent
generations. Only those imprinted with the social appetite
survived. And thus it became an integral component of the
human condition.
Religion was originally the feeling of gratification of the
individual for the benefits received and to be received from

34

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

the tribe. And it is both a major implementation of the

social drives and the dynamic drive of the ego-tribal duality.1t serves along with the other social feelings as a balancing factor for the aggrandizing drives, which arise from the
self.
Life was tribal during millions of years of hominid evolution, during which religion was interwoven with every aspect of life. The medicine man was the high priest, presiding over ceremonies and rituals which the tribesmen felt
were important, though they could not have explained why.
Modern researchers usually think of religion as a structure
of superstitions. They cannot seem to get it into their heads
that its primary function was to keep the tribe unified.
In later times tribes recognized links with other tribes
and expanded into social units known as civilizations.
Then, as knowledge became specialized and more complex, it divorced itself from religion. Philosophy separated
from theology, economics from philosophy, sociology from
economics. Special interest groups of a thousand varieties
were formed. An individual might be attracted by, and his
loyalty fixed on, a gang, club, fraternity or association,
pressure group, corporation, baseball team, scientific society, revolutionary "movement," political party, province
or region. Today most people feel a common bond with
at least two or three such social units.
Religion is about all that has come down to us from tribal
life, from the long forgotten days when the loyalty of members was undivided. The old tribal functions are now the
legacy of our local church. Such functions include marriages and funerals and most important of all-fellowship.
We must pursue the relation of religion to the social
order a little further. We all vaguely understand the statement that "the kingdom of God is within you." This is
almost the same as saying that a very important part of us
is not on center stage.
The self is often considered by religious teachers as a
foil. They prefer to appeal to the social side of the mind;

The Social Appetite

35

to the desire for companionship, attention, acceptance,

recognition and approval; to our need to tell somebody
what is bottled up inside of us; to the desire to be "in" and
to "belong." They also play on our conscience and our
altruism by alternately appealing to our "better instincts,"
praising the virtues of repentance and chiding and reprimanding us for our sins.
Altruism and conscience are essential building blocks of
religion. Doing things for others is given tremendous importance in most denominations. A person noted for his
altruism is thought of as "good," even if he belongs to a
different denomination. The famous poem of Leigh Hunt
expresses a widely held attitude:
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!

Ethel Percy Andrus, founder of the National Retired

Teachers' Association, has said, "The loftiest aim of human
life is unselfish service to others." Much of the wisdom of
the past conveys that thought. "Let the wise man show
forth his wisdom, not in words but in good works." "By

36

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

charity were all the elect of God made perfect: Without it

nothing is pleasing and acceptable in the sight of God."
Ella Wheeler Wilcox put it this way:
So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths, that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.

Sir Richard Steele, who died in 1729, asserted, "The noblest motive is the public good." William Wordsworth
wrote in 1798:
That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

Oliver Goldsmith complimented a pastor in these verses:

Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And e'en his failings leaned to Virtue's side.
His ready smile a parent's warmth expres!-ed,
Their welfare pleased him and their cares distressed.
As some tall cliff, that lifts, its awful form,
Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.

Cicero remarked, "The diligent husbandman plants

trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit." Robert
Bloomfield, born in 1776, said:
Thine heart should feel what thou may'st hourly see
That Duty's basis is humanity.

Horace Mann had this advice: "Be ashamed to die until

you have won some victory for mankind."
Were Hunt, Andrus, Wilcox, Steele, Wordsworth, Gold-

The Social Appetite

37

smith, Cicero, Bloomfield and Mann speaking religiously

or clarifying that aspect of the inherited social impulse
which is altruism? The answer is both. Altruistic thoughts
and deeds are offshoots of religion, and religion, as we have
seen, does not come from on high but from the genes.
Of course there is a certain "religious" puzzlement and
awe at the power of electricity and gravity, at the spinning
of the planets and the blinding lightning, and even the
cold-blooded process of evolution. But these are not
deemed to be the work of the personal and personified
God, the God of love from whom all blessings flow.
It may be hard for us to admit, but the indiscriminate
exercise of kindness can encourage loafing or wrongdoing.
We all have duties, not only to individuals, but to the social
structure that serves us, and in case of conflict the social
structure must be given priority. Unconditional charity to
people who are a burden to society is the insidious destruction of society. There should only be charity when it does
not increase the need for charity.
If we look at society as a whole, we will see that it is based
largely on expectations. Perhaps this is not the right word,
because the word "expectations" implies conscious anticipation, whereas the basic feelings which comprise the social appetite are in the subconscious and rarely rise to
consciousness except when something goes wrong. The
trouble is, there isn't any word which exactly represents
the psychological component of society, probably because
the subconscious aspects of mind have not been studied
enough to develop an appropriate vocabulary.
Nevertheless, social structure is essentially a subconscious constituent in the mind which, when it comes to
consciousness, gives the impression of an expectation. A
student habitually comes to school at two minutes before
eight. Did he "expect" his teacher to be there already? If
you asked, he would have said yes. In reality, however, the
teacher had not been on his mind until you asked, or until
he discovered that she was not there!

38

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

We know that the airline clerk will be where he is supposed to be when we go to buy a ticket; that an officer will
be at the police station when we phone; that the fire department will come to our burning house when we call; that the
newspaper will be on our front lawn by six o'clock; that,
if we send a check to the insurance agent, our bank will see
to it that the appropriate sum is transferred from our account to the insurance company's account. We know these
things. But they are not in our consciousness. We simply
take them for granted. If something should go wrong, however, we raise a racket. "We never miss the water till the
well runs dry."
Factories, farms, theaters, TV networks-and their personnel-are all part of the social structure. On them we
have developed a strong psychological depende"nce which
we can define as "expectations," even though they are only
in our subconscious.
Social structure, which wasn't built in a day, functions
because people willingly fit in and cooperate. It rests on
the habits and expectations which mold an individual to the
system and the results of conditioning. But the basic elements of the habits-and the basic foundations of the
whole social structure-are the primary motivations, which
are inherited.
Though social structure of some sort has been present
in all group living, a complex social system is necessary for
civilization, which depends on intelligence, another gift of
heredity. Inventions require intelligence; so do the division
of labor, the exchange of products and services, and the
variety of other procedures and processes typical of complex social organizations.
The social appetite leads to order. Among our prehuman ancestors sympathy and the desire for social approval made mutual aid and cooperation the rule, long
before the human mind had acquired the capability for

The Social Appetite

39

logical reasoning. Cooperation and appreciation for order

reduce the range of individual action.
But, it may be said, these limitations are processed in the
individual's mind and are not external compulsions which
interfere with freedom. Yet, these socially oriented restraints are the basis for a large proportion of customs and
laws. By its very nature civilization requires and imposes
systematic brakes on individual impulses, brakes which are
normally accepted unless or until people are led, or misled,
to believe they belong to a different social unit or to believe
those who enacted the restraints are outsiders.
We can never lose the urge for freedom entirely because
it is an essential part of self. Even a bee or an ant has to
have a dose of it to organize his behavior. But to be utterly
realistic about freedom, we must think of it in a matrix of
social expectations, customs and institutions.
Again, no man can be wholly free. Could you be free to
drive your car down the left side of the center line of the
road? If your conscience or a police officer didn't stop you,
you would probably be more severely restrained by a headon collision. At any event your freedom would be very
short-term.
Order in social relations was probably preceded by or
accompanied by order in minds.
The subconscious level of the brain stores an amazing
number offacts and attitudes. But it isn't only a storehouse;
it's a workshop. As facts accumulate from day-to-day experience, they are dumped together in a somewhat unorderly fashion. The ego does the sorting and organizing.
From its main office on center stage, it attempts to maintain
consistency in classifications and conclusions. It keeps a
tolerable showing of order, but probably never quite measures up to its innate drive. However, when the information
reaches the stage of consciousness, the semblance of order
makes us feel pleased. If it weren't for the continuing cas-

40

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

cade of new and disturbing happenings coming to our attention, we would enjoy a moderately satisfying "frame of
mind."
But the point is that the struggle for understanding goes
on even while we are not conscious of it. Parables playa
part. Sometimes we have reveries. We mull over what we
said and what we could or should have said. Or we engage
in fantasies, in which our imaginary role is more satisfying
than our actual performance. The subconscious mind, with
prodding from the ego, keeps active, not even coming to
a full stop when we are asleep. In fact, it may be that
processing new experience is a regular function of sleep,
as automatic a function as the digestion of food.
In evolution, consistency and orderly thought have survival value in the same way that knowledge has. Fitting the
facts together in correct patterns facilitates appropriate action and reaction.
We have now examined a number of feelings which unite
us with other people. We have a hunger for companionship, for friendship, for attention, for acceptance, for
recognition and approval. We want to be "wanted, loved
and appreciated." We have the habit of indulging in sympathy, altruism and mimicry. We have a conscience, and we
are prone to fear, joy and all kinds of suggestibility. All
these drives, impulses and emotional states and traits support the proposition that we have an inherited social appetite.
Hopefully by this time we will agree that our social appetite is as truly innate in us as it is innate in baboons, chimpanzees, sheep, horses and honeybees. As we have tried to
show, it is not a single motivating force but a whole neural
and chemical motivating system.
Finally, it was because of the social appetite that civilizations came into being. Later we will demonstrate that it also
destroys civilizations.

Chapter 4

Speech: The Tool of Sociality

Speech is civilization Itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact-it is silence which isolates.
Thomas Mann

The world has been indoctrinated by the anti-heredity

behaviorists for forty years. They have never ceased repeating that heredity has almost no place in human behavior;
that if a person behaves destructively the causes are solely
environmental. Their theory leaves no room for the
thought that most misfits are born not made. It therefore
seems appropriate at this point to offer additional evidence
that heredity provides the groundwork for civilization and
that by ignoring heredity man is inviting his own destruction.
In pursuit of this evidence we will first turn our attention
to speech, which would have had no function and would
never have developed except for the social appetite. Having no survival value for the isolated individual in a harsh
environment, speech is mainly important to the group and
its cooperative efforts. The faculty of speech would not
have been bred into man by countless mutations if speech
had had no inherited motivational structure. The fact is the
social appetite must have created a readiness for communication, a communicative capability as firmly anchored m
heredity as the vocal chords and the tongue.

42

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Favorable social attitudes, already fixed in inherited neutral patterns, must have been the nourishing matrix which
led to the spread of mutations conducive to speech. Which
social attitudes? Friendliness and cooperation, to name
two. They would reflect the hunger for cGmpanionship, the
yearning for approval, the altruistic tendency and many
other aspects of the social area of the mind.
When did your ancestors learn to talk?
Miss Jane Goodall's work for the National Geographic
Society has been widely publicized, particularly her study
of the behavior of chimpanzees (Science News Letter, March
21, 1964). She found that chimpanzees communicate by
means of more than twenty voice sounds. A similar facility
must have been developed by our remote ancestors.
Speech implies the ability to fit things, events and acts into
certain categories, the ability to think not only of particular
items but also of classes of items, which are represented
by symbols. A word is a symbol and at least some of the
twenty distinctive sounds of Jane Goodall's chimpanzees
must have symbolized basic forms of actions or basic kinds
of things. (Some could have been emotional symbols such
as exclamations of joy or fear.)
Our ancestors were not yet human beings when they
came down from trees more than twenty million years ago.
In that long-ago era they were probably not even apesjust chattering monkeys. Our voice sounds must have
started when we were still tree dwellers. This seems likely
because most earthbound creatures risked extermination
if they announced their presence with sounds. Only on
special occasions do defenseless ground animals use sound
signals.
The evidence is strong that the ape which evolved into
man was a beast of prey whose survival was not endangered
by oral expression. Raymond Dart in Adventures with the
Missing Link, Robert Ardrey in African Genesis and Desmond
Morris in The Naked Ape agree in that conclusion. Most

Speech: the Tool of Sociality

43

speech mutations probably paralleled the development of

aggressIOn.
In contrast with ground dwellers, birds are extremely
vocal. They can afford to be because they can flyaway from
the danger that their song invites. Equally vocal are some
kinds of monkeys. Trees provide safety from marauding
tigers and other large flesh eaters. Our own development
of speech might never have started if our ancestors had not
spent a few million years in trees. There is a good chance
that before they moved permanently to the ground they
were already using a few meaningful sounds-probably
more than the nine that present-day gibbons have and
more than the twenty used by chimpanzees.
Each successive stage of communication has been essential to our transition to human status. C. Judson Herrick
in The Evolution of Human Nature (p. 405) has this to say
about the importance of speech:
This ability to communicate with others through the medium of
spoken or written words, pictures, and other objective symbols
is the basic factor of man's superiority over all other living creatures.

Much of our thinking is in symbols, mainly in words. The

effective application of symbols requires intelligence,
which therefore has a close link to language. At a certain
stage in the transition from the "dumb animal" level, a few
individuals in our ancestral groups and later a majority
could think well enough to be classified as human beings.
Could we call the slow learners in the bright tribes human
too? Or were some members ofa tribe human while others
still lacked the qualifications? If, on the way up, some individuals were human and some were not, then the same
situation may apply on the way down!
It is well recognized that, since cooperation is a major
factor in survival, for a considerable period during the de-

44

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

velopment of speech, collective action with others must

have gone hand in hand with the development of intelligence. The connection between these parallel occurrences
is their combined effect on survival. A favorable mutation
in problem-solving ability would lead to more effective cooperation, if language were available to transmit ideas.
This does not mean that then, or today, the most intelligent people were or are the smoothest talkers. Intelligence
had survival value apart from promoting cooperation.
When verbal mechanisms, which seem to have paced the
problem-solving ability for a few centuries, had become
common to practically all mankind, mutations beneficial to
intelligence appeared in other problem-solving areas.
Speech depended on various mutations in tongue, lips,
larynx, pharynx and vocal chords. We learn about such
matters in Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races. Some of
these mutations occurred in our monkey stage, some after
we became apes, and some since we, or most of us, became
human.
Two books are especially useful for understanding the
phenomenon of speech: Biological Foundations of Language by
Eric H. Lenneberg and Speech and Brain Mechanisms by Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts.
As these authors point out, the machinery of the mind
is very specialized. Brain cells with responsibilities for a
tremendous array of specific muscle movements are pinpointed in certain areas. Even memory is separately
located. One area in the brain is reserved for remembering
experience; another for remembering a concept which results from experience. In both cases when we speak of
memory, we must also include remembering the word or
words that describe the experience or the concept. Consequently, a brain injury may leave the concept of "butterfly"
but not the name.
The file of names is apparently in cells of the dominant
hemisphere, which for most of us is the left side of the

Speech: the Tool of Sociality

45

brain. There are three main speech areas, one of them

being near the rear of the dominant temporal lobe. A temporallobe reaches from about an inch and one-half forward
from the opening of the ear to about two inches to the rear
of the opening of the ear, and an inch above. At the bottom,
at about the level of the ear opening (the auditory canal),
the temporal lobe curves under. Penfield describes the
temporal lobe on the dominant side as the interpretative
cortex where reasoning takes place.
Not only memory but reasoning, speech and writing are
separately programmed. Writing, of course, involves a
completely different set of symbols than the sound symbols
of speech. Each category requires myriads of nerves. After
training, some of the connections become automatic.
Intelligent speech requires that consciousness select
concepts from a stored array. The nerves representing the
chosen concepts shunt energy to nerves managing the corresponding word patterns. As Penfield says, "One must
suppose . . . that the resultant activation of each concept
brings up in turn the pattern of corresponding words by
acquired automatic reflex action." Then the consciousness
system "sends forth the patterned stream of impulses that
end in speech or writing."
As we continue to quote from Penfield, be ready for
"centrencephalic system." That is his term for consciousness.
Reception of speech implies a reverse process: Listening to
speech or reading a book would send a stream of afferent impulses flowing inward over the auditory or the visual route,
through the transmitting stations of the COrlex, into the centrencephalic system. From here the stream must somehow exerl
its patterned effect upon the speech mechanism of the dominant
hemisphere. Ganglionic counterparls of the words are thus activated in the speech mechanism. As each word complex is thus
activated, it wakens, by its own automatic reflex, the corresponding concept. Thus, we have come around a circle which depends
on the reflex connection of each word or succession of words

46

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

with each corresponding concept. The connection between

speech mechanism and concept mechanism is evidently reflex
and automatic.

The biological aphorism, "Ontogeny repeats phylogeny," means that the development of the individual repeats or summarizes the history of the species of which the
individual is a member. I wonder if the timing of language
in an infant with the simultaneous growth of the body parts
may be a key to the timing of speech development in the
evolution of our ancestors. The infant first walks erect at
the age of about a year-shortly before he outgrows his
bandy-legs. Some crude word sounds are heard soon after.
According to the drawings in Raymond Dart's Adventures
with the Missing Link, Australopithecus seems to have passed
the bandy-legged stage at least a million years ago.
Eric H. Lennenberg concludes that the child's ability to
form concepts develops to a surprising extent before
speech. Corresponding developments in muscle and nerve
capacities, memory and motivation are made at the same
time.
In this connection an interesting experiment with a chimpanzee was conducted by R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice
T. Gardner of the University of Nevada. The two psychologists taught Washoe, their chimpanzee, the Standard
American Sign Language used by the deaf. At age five
Washoe was using 130 signs, sometimes grouping two or
more signs to make meanings. Among other things, she
learned to name herself and friends, to ask for flowers,
sweets and blankets, and to apologize for mischief and
toilet accidents.
Washoe was later transferred to a chimp colony near the
University of Oklahoma in a research program in charge
of Dr. William Lemmon and Dr. Roger Fouts. By 1972
Washoe, at seven, knew 200 signs.
Another chimpanzee, Lana, at Yerkes Primate Center of
Emory University, communicated by means of a special

Speech: the Tool of Sociality

47

push-key computer console of seventy-five symbols. Lana

learned all seventy-five. Though only three years old, she
would ask for a banana or other food, for music, and for
motion pictures. To get a response to her requests, she had
to put them in sentence form, starting with the symbol for
"please."
The story of Lana is continued in Reader:~ Digest (Oct.
1975) in an article, "The Ape that 'Talks' with People." She
was five years old by then. "Yerkish," the language of symbols devised for her, uses different colors in different positions, all activated by pushbuttons on keyboards. In her
computer language, Lana demonstrates a mental grasp and
resourcefulness far exceeding the expectations of psychologist Duane M. Rumbaugh, who has charge of the program, and Timothy V. Gill, one of Lana's teachers. In many
ways she is more intelligent than retarded individuals of the
human species.
The reports on Washoe and Lana teach us how utterly
incapable of civilization human beings would be without
speech.
What I have written about speech and the inherited social appetite which brought it into being should not be
construed as downgrading environment as a cause of specific human behavior. Dr. Anne Anastasi, eminent Fordham
University psychologist, was right in her statement that
every act is a result of heredity and every act is a result of
environment. No individual could be what he is or do what
he does without the influence of both. No society could be
what it is or do what it does without the influence of both.
My emphasis on heredity in this book must be understood
as a constructive and necessary reaction to the intolerance
of the behaviorists who have almost succeeded in making
heredity an illegal form of scientific study.
At this point, we will need one more chapter to set the
heredity record straight. Social motivations are not without
inherent boundaries.

Chapter 5

Constraints on the Social Appetite

You ought to 5ee the human zoo

Wzthin us caged and hid.
The Ego:S perched upon a perch,
Beneath it i5 the Id.
The Soul i5 ba5king 5leepily,
The P5yche make5 a fus5.
Come 5ee the zoo, but when you do
Don', feed the Ammus.
Richard Annour

For many millions of years the social impulses in our

ancestors' brain cells were enhanced and refined by the
winnowing out of members who had strayed from the tribe.
The group feelings of those who survived were thereby
strengthened. When there was tribal division, generally
due to the number of tribesmen exceeding the local food
supply, the gregarious traits were carried over in full
strength to the new tribe.
Nevertheless, after long years of separation when members of the old and new tribes met, they met as strangers.
If at that time food was again scarce, they also met as
competitors, and in many instances as enemie~.
Eventually, there were "our" group and "other" groups,
ingroups and outgroups, we-groups and they-groups. If a
group made no distinction between "us" and "them," it
was crowded away from the best sources of food, and had

Constraints on the Social Appetite

49

less chance of survival. There was little, if any, survival

value in mutations that broadened the social impulses
beyond the nuclear group. Conversely, except for occasional tribal confederations in the event of a widespread
war, there was survival value in maintaining the ingroup's
exclusivity-and keeping the outgroups out.
As previously stated, all of our ancestors' evolutionary
life as primates was tribal. That means millions of years of
tribal living-hundreds of thousands of generations! And
all the while emotions developed accordingly. A sweeping
friendliness for all mankind would have had no survival
value. Actually it would have exposed its possessors to
great dangers.
So intelligence continued to increase because it solved
problems, which extended the longevity and the procreational time span of those who possessed it. At last men
acquired enough problem-solving ability to see the advantages of the division of labor and other practices and processes that make up a civilization. Civilization, throughout
much of the world, put an end to tribal living, which had
been the maternity ward of the social appetite.
Though civilization did not change inherited drives and
motivations, it did permit, through use of previously acquired intelligence, a broadened application of the social
impulses-but one by no means broadened to the extent
of freely substituting "mankind" for the tribe. The proportion of people who had a friendly feeling for strangers still
remained very small. Only recently have we tried to rely
on reason to soften the code of enmity.
Psychological obstacles became even more formidable as
more extended social units were substituted for tribes. A
country with as many differing population groups as the
United States has to elicit patriotism largely by relying on
what Ardrey calls "The Territorial Imperative." Very little
patriotism can be evoked by social appeals.
But if a tribal situation should recur, the smoldering
loyalty of millions of years bursts into flame. A boy is lost

50

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

in the forest? Policemen, Boy Scouts, The National Guard

-thousands of volunteer "tribesmen"-comb the area, and
bring him home. Six inches of rain flood the lowlands and
threaten the lives of the inhabitants. Local Lochinvars and
Noahs bring horses and boats to the rescue. The feeling
of comradeship engendered by such crises can only be described as an explosion of the smoldering tribal spirit.
Normally, what we have "in our bones" for strangers is
hostility. We feel it in different degrees for foreign nations.
And we have the same feelings of distrust for various
groups of outsiders, even for individual strangers. The social side of mind, as it developed, never opened wide
enough to include all members of our species. The more
people differed from the ingroup norm, the more certain
they would be classified as aliens and outsiders.
"Consciousness of kind," a concept developed by sociologist Franklin Giddings, was a fashionable phrase in the
early years of this century. It has a measure of validity, and
helps clarify one of the most important restraints on gregariousness. It means that even such "loose" associations
as country clubs and scientific societies are based on feelings of exclusivity and sameness.
The London Spectator Uuly 25, 1970) asserted: "Men are
not indefinitely gregarious by nature, but are familial and
tribal. By and large they like and prefer the company of
their own kind." The article then went on to state "it is
fairly certain there are distinctive differences between ethnic and racial groups which can be categorized in terms of
'gene pool.' "
In this connection the columnist Kevin Phillips (May 6,
1973) points out that Europe is having its own ethnic
upheaval. Not only in Northern Ireland, but in Scotland,
Wales, Brittany, the Basque provinces, Catalonia, Aosta,
Trentino-Alto Adige, Jura, Alsace, Belgium and Carinthia
minorities and provincials are pushing increasingly for ethnic recognition and identity. Tribal psychology is alive and
kicking.

Constraints on the Social Appetite

51

Our hereditary social appetite, as we have seen, is sweeping and intense. But it was born, and so far has spent the
overwhelming proportion of its existence, in tribal groups,
in which likeness was the signal for amity and acceptance,
and difference the signal for hostility. Consciousness of
kind involves an assumption that physical similarity is accompanied by a similarity of attitudes.
For instance, a mother of three is likely to notice that the
two children who are nearest in age often form a partnership which excludes the third. Age discrimination is also
likely to occur in later stages oflife. Consciousness of kind
seems to be the most reasonable explanation.
A youth's close association with other youths results in
a "generation gap" between him and his parents. The gap
is now much wider than ever as a consequence of the increasing complexity of social environment, glorification of
the ego and sensationalized television programs.
Consciousness of kind often reduces to consciousness of
different attitudes. The parent-child schism is a typical
case. Richard Armour gives the problem a light touch:
Pleasant Company Accepted
I know what makes a good companion
On mountain top or in a canyon,
In living room, hotel, or bar,
Wherever such companions are,
At parties large, at parties small,
Or just the two of us-that's all.
And here, resolving your confusion,
Is my remarkable conclusion:
The people I most like to be with
Are those, I've found, whom I agree with.

Attitudes are often in conflict with attitudes and emotions with emotions. Fear may command you to run away,
but hunger says no, you can't go yet. Frequently ego feelings are antagonistic to social dictates. Ego says, "These

52

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

expenses would look reasonable for income tax purposes

if I double them." Conscience, the social monitor, responds, "You'll do it over my dead body." Ego says, "That
trash container is forty yards from here so I'll just drop
this pop bottle on the lawn." Conscience says, "You litterbug."
But the big battleground is where all the conflicting commands are socially motivated. Mark Twain felt pangs of
conscience when he fed a worthless beggar, but his conscience hurt worse when he turned the beggar away.
Our current civilization is overloaded with a multiplicity
of behavior codes, many widely different and most of them
clashing. Some individuals, as they lose themselves in a
maze of conflicting doctrine, cannot make up their minds
about anything and are swayed by almost every sort of
external influence. Others make up their minds too quickly
and are fierce protagonists for causes which may be of vital
importance or may amount to nothing at all. But the worth
of the cause does not matter. They are part of an ingroup.
They belong.
Few people know very much about their own pet "cause"
(or any other). Many who clamor for change are really
demanding more leeway for the egocentric drives they call
"freedom." They want greater leniency for robbers, dope
peddlers, rapists and murderers on the ground that society
made them what they are. Society surely has something to
do with its human end products. But whatever the cause
of faulty behavior, offenders must be punished. Punishment, if prompt and severe, is a very important conditioning influence on potential lawbreakers. Forgiving criminal
behavior is an invitation to repeat such behavior.
Intelligence acts as a referee for feelings. In a normal
array of attitudes we are basically hostile to any challenges
to our amour propre. This hostility is overcome and suppressed by gregarious drives which can be described as the
rounding out of the incomplete individual by association

Constraints on the Social Appetite

53

with others. But gregariousness is normally limited by consciousness of kind.

Reasoning plays a continuing part in the working out of
both social and self-centered drives. In a person of high
intelligence, reason often suppresses direct emotional responses or finds a more acceptable and more logical reaction.
If amity is to be extended beyond the scope of association, either geographically or to a different group within
the community, reason has to do the job with very little
support from innate emotions and impulses. The assumption that all men are brothers may be factual, if we go far
enough back in heredity. But they are no longer members
of the same tribe, and so cannot be expected to act as
members of the same tribe. Most people, in unfamiliar
relationships, cannot pledge allegiance to an abstract social
structure or to an alien ideology. If you understand a person, we are told, you will consider him a friend. This happens rarely. More frequently, to understand a person may
lead to fearing or disliking him.
In a civilization, and especially in a complex civilization
in which conditioning influences are legion, our interpretation of our surroundings is likely to diverge from that of
our neighbor. He may gravitate to one ideology, we to
another. The biggest herd is the national government. This
may include a vast array of subherds, many of them discordant. Our standards and our conscience will probably
derive from one of the small herds.
The more complex the large group becomes, the more
points of difference will arise between it and the member
groups. The more functions the big herd assumes, the
more its members will become captive members, and the
more thought-control is likely to be exercised by the big
herd's leaders.
In such manner our so-called "Federal" government-a
misnomer in an age of centralization-usurps more power
and functions, and its citizens become increasingly restless.

54

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

To bring them voluntarily into line the government exercises greater influence on our educational system as it
spends a larger proportion of our income. The USSR has
a system of thought-control that supports its totalitarian
functions. The United States is proceeding rapidly in the
same direction. Present pressure on our schools for racial
integration is a typical example.
The age-old habit of personalizing government tempts
people to praise or blame our political leaders for everything that happens. The truth is that our leaders may accelerate or retard change, but increasing population and more
involved human relationships are two of the chief reasons
for change-and these automatically require greater curtailment of personal decision-making. Since the complexity
of government is now beyond the comprehension of average citizens, democracy is sure to fade. Some visionaries
would centralize government even further, advocating a
world state. They do not perceive the straightjackets that
go with such dreams.
So unequivocally does civilization depend on mental attributes that the subject deserves further study. Thus far
we have seen that gregariousness, which evolved through
millions of years of herd and tribal association, maintains
a boundary, an outer edge at which social drives cease to
operate. Toward persons outside "the tribe," a feeling of
suspicion, if not hostility, is normal.
Anthropologists and ethologists have built up a considerable literature on the subject of aggression to support the
conclusion that hereditary social impulses are limited to
individuals who are in face-to-face association.
Aggression is the tendency to question or challenge the
claims of others, either by competition or violence. It may
be expressed by single individuals, by teams or by armies.
Is aggression conditioned or does it spring directly from
heredity? The answer is that it is very close to the ego
compartment of the mind, though when displayed by

Constraints on the Social Appetite

55

groups it also makes use of the cooperative mechanism of

the social impulse. In other words, there can be and often
is cooperation with associated individuals in aggressive activity against other individuals or groups.
Prominent among anthropologists and authors who have
concluded that aggression is an inherited drive are Konrad
Lorenz of Austria, Niko Tinbergen of Holland, Anthony
Storr of England and Robert Ardrey of the United States.
In his book Human Aggression Storr writes that a child has
offsetting tendencies. One tendency is to cling to its
mother. The offsetting tendency is to "explore and master
the environment." The latter is the aggressive trait and it
gradually results in independence from the mother. Storr
writes that such tendencies, somewhat modified, persist in
adulthood. Being social, a person needs other human beings. On the other hand, he must preserve his identity.
Consequently, exploring the environment and preserving
identity are both expressions of the aggressive drive.
In effect, Storr is saying that the mere fact of doing something independently is a characteristic of aggression. He
quotes D. W. Winnicott, who wrote, "At origin, aggressiveness is almost synonymous with activity."
Storr thinks of positive functions of aggression as: (1) the
spacing out of population; (2) sexual selection; (3) defense
of the young; (4) establishment of rank; (5) establishment
of order; (6) overcoming obstacles; (7) mastery of the external world.
Incidentally, the recognition of the child's innate tendency toward independence does not imply that there is
anything beneficial about parental permissiveness. The
child has to learn that there are limits to his power, while
his parents have to curb his explorations for his own safety.
If parents become submissive, the child will no longer be
convinced "that his parents are able to cope both with the
world and with himself." This idea may be shattering to the
child's development.
Parents should give their children books about men who

56

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

perform heroic tasks against heavy odds. But the heroism

should derive from persistence and skill, not violence. Parents, both in reality and in their children's books, must be
regarded as the hero's supporters, not his enemies.
Territoriality is an inherited mental characteristic of
many species, including man. Storr and Konrad Lorenz see
territoriality as coincident with aggressiveness. A feeling of
proprietorship over real estate is necessarily accompanied
by a willingness to defend one's occupancy. In some instances the proprietorship has been individual, in some
instances tribal. Either way, territoriality and aggression
are inherited psychological limitations on social impulses.
Reason may stretch the social inclination beyond the tribal
boundaries, but with every expansion there are additional
strains, additional captive groups, additional irritations. A
knowledge of man's heredity assures us that worldwide
political sovereignty would almost certainly lead to worldwide chaos.

Chapter 6

Death-The Servant of Life

We build, like corals, grave on grave

But pave a pathway sunward.
Anonymous

We should be aware that the creation of man was not a

piece of magic. "To create," says the American Heritage Dictionary, is "to cause to exist . . . to bring into being . . .
to originate." Adam's birth took millions of years. How
many millions depends on when in the evolutionary process we begin the countdown, and at what stage we label our
ancestor Homo sapiens.
The facts of human evolution are voluminous, fascinating and important. We will start with the early men who
lived in Africa about 750,000 years ago. Fossil remains of
at least seventy-four individuals have been studied. Since
Australopithecus africanus was a fairly close cousin of ours,
let's look him up in our anthropological Who Was Who.
Australopithecus was discovered in 1924 by Dr. Raymond
Dart, an Australian who had been educated in England and
the United States. In 1922, when Dart was head of the
Anatomy Department of South Africa's Witwatersrand University, Josephine Salmons, a student in one of his classes,
brought him a fossil baboon skull which had been found
in a lime works in a village about a hundred miles south
of Johannesburg.

58

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

A baboon belongs to that broad subdivision of mammals

called primates, which also includes monkeys, lemurs and
other species with similarities to apes and human beings.
Dart was quite excited about the baboon fossil and he
aroused the interest of a geology professor, Dr. R. B.
Young, who arranged that Dart should receive some more
fossil-bearing rocks from the same lime works. In these
Dart found the mineralized skull and face bones ofa youngster about five years old-a youngster, incidentally, who
was not a baboon!
Dart named the species to which the infant belonged
Australopithecus africanus or South African Ape. The find was
called the Taungs skull, and the infant that died threequarters of a million years ago has been called Dart's baby.
Robert Broom, a distinguished zoologist, saw the
Taungs skull in 1936. Considering it the most important
fossil ever found, he undertook a search for other specimens. He found several. Dart got into the act again and
found many more.
Living anthropoid (manlike) apes are of five kinds: chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, and siamangs. Australopithecus africanus was more like us than like any of the
above. He walked and ran in an erect position, as proved
by his short pelvis and the way his skull was balanced on
his spine. His biting apparatus was much like ours; his
canines did not protrude, though their roots were largevestiges of the days when canine teeth (fangs) were used
for fighting as well as for tearing food.
The big roots of our own eyeteeth tell us that our ancestors not only had fangs, but must have used them as weapons. A mutation which reduced the length and sharpness
of fighting teeth would have made the mutant an easier
victim for hyenas, wolves, snakes, baboons and other carnivores, unless he had invented weapons to replace the innate armaments taken from him by nature.
For years some scholars doubted that Australopithecus had
used weapons. Sherwood L. Washburn, in "Tools and Hu-

Death-The Servant of Life

59

man Evolution," Scientific American (Sept. 1960) and Robert

Ardrey in African Genesis (1961) relied on the "lost fang"
theory to claim that Australopithecus had weapons, even
though no trace of any such weapons had been found. They
further asserted that the only way such a mutation could
spread so widely was the regular employment of hand
weapons to insure that there were enough survivors to pass
the mutation around.
The question arises: How is it that both Australopithecus
and ourselves lost our fangs, yet kept our big canine roots?
The answer is that if there was no need to fight, ordinary
teeth would be more efficient than oversize canine teeth.
Biting and chewing would be easier and the process of
digestion would be improved. There would be a positive
value in mutations which substituted biting and chewing
implements in place of protrusions that had lost all their
usefulness. But there was no positive value in reducing the
size of the large roots. They serviced the biting and chewing functions as well as smaller roots. So there was no
reward for a mutation toward smaller roots.
Australopithecus brain sizes ranged from 435 to 700 ce.,
about the range of gorilla brains. But a gorilla has more
than four times Australopithecus s body size. According to
Carleton S. Coon, "the mean weight of adult male gorillas
is about 400 pounds." Dart gives the probable weight of
Australopithecus as less than 100 pounds. For comparison,
in modern America, brains probably average between 1400
and 1500 ce., a little more than twice the cerebral volume
of the smartest Australopithecus, though our bodies are less
than twice as large. W. H. Sheldon in his Atlas of Men considers 165 pounds as our average adult male weight. The
ratios of brain size to body size may be our most important
criterion for distinguishing human beings from other primates. The human classification seems only a matter of
degree.
Before leaving Dart's weapon-toting ape, we should
point out that tool-making is not a uniquely human talent.

60

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Jane Goodall testifies that she has seen chimpanzees use

leaves as napkins to wipe their sticky fingers and to scoop
up water for drinking. They also dig for termites with twigs,
and throw stones to frighten away enemies.
In his Adventures with the Missing Link (p. 167), Dart recounts that a hunter came upon eight excited chimpanzees
in a small clearing in a Cameroon forest. They were sitting
around the opening of a nest of ground bees. One after
another would dip a stick in the hole and withdraw it. Each
chimpanzee would then lick off the honey and dip the stick
.
.
m agam.
The Leakey family has contributed greatly to the knowledge of mankind's past. Dr. Louis Leakey was curator of
the Coryndon Memorial Museum in Nairobi, Kenya, from
1945 to 1961, and later was director of the Nairobi National
Museum Center for Prehistory and Paleontology. Since
1926 he has been fossil hunting in East Africa, where he
and his wife Mary have unearthed about 600 primate fossils, all of them related to distant ancestors of ours, some
much more distant than others.
Significant among the discoveries of Dr. and Mrs. Leakey
has been the ancient manlike fossil they called Zin.ianthropus,
an early Australopithecus-type individual that lived at least a
million years before "Dart's Baby." More recently, the
Leakey team has found evidence that dated Australopithecus
back to 2,400,000 B.C.
In 1968 Richard Leakey, the son of Louis, decided to
investigate a soil area at the eastern shore of Lake Rudolf,
in Northern Kenya, which after millions of years had
reached a thickness of 2,000 feet. His findings were reported in Science News (Nov. 27, 1971, Feb. 26, 1972 and
Nov. 18, 1972).
It had previously been estimated that Australopithecus
africanus had evolved into Homo erectus about a million years
ago, but Richard Leakey found fossils which were definitely
more manlike than previous discoveries, and yet were

Death- The Servant of Life

61

shown by potassium-argon dating and other methods to be

2,600,000 years old.
In that dim, dark past there were manlike creations with
a brain capacity of 800 cc. Compare that with your own
(about 1500 Cc.) and the prehuman Australopitheeus (435 to
700 Cc.). It seems clear that our ancestors had graduated
from their apehood way back in Pliocene times.
Richard Leakey thinks of Australopitheeus and Homo ereetus
as coexisting in the early Pleistocene. That is not to say,
however, that they had different lineages. It merely says
that Homo ereetus had branched off from the same family tree
earlier than previously supposed, and that it took a longer
period for the more gifted branch to displace the less
gifted. Leakey's discoveries also provided more conclusive
evidence that Homo ereetus had received his hominid mutations before he left Africa for Europe and Asia.
We are talking about 2,600,000 years ago, which means
that at least 100,000 generations of our ancestors have
lived, had offspring and died since then. It also means that
there has been ample time for great and significant changes
by variations, mutations and the early deaths of unadapted
brothers, sisters, children and tribesmen.
To understand who were deprived of direct descendants
by early death we must first look at human beings in a state
of nature, when each individual had to provide for him~elf
in much greater measure than now. Hardships were frequent and severe. The strong, quick, alert and intelligent
people could either handle the dangerous situations or
dodge them more successfully than their weaker, slower,
less alert or less intelligent relatives and tribesmen. Those
with fewer of the favorable traits, or more of the unfavorable traits, were much more likely to die-and die early,
before they themselves could reproduce.
Quickness, speed, alertness, vision, hearing, perception,
physical strength and intelligence are to a great extent
transmitted via the genes. But individuals vary in their endowment of these and other characteristics. Even brothers

62

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

receive them in unequal measure. In the faraway past, more

of the less nimble humans died in childhood, killed perhaps
by hyenas and black panthers. As a result, later generations
were more alert and could run faster. They were the descendants of fathers and mothers who had been able to
escape the beasts of prey.
Evolution depends on mutations, which are changes in
the genes themselves-changes in the biological pattern of
the individuals. Some are beneficial, but most are harmful.
Occasionally primitive people with a favorable mutation
changed their location because food was getting scarce.
Moving about, they would come in conflict with a group
without the favorable mutation. More of the latter would
be killed, thereby resulting in a disproportionate "survival
of the fittest." Unless death had culled out the weaklings,
the less fit would have reproduced, and subsequent tribal
generations would have been no more advanced than earlier ones.
Death not only removed a deficient individual from a
blossoming society, but it removed his genes from the gene
pool of his tribe. Consequently the tribe and the species
were both improved by nature's program of "negative eugenics." Death, by permitting the winners to mate and denying the privilege to the losers, was a "servant of life."
The time-tested process by which humans climbed up
from the ape is often gruesome, but magnificent in its end
product-Man. Clement Wood caught some of this magnificence in his poem, "Time."
The rock is dead, and does not mark Time's going;
The grass that feeds upon its aging head
Takes of the ancient soil to speed its growing,
But to Time's passing is forever dead.
The pine that shivers on the windy height,
The seaweed dozing in the stagnant sea,

Death-The Seroant of Life

Are blind to blazing sun and blinded night,
As to the gray stretch of infinity.
The deer that crop the grass are more than these,
Stirring upon the stirless face of land;
The bird that has its choice of kingly trees
Kings it, all unaware that near at hand
There is a hidden and a precious way
To make long yesterdays nourish today.
Why, there are larks that wake the English woods
Whose fathers saw fierce Caesar beach his keel,
And shake the Druids' solemn solitudes
With the harsh clangor of the naked steel.
There are sleek dolphins in the tossing spray
Whose ancients saw Apollo come to port,
And yet their knowledge cannot leap today,
Nor spin the heavy ages for their sport.
Forever locked to grass and toughened tree,
Forever barred from animal and bird,
The travelled vistas of eternity,
The dust the marching centuries have stirred.
They are Time's abject creatures; they are slaves,
Who crumble dumbly into crumbling graves.
But out of jungle loins a being came
Fitted to smooth the jungle to his will,
Whose groping vision sharpens to a flame
That leapt lightly above your highest hill;
One who could add one day unto another
Until the hoarded store was rich and vast;
Kin of the ape and the strong eagle's brotherAnd yet himself, and none of these, at last.
Now tremble, Time, for your unbroken swayHere is a lord will share your ancient throne.
He travels far beyond the thin today,
And makes forgotten yesterdays his own.
The half-chained spirit, Time, shrinks at man's nodAnd a whole conquest makes of man a god.

63

64

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Wood may have carried his glorification too far. But in

contrast to the "stirless face of land" or "the pine that
shivers on the windy height," or even the deer, the larks
and the dolphins, the sons of apes have done all right.
How many ancestors have you had in the 100,000 generations of man since the great days of Australopithecus? Even
a computer would be incapable of answering, because
many of our ancestral lines have merged.
Nevertheless, the number of your direct ancestors runs
into the millions. In your great-grandfather's generation,
you had eight ancestors. In the tenth generation before
you, you had 1,024 direct ancestors, unless there were
some cousin marriages. Since each ancestor had two parents, just try doubling the numbers for each generation.
Allowing thirty years per generation, in the last ten generations you had 2,046 ancestors. That many forebears since
New Amsterdam became New York!
In the 20th generation before you, you had more than
a million ancestors. In 100,000 generations the figures
would be fantastic, if it were not for the merging of ancestral lines. With all that genealogy in your family tree, it is
not surprising that favorable variations and mutations,
together with the elimination of the tribal members who
did not share them, have given you some special talentsmost importantly, talents that have to do with thinking.
Unfortunately, a great deal of suffering took place as
these favorable mutations and variations were imprinted in
your heredity. The evolutionary process brought about the
untimely death of countless individuals who lacked favorable variations and mutations. Hunger, cold, accidents,
germs and carnivores also took a frightful toll. Yet, among
the many millions of your direct ancestors, not one was a
victim of infant mortality. Everyone of your forefathers had
what it took to survive! Otherwise, you would not be here.
As an example of evolutionary extremism, we can point

Death- The Servant of Life

65

to the Black Death. What more conclusive proof do we

need to show:
(1) That the benefits of civilization are not free;
(2) That evolution's wild, almost hit or miss, method
makes evolution awfully costly;
(3) That human reason has done a good job breeding
domestic animals and plants, and could also do a good job,
given the chance, with humans.
The Black Death struck England in 1348. Within two
years, says the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, "a loss of
one-third of the population appears to be indicated in
many cases, and a much greater loss in a few villages and
towns."
Before the plague struck, the English people had been
increasing for many years and were outstripping the food
production necessary to keep them alive. Conditions were
verging on famine when the Black Death arrived from
China via Italy.
In London nine-tenths of the inhabitants were lost. Although "lost" seems to imply harm, this is one of those
instances in which a short-run minus can be a long-run
plus. As a consequence of so many deaths, labor was scarce
and land became plentiful. Wages shot up in spite of "controis." Enclosure of lands for use as sheep pasture was
profitable. All in all, Englishmen who survived the plague
were more secure and worth more per capita than the more
numerous Englishmen of the previous era.
There were also some genetic benefits. The Black Death
was bubonic plague in combination with primary pneumoni, plague. Fleas transported on rats were the main
carriu. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences tells us that the
proportion of deaths among "the richer classes" was low.
We may safely assume that the richer classes included
more than an average proportion of capable people, and
that the crowded slums held more than their share of incapable people. Also, since intelligent persons, whether rich

66

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

or poor, are more careful about rats and insects than unintelligent persons, a smaller percentage of the former would
have been bitten by the infectious fleas. In Scotland, "the
meaner sort and common people" comprised most of the
plague victims.
The Black Death, a concentrated dose of evolution,
helped to usher in a society which was more efficient than
the one that had preceded it, while it also set the stage for
the agricultural revolution. Because of the scarcity of workers, more attention had to be paid to developing laborsaving devices for the farm. Freed by necessity from the
"web of custom," more analytical minds went to work. A
new wave of prosperity encouraged improvements in maritime trade, which in turn was a stimulus for the industrial
revolution.
A less extreme demonstration of evolution was furnished
by the American Pilgrims. There are, as Ellsworth Huntington has intimated, selective processes involved in long and
difficult human migrations. Since those who arrive are generally superior to those who start, the best-fitted Pilgrims
reached the colonies.
The Pilgrims were separatists who disapproved of the
easygoing Anglican Church. This separation, in itself, was
part of a sorting process. Another weeding out took place
in the migration from England to Amsterdam. Still another
derived from the decision to go on to Leyden in 1609.
In the first New England winter, the weeding out was
severe. In addition to one man who had died at sea, six died
in December, 1620; eight in January, seventeen in February, thirteen in March. Of the forty-one who signed the
Mayflower Compact, only twenty were left alive by the beginning of April, 1621-less than four months after their
arrival. There were six more deaths by the time the ship
Fortune arrived in the fall of the same year, making a death
toll of 51 of the original 104. After this came the famines
of 1622 and 1623. Most Americans tend to forget that the

Death-The Seroant of Life

67

process of biological evolution, the weeding out of the less

hardy, the less adaptable and the less wise, which had been
active so long among wild creatures and primitive peoples,
was also at work among the first white settlers of New
England.
Conditions improved in the next decade, yet of the 2,000
who migrated to Massachusetts in 1630, ten percent died
in the following winter. At that time most of the settlers
were coming to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Selective
processes were evident in this migration because the arrivals included a considerable proportion of prosperous merchants.
Is there any evidence, besides the logic of the evolutionary mechanism itself, to show that the surviving Pilgrims
and Puritans were superior to average Englishmen?
In Mainsprings of Civilization Ellsworth Huntington classified New England surnames in four groups, according to
dates of arrival in America: those arriving in 1620-1635;
in 1636-1643; in 1644-1692; and in 1693-1790. He then
estimated what proportion of people in 38 American cities
bear those names, and what portion of these achieved distinction. He pointed out that, although they come from a
much diluted stock, "the differences between people descended from Puritans who arrived in America early in
contrast with those who arrived later are surprisingly
great." Members of the 1693-1790 group, he asserted,
"did not undergo such difficulties as beset the earliest migrants," so they had not been weeded out in any comparable proportion and their achievements had been fewer and
far between.
One of Huntington's studies relied on names in Who s
Who in America. In each occupational field he found nearly
twice as many people whose ancestors came here in 16201635 as those whose ancestors came in 1693-1790. Among
other things, Huntington compared the inventive talents
of descendants of early arrivals to the population at large.

68

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

He found that the posterity of the early colonists had been

given patents in far greater proportion than the general
population.
Here we should refer to a scholarly study by Stephen
Sargent Visher, Scientists Starred, 1903-1943. Vis her provides a goldmine of interesting and useful information
about outstanding contributors to scientific knowledge. Of
the fifty women who were named as outstanding scientists,
almost all were of Puritan descent. Of the men, a larger
number were descended from Puritans than from any other
group.
The beginning of American civilization was unique in its
details, but not in its general pattern. As everywhere, the
weeding out of the weaklings and the consequent improvement of the average biological level of the group preceded
the high points of civilization-and the more rigorous the
weeding, the more phenomenal the subsequent achievements.
Virginia serves as another example. Five thousand people migrated from England to the vicinity ofJames town in
1606-1624, but by the end of that eighteen-year period
only I ,200 had survived. Three-fourths of the migrants had
succumbed to starvation, Indian attacks, malaria and other
misfortunes. Could these tragic experiences be a partial
explanation of the fact that seven of the first twelve of our
country's presidents were born in Virginia?
The "creative minority," to which Toynbee refers in his
Study of History, has been dazzlingly inventive in America.
Take one of its most gifted members, Benjamin Franklin.
In 1742 he invented the stove that still bears his name. In
1746, at age forty, he was the first to discover that static
electricity is both positive and negative. In 1748 he designed the first pair of bifocal glasses. In 1752 he invented
the lightning rod. In that year he also experimented with
heat conductors. In 1768 he wrote of the cooling effects
of evaporation. Later he found that boats of slight draft

Death-The Servant of Life

69

move faster in a canal than those of deep draft. In 1769 he

charted the Gulf Stream.
Besides brilliance of a scientific sort Franklin organized
the Philadelphia Fire Department. He was a member of the
colonial Pennsylvania assembly. He was postmaster general of the American Colonies. He authored Poor Richard's
AlmanacR and edited the Pennsylvania Gazette. He founded
a circulating library that became the Philadelphia Library,
a discussion group that became the American Philosophical
Society and an educational institution that became the University of Pennsylvania.
Franklin's work as a diplomat and as one of the formulators of the American Constitution is widely known. His
proposal at the Albany Congress of 1754 for a colonial
union was further proof of his wisdom. It was rejected, but
it might have given us independence without a war.
Exhibit number two is Eli Whitney. In 1798 the United
States government gave Whitney a contract to make 10,000
muskets. When the contract's two-year deadline expired,
only a few of the muskets had been made. Unsurprisingly,
the government was disturbed at what appeared to be the
almost complete failure of Whitney to live up to his agreement. But the inventor called a meeting in which he displayed the unassembled parts of ten muskets. The parts
were interchangeable and represented one of the first
demonstrations of mass production techniques. The government inspectors were quickly convinced that they could
have their 10,000 muskets in a hurry, and as many more
as they wanted. (Earnest]. Knapton in Europe, 1450-1815
tells us that Christopher Polhem of Sweden was "a pioneer
in producing standardized interchangeable parts" around
1700. But the genius of Polhem dims not at all the talent
of Whitney.)
The intellectual climate of America was favorable to invention. So was the political and economic climate. In 1791
Congress passed a law granting patent rights to inventors.
But more than a century and a half earlier the early colo-

70

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

nists had demonstrated their genius for innovation by using water power to operate windmills.
Later a number of saws were arranged in a gang that
would saw several boards or planks at once. The still more
efficient circular saw followed.
Timber was abundant: white oak, pine, hickory and maple. The colonists used the saws to make lumber for
houses, furniture, barns, boats and ships. John Smith built
some fishing vessels on the coast of Maine in 1614. The
Trial was completed at Boston in 1642, a sturdy craft of at
least 160 tons, approximately the size of the Mayflower.
Bear in mind that Boston, the first permanent settlement
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was established by Governor John Winthrop on June 17, 1630, only twelve years
before the Trial's launching. Its length was twice that of
today's average American house. By 1676,730 vessels had
been built in New England, and some 300 of them were
sailing out of Boston in the coastal trade.
A century later, at the beginning of the Revolutionary
War, New England citizens owned as many as 2,000 vessels,
in addition to fishing boats. Almost one-third of the ships
of Great Britain had been built in the colonies. There were
large industries engaged in sail making and rope making
and the forging of anchors. Iron for the anchors, rudder
fittings, spikes, chains and chain plates was available after
a mixture of vegetable mold and iron oxide had been found
at the bottom of ponds and bogs near Lynn, a few miles
northeast of Boston. Some samples were sent to England
for testing. The reports were encouraging. John Winthrop,
Jr., son of Governor Winthrop, organized a company with
both English and colonial members for the purpose ofmaking iron from the bog ore. The firm set up a furnace, used
charcoal as fuel, sea shells as flux, and a bellows powered
by a waterwheel. The enterprise was almost immediately
successful. In a few years deposits of ordinary iron ore were
discovered, and other iron works were started. After 1710
the development of the industry was rapid. By 1775 Arthur

Death-The Servant of Life

71

Bining reports in The Rise of American Economic Life, "There

were more blast furnaces and forges than in both England
and Wales."
Hat making, cloth making, flour milling, lumbering, fishing and several other industries dotted the colonial scene.
But the fact that the colonies, so soon after their etablishment, surpassed the mother country and the rest of the
world in such basic industries as iron forging and ship
building must mean that early Americans had an unusual
inborn capacity for achievement. There have been other
transplants of civilizations. But has there ever been a more
productive one?
The determined, purposeful, intelligent people who
comprised the first settlers were the pure gold that remained in the pan after the sand and mud were washed
away. No doubt there were many highly intelligent individuals who remained in England, but they had to spend
much of their time and effort taking care of the nonproducers. In America at that time there were almost no nonproducers. Brain power could concentrate almost exclusively
on building the future.
Arnold J. Toynbee in A Study of History mentions the
marsh men who lived and still live in the delta near the
outlet of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They adapted
themselves to the environment, but, Toynbee adds, "they
have never yet girded themselves for the task which the
fathers of the Sumeric Civilization accomplished in similar
country nearby some five or six thousand years ago, of
transforming the marshes into a network of canals and
fields. "
As to the manner by which the quality of a group is
improved, Toynbee uses figurative language, but it seems
to hinge on the elimination of weaklings. Repeatedly he
states that if the challenges to men are tough, many groups
will fail. But the response of the successful group will be
all the more brilliant. At one time in history, Toynbee reminds us, the Cossacks were under crushing pressure from

72

Why Civilzzations Self-Destruct

Mongol nomads. They withstood the pressure and transformed the nomads' cattle ranges into peasants' fields. The
Cossacks had been "tempered in the furnace and fashioned
on the anvil of border warfare."
Pitirim A. Sorokin in his monumental Society, Culture, and
Personality (p. 541) included heredity as one of five basic
factors in the rise of new social systems. "One is not
obliged," he said, "to subscribe to the claims of extreme
hereditarians and racialists to perceive that a fortunate
heredity is a prerequisite condition." Then, listing several
creative persons who had made notable changes in the
human condition, he observed that education and affluent
parents could not account for their achievements because
in some cases the achievements had been made without any
such advantages. The point was that such men had a special
biological heads tart. And finally, said Sorokin, the fact that
few social groups have been creative suggests that those
who were creative had a favorable biological heredity,
"especially when it can be shown that the environmental
opportunities of many uncreative groups have been better
than, or as good as, those of the few creative groups."

Chapter 7

Evolution in the Ice Ages

Evolution is the key word which will either amwer all the
riddles which mTTound us or put us on the way to their solution.
Ernest Haecke!

One of the controlling influences in man'sjourney to the

sapient stage was cold weather. The Ice Ages were harsh
schoolmasters who kept asking life-and-death questions.
Was a tribe too far north? Did its members have suitable
shelter for the winter? Did they have fur clothing? Did they
lay in an ample supply of grain, nuts, honey, dried fish? Was
wood handy to keep the fires blazing?
Freezing temperatures were not good for individuals in
the Ice Ages. But for the species-that is, for the descendants of those who survived-the frigid weather was a benefactor. Parents didn't have to worry that their daughters
would mate with worthless young men. When nature gets
rough, there are no worthless young men! From the standpoint of eugenics, the hostile climate raised the intelligence
level of the survivors' descendants sufficiently to pave the
way for civilization.
There were human beings in Europe about 600,000
years or 24,000 generations ago. This was the time of the
Ice Ages. The weather had been growing colder and colder
for many thousands of years before that. After unnum-

74

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

bered earlier ice ages, the Gunz Glaciation was probably

the first to affect human heredity. It lasted about 50,000
years. After that came some 70,000 years of mild weather,
which has been named the Gunz-Mindel Interglaciation.
The Mindel Glaciation was the second such protracted
period of selective influence on human survival. A vast ice
sheet piled up and extended slowly down into Northern
Europe. It lasted, according to the best estimates, from
480,000 to 440,000 B.C. From the Atlantic Ocean to the
Aral Sea, most of the scattered European bands of Homo
erectus people must have been killed by the Mindel freeze.
One or more of the ice sheets, which in many places were
as much as 10,000 feet thick, reached as far south as London, Calais and Dresden. But half of Belgium was spared,
and virtually all of France. To the south, where the ice
sheets did not reach, was vegetation, which meant foodand survival-for men and beasts.
Without the Ice Ages there would have been no civilization, which was the legacy of those who survived the bad
times. The great epochs of man grew out of the misery that
prevented the reproduction of all but the most resourceful
human specimens.
Ice Age Europeans who did not have the vision to prepare for the worst were not our ancestors. They were no
one's ancestors! Our forebears were among the chilblained, tenacious characters who anticipated bone-cold
winters and were ready for them when they arrived. Some
of the near relatives of Heidelberg Man, whose remains
were found only 100 miles south of the furthest extension
of the ice sheet, must have lived through the 40,000-year
Mindel Glaciation.
When we speak of time in terms of generations, it's easy
to see there was considerable opportunity for many mutations, good and bad, and the transfer of the many favorable
mutations by mating. Quite a few mutations could have
occurred in the 1600 generations during which the Mindel
Glaciation was sifting out the unfit.

Evolution in the Ice Ages

75

In its article on the "Pleistocene Epoch" the Encyclopaedia

Britannica states:
The skeletal parts show that marked evolution took place during
the 1,OOO,OOO-year stretch of Pleistocene times, particularly in
the brain, which increased greatly in size. The artifacts show a
gradual progressive increase in perfection and adaptability,
which in turn record an increase in intelligence and skill among
the people who made them.

It would be unreasonable to expect, however, that in the

temperate climate of the interglacial periods the evolution
of mankind would be as rapid as in the trying times of the
glacial deep freeze. We could not expect that the 200,000
years of the Mindel-Riss Interglaciation would be as effective in creating a race of problem solvers as the 40,000
years of the Mindel Glaciation or the 50,000 years of the
subsequent Riss Glaciation.
It is true that most of the artifacts and fossils we have
found belong to the interglacial epochs. The reason is simple. The mutations that maintained life in the fierce winters
that preceded the interglacials were readily available to
meet and solve the lesser problems of the temperate era.
Also a long stretch of relatively comfortable conditions
must have been a time of proliferation because birthrates
would have exceeded death rates. There were many more
tribesmen to work up the artifacts and leave them for our
archaeologists to find. More men would be born, more men
would die, and more bones would be fossilized.
Dating from the first part of the 200,000-year MindelRiss Interglaciation are flints, hand axes, scrapers and borers. There is evidence of life in caves, of fire and of burial
of the dead. It requires a higher form of intelligence to
create these things, an intelligence made possible by the
culling effects of the Mindel Glaciation.
The Mindel-Riss Interglaciation was the beginning of
paleolithic times; "paleo" meaning early, "lithic" pertain-

76

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

ing to stone. Another name for the period is the Old Stone
Age. By the degree of refinement of the stone tools in use
it is distinguished from neolithic times-the New Stone
Age.
The population of Homo ereetus in Europe must have been
thinned to almost zero by the Mindel Glaciation. Only the
few who boasted an almost Homo sapiens intelligence could
have survived.
But after the murderous siege of Mindel cold came 200,000 years of relatively good weather. In the population
proliferation that would have occurred in that sweep of
eight thousand generations, the quality of personnel would
have certainly deteriorated. It took three more Ice Ages,
the Riss Glaciation and Worm I and II, to raise the inventive quality to the level that resulted in the New Stone Age,
when tools were made more expertly and in greater variety.
A chart is necessary to illustrate the ancient Ice Age
timetable. For the earlier glacial periods I have used the
estimates of anthropologists Henri Breuil and Raymond
Lantier in The Men of the Old Stone Age and W. E. LeGros
Clark in History of the Primates, though recent geological
studies indicate that the earlier glaciations may have taken
place even earlier. What is important for our purposes here
is not the exact dates but the correlation of the weather
with human evolution.
For the latest 140,000 years I have relied on the findings
of Dr. Cesare Emiliani, geologist and anthropologist at the
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of
Miami. His study of deep-sea borings and densities of stalagmite and stalactite accretions in caves provides a fairly
clear picture of the weather conditions affecting relatively
recent human experience.
Australopitheeus, as we have seen in an earlier chapter,
seems to have attained the Homo ereetus stage before he left
Africa. Then after several thousand years in Asia and
Europe, where the winters were sometimes harsh, he discovered and used fire.

RELATIVE DURATION OF GLACIAL AND INTERGLACIAL PERIODS

(in thousands of years B.C.)
The humps are interglacial warm spells; the dips are the glacial periods. Below the dOlled line
there were thousands of frigid years with much of Europe and America under thick layers of ice.
Riss

600

400

500

Heidelberg Man

Old Stone Age

begins

200

300

Swanscombe Man

100

Neanderthal
Man

Cro-Magnon
Man

New Stone
Age begins

78

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

In Asia at the Choukoutien caves, forty miles southwest

of Peking, the site of the bones of persons collectively referred to as Peking Man, the remains of several hearths as
well as quartz tools were discovered. Bones of animals littered the area, together with the fragmented skeletons of
several human victims of cannibalism. Apparently one tribe
roasted and ate members of another. The brain cases of
four victims, according to Carleton Coon, ranged from
1,015 to 1,225 cc. The cannibal feast had apparently taken
place when Europe was in the midst of the Mindel-Riss
Interglacial-about 360,000 years ago. Peking Man seems
to have been of the Homo ereetus type, possibly Homo sapiens.
Fire was used by Homo ereetus in Europe as far back as
250,000 years ago. The evidence was found in the remains
of a hearth at Swanscombe, east of London. Not too far
away, at the same level, a skull was unearthed in the gravel
of a shelf left by an ancient channel of the Thames. It
was a woman's skull and had a brain capacity of about
1,300 cc.
Another Homo ereetus fossil is a jawbone, the only evidence of so-called Heidelberg Man. It was unearthed in
Germany, six miles southeast of Heidelberg. Heidelberg
Man lived earlier than Swanscombe or Peking Man. Steinheim Man, represented by another skull in Germany, lived
later than Heidelberg Man. Steinheim Man is really a
woman, with a brain case of about 1,150 cc. Belonging to
the same human species are some fossils discovered at
Ternefine, about a dozen miles from Mascara in Northern
Algeria.
In some phases of the Ice Ages, when the thickening ice
sheets absorbed much of the ocean's evaporation, the water level of the seas, including the Mediterranean, sank so
low it was possible to walk most of the way from Italy to
Africa.
Homo ereetus, both in Europe and Africa, had tools, but
they were not always made of stone, which means such
terms as paleolithic and neolithic are slightly misleading.

E votution in the Ice Ages

79

It is quite probable that every man or ape who had stone

and flint tools, including weapons, also had tools made of

wood, bone, antler, bamboo and shell, when and as those
materials were at hand. These easily shaped artifacts are
not often found, perhaps because they are much less enduring than stone.
Prior to the WUrm glaciation, perhaps as long as 200,000
years ago, there arrived in Europe a distinctive branch of
Homo sapiens-the Neanderthals. They acquired their name
from the Neander Valley in Germany, near DUsseldorf,
where in 1856 a fossilized skullcap was discovered. Since
then scores of Neanderthal remains have been found in
various parts of Eurasia, most of them in France.
Neanderthals are presumably the descendants of China's
Homo ereclus, who developed almost to the Neanderthal
stage in Asia. Carleton Coon writes that they had "Inca"
bones in their skulls-small bones where the right and left
parietal plates converge with the occipital. The Inca bones
are usual in Mongoloids, in both Asia and the Americas.
Coon thinks of Neanderthals as Caucasoids, and very likely
they picked up their Caucasian traits from captured women
in centuries of their westward migration.
Most of their "humanization" probably took place in
some frost-bitten pocket south of the ice sheets. Their
European territory may have been only a couple of ridges
away from the birthplace of Cro-Magnon Man. Perhaps the
Neanderthals found it necessary to resume their westward
trek when the proliferating and more intelligent Caucasian
Cro-Magnons, needing more caves and meat, made life
dangerously insecure for them.
The isolation required for the fixation of a mutation, or
for the dozen or more mutations, which furnish the identifying characteristics of a group, is a recognized part of
evolution. This isolation, sometimes called the pocket principle, must have been experienced not only by the Neanderthals but also by their replacements, the Cro-Magnons.
Only if a group is separated from other groups for many

80

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

generations does an individual trait become a tribal trait.

As a result of isolation, the mutation can be transmitted by
the mating process to a larger and larger proportion of the
tribe or hunting band. Eventually, after many generations,
every tribesman is a direct descendant of the single individual who first had the mutation. Since one individual
can be a direct descendant of many individuals, several
mutations from different individuals can be transmitted
throughout the tribe. Later, a tribe may expand into a race,
which then becomes both the guardian and receptacle of
the gene pool.
After mutations favoring intelligence have become general among a tribe, it expands into a clan or system of
tribes. A beneficial mutation might then be established in
all the tribes by intermating. But in general the special
characteristics of larger groups were fixed in the isolation
period of the parent tribe.
The Neanderthals had been in Western Europe for some
thousands of years. They survived the horrors of the first
WUrm Glaciation, and enjoyed pleasant weather from approximately 95,000 to 65,000 B.C. "Enjoyed" is perhaps
not the right word. Most likely they took the pleasant
weather for granted, as we do. All 30,000 years of it! Then
they disappeared, perhaps after a series of confrontations
with the Cro-Magnons.
A major concern for tribal man for thousands of years
was rivalry with other primates, including those who were
evolving into the hominid stage. Tribes and hunting bands
competed for the same hunting and fishing spots and for
berries and nuts from the same berry patches and groves.
Conflict was frequent. Over the millennia, tribe after tribe
was wiped out. In some conflicts women were captured and
became the property of the conquerors.
Culture transfer is the taking over by one group of the
practices and artifacts of another group. The capture of

E votution in the Ice Ages

81

women stimulated culture borrowing and, additionally,

had an important genetic effect. In periods when the physical environment was adverse, if the heredity of the captive
females was not adaptable to the heredity of their captors,
their offspring would have a higher early death rate than
the average child. If the captured woman introduced a
beneficial trait, their children would inherit it, and in a
number of generations it became a common characteristic of the adopting tribe. It is this kind of heredity transfer
that consolidated so many beneficial traits in a single speCies.
The Neanderthals appear to have had, in the size of their
brains, a good physical basis for intelligence. But though
Neanderthal brains were large, Cro-Magnon brains were
larger. The Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the sizes of their
brain cases as 1,550 to 1,750 cc. in comparison with modern man's average 1,400 cc.
When we mention brain size we automatically correlate
it with intelligence. Since consciousness is in the brain,
since thought processes are in the brain, since memory is
in the brain, we can justify such a correlation though it is
not a trustworthy test for each individual.
James J. Jenkins and Donald C. Paterson edited and authored a widely read book entitled Studies in Individual Differences, in which Paterson denies that brain size is an indicator
of intelligence. In fact, he calls the idea "phrenology." But
phrenology is or rather was a practice which attributed
mental characteristics to prominent skull areas. Although,
as Penfield and others have shown, behavior functions are
related to specific brain areas, they are not predictably reported by head bumps, and the phrenologists' head charts
had them in the wrong places anyway. So phrenology has
been universally rejected. To classify anything in phrenological terms is to condemn it from the start.
That general intelligence is proportional to brain size is
the kind of truth which "crushed to earth will rise again."

82

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

In 1906 Karl Pearson measured the heads of several thousand twelve-year-old youngsters and 1,010 Cambridge
University students and correlated the measurements with
teacher reports and scholastic grades. He found a positive
relationship of head size to grades and teacher appraisals
of achievement, though the coefficients were small.
PEARSON'S CORRELATION OF HEAD SIZE AND INTELLIGENCE

1011 Cambridge
Students

For Length of Heads

For Width of Heads
For Height of Heads

+ .11 .02
+.10 .02

2290 Boys
Age 12

2165 Girls
Age 12

+.14.01 + .08 .01

+ .11 .O 1 +.11 .01
+ .07 .01 + .06 .01

Pearson wrote that because of the small coefficients, "It

is impossible to use head size as a basis for judgment as
to intelligence." Leona E. Tyler in The Psychology oj Human
Differences (pp. 421-22) agreed. If these psychologists were
using head sizes for comparisons of individual intelligence,
their conclusion was justified. We cannot expect the correlation of brain volume with intelligence to be close, because
the size of our thinking apparatus is not the only factor
affecting intelligence. How much body the brain has to
service must also be considered. Another variable is the
folded-in convolutions of the cerebral cortex, which is the
outer layer of brain. The recessed portions of the convolutions increase the total surface, so a smaller brain with
many convolutions is equivalent to a larger brain with fewer
convolutions.
The Mankind Quarterly (April-June 1972) has a study by
Bertil Lundman entitled "Anthropological, Sociological
and Psychological Investigations of Swedish School Children." Approximately 1,100 students, mostly eleven-yearolds, were studied in Uppsala. Head size was one of the
measurements:

83

Evolution in the Ice Ages

LUNDMAN'S CORRELATION OF HEAD SIZE AND INTELLIGENCE

Average /lead Size (length plus

width) in millimeters

Boys in the Upper School

Boys in the Common School
Boys in Remedial Classes

331.5
329.7
327.3

Girls in the Upper School

Girls in the Common School
Girls in the Remedial Classes

326.0
322.9
314.1

The above figures should give the Pattersons, Pearsons

and Tylers cause to reevaluate some of their statements
about the unimportance of head size.
Evolutionists, as they study fossils in tracing the development of animal life, give a great deal of attention to skull
measurements. John Roddam in The Changing Mind (p. 90)
states, "Mammals differ from other animals mainly in two
ways: in the care of their young and the size of their brains."
Later he says mammals "have large skulls capable of housing out-size brains."
Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan T. Possony in The Geography
of Intellect (p. 57) assert "that brain growth parallels the
development of intelligence in childhood, and that by the
time mental growth has been completed, brain growth has
also stopped." They quote David Wechsler, who designed
the Wechsler-Bellvue Intelligence Scale: "It is to be noted
that 'heavy' brains have generally been those of men of
genius and there would seem to be some correlation,
though not a great one, between size of brain and mental
capacity."
In The Mankind Quarterly (April-June 1971) Weyl writes:
"Throughout the animal world there is a positive association between the mental ability of a species and its brainweight to body-weight ratio. We find a similar progression
in the various anthropoid apes, pre-hominids, hominids

84

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

and Homo erectm and Homo sapiens types to Cro-Magnon

Man."
Brain capacity is the major consideration for judging
whether or not a fossil specimen is to be classified as Homo
sapiens, although as Coon points out in The Origin of Races
(p. 341), "The designation of a fossil skull as erectm or
sapiens depends on the total configuration, not on brain size
alone." Ernst Mayr in Animal Species and Evolution (p. 650)
remarks, "The most astonishing phenomenon of human
evolution is the rapid increase in brain size during the
Pleistocene." Clarence W. Young and G. Ledyard Stebbins
conclude in The Human Organism and the World of Life (p.
843), "The gradual increase in the size of the brain . . .
accompanied the trend toward greater intelligence, the
most important feature of human evolution." Says Norman
J. Berrill in Man s Emerging Mind (p. 70), "In a general way
we can say that the brain volume doubled during the ten
million years or so of man-ape evolution . . . and that it
has on the average doubled again during the last million
years."
About 15,000 generations after mankind came in contact
with the cold, there were enough favorable mutations and
enough premature deaths of individuals with unfavorable
mutations to produce a Cro-Magnon people. In them evolution reached a peak. No men have ever had larger brains.
Alfred L. Kroeber, author of a Roster of Civilizations and
Culture, reports the skull capacities of seven Cro-Magnon
males as 1,500 to 1,800 cc., with an average of 1,600 cc.
In Anthropology (pp. 27-28) Kroeber estimated brains of the
Cro-Magnon people to be "fifteen to twenty percent
greater than modern Europeans."
The array of tools, utensils and art objects used, and
mostly invented, by Cro-Magnon Man is evidence of high
intelligence. They had arrows, spears, harpoons with multiple barbs, stone axes, stone lamps which burned animal fat,
flint knives, awls, needles with eyes, woven baskets and
carvings on reindeer antlers and ivory.

Evolution in the Ice Ages

85

Most remarkable are the paintings of wild animals on the

walls of caves at Font de Gaume, at Les Eyzies, at Lascaux
near Montignac and at Altamira near Santander on the
north coast of Spain. The Encyclopaedia Britannica affirms
that "these artistic achievements show a sensitivity of observation, a technical ability and a creative consciousness
which prove Cro-Magnon Man to have been a highly
evolved human being, both physically and mentally."
Marie E. P. Konig in an article entitled "Ethnological
Analogies" in Mankind Quarterly (January-March, 1971) interprets the cave drawings as having a philosophical content. The bulls represent, with their horns, three phases of
the moon-a symbolic representation seen thousands of
years later in Sumerian, Egyptian, Cretan and Grecian art.
An important study in this area is entitled The Roots of
Civilization by Alexander Marshack, who seems to have
opened a door to a new perspective of the Cro-Magnon era.
Studying Ice Age implements of ivory, antlers, stone and
bone with a microscope, Marshack analyzed markings
which other scholars had supposed to be merely ornamental. In many instances he found that the engravings on a
piece of antler, or an eagle's bone, had been made not at
one or two sittings-which would have been consistent
with a decorative purpose-but on different days with different implements and distinctive strokes. After five years
of investigation, Marshack is convinced that the Cra-Magnon markings were notational; that our ancestors of a thousand generations ago were keeping records of moon
phases. This, according to Marshack, was the beginning of
astronomy, of time measurement and of written communication. But even then they were building on the cultural
achievements of earlier human species.

Chapter 8

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

Short-run good is too often long-run bad.'

Anonymous

"It is quite possible," writes Robert Klark Graham in The

Future of Man (p. 56), "that the precise turning point in the
evolution of humankind-the time when natural selection
was weakened until deteriorative influences could predominate over ameliorative ones-occurred within the eroMagnon peoples."
Some scholars, reluctant to entertain the idea of declining mentality, have clung to the fiction that human intelligence, which reached such a high level in ero-Magnon
times, has remained unchanged ever since. Graham, as far
as it is known, is the first to state there has been a decline;
that in the brain department we are lesser men than some
of our remote forebears.
Although it may grate against commonly held religious
ethics, Graham's "ameliorative" influences, which accounted for the ero-Magnon ascendancy, were poisonous
snakes, man-eating tigers, and the extremes of weather
which demanded foresight and frugality on the part of
those who survived. These influences, hard as they were
on individuals, were beneficial to the species.
The usual definition of "ameliorative," almost the oppo-

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

87

site of Graham's meaning, has to do with improving the

comfort of the individual, and this is how the word is used
in the Interstadial Amelioration, which designates the time
Europe had pleasant weather and Cro-Magnon Men proliferated. For the species as a whole, however, this amelioration was deterioration.
The Interstadial Amelioration was blessed (or shall we
say cursed) with 25,000 years of tolerable weather from
about 53,000 to 28,000 B.C. The cool days and nights were
not too uncomfortable for individuals, and could be considered a vast improvement over the zero weather that
came before and after. For the species it stimulated a population explosion. But for the quality of the species those
good years were bad, because the sorting out process of
evolution slackened. Many who would have been eliminated before reaching puberty in the Ice Ages continued
to live and reproduce.
Robert Klark Graham was not thinking of "the greatest
good for the greatest number" when discussing the CroMagnon people. He was referring to the quality of the
species when he defined as "deteriorative" the comfortable
environment that saved the weak. To produce the CroMagnon brain required a cruel and continuing selection
process that lasted over tens of thousands of years. CroMagnon Man must have rejoiced at the Interstadial Amelioration. But how could he have known that by keeping the
less fit alive for reproduction the new era of comfort would
lower his descendants' level of intelligence?
It so happens that 25,000 years of the Interstadial Amelioration constituted the Cro-Magnon era, when the Aurignacian and Solutrean cultures prevailed. The pleasant
weather protected about a thousand generations of CroMagnons. When they first entered Europe, they must have
conquered the Neanderthals in about 100 years or about
four generations. Since Europe was a region of abundance,
they seem to have enjoyed economic prosperity almost
from the beginning.

88

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

During the Cro-Magnon heyday, evolution's weedingout process must have become practically inoperative, as
it has in our own time. With the less capable families having
the most offspring, there was a gradual and insidious
deterioration.
We can visualize the rise and fall of Neanderthal and
Cro-Magnon Man in the Ice Ages with the following graph.
THE EFFECT OF WEATHER ON RECENT HUMAN
EVOLUTION
(in thousands of years B.C.)
The humps are interglacial warm spells; the dips are the glacial
periods.

120

Wiirm

Wiirm

II

100

80

60

Wlirm
III

40

Neanderthal
proliferation
and correlated

Cro-Magnon
proliferation
and correlated

delerioration

deterioration

20

Our interpretation of the past leans heavily on the

proposition that deterioration accompanies proliferation,
not only for the prehistoric Cro-Magnons but for all historic peoples and societies. Here is a thumbnail summary
of the supporting evidence:
1. Evolution tends to eliminate inefficient individuals in somewhat greater proportion than efficient individuals.
2. A considerable increase in an area's human population signals
a more sparing application of evolution's winnowing process,
due, for instance, to improved shelter or clothing, or better
food storage methods.
3. When a group proliferates, the survivors include individuals
further down the scale of efficiency.

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

89

4. When a group increases at a faster rate than usual, then it has

fewer early deaths per thousand births than usual, and there
is less weeding out than usual.
5. Since births are normally more numerous among the less
efficient half of any specific group, there is a larger proportion
of survivals among the less efficient half when the group increases in number.

All the above statements add up to what can be defined

as the law of population dynamics. It is operative wherever
prosperity reduces the severity of evolution, wherever the
division oflabor is complicated enough to obscure the part
that incompetent men play in production. Prosperity,
which has become the dream of most statesmen and most
citizens, promotes more generosity on the part of those
who produce more, while camouflaging the inefficiency of
the nonproducers.
The law of population dynamics was at work even in
prehistoric times. The brain power of the Cro-Magnons,
combined with the abundance of food and the pleasant
weather, makes it almost a certainty that birthrates increased and deathrates decreased-and the less effective
half of the population did more than half of the reproducmg.
Among any species, the direction of evolution is in most
cases towards greater intelligence, since this usually leads
to decisions which help assure individual survival. The
mammals have outdistanced other species in the development of intelligence. The primates have outdistanced other
mammals. Homo sapiens has outdistanced other primates.
In most of its results, evolution usually meets with our
approval. We applaud the increased capability of various
species, including our own, to adapt to their environments.
In comparison with evolution's other products, we have the
forgivable habit of liking ourselves best. But ordinarily we
give little thought to how evolution works. The modus ope-

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

randi might be called "selective victimization," which can

be illustrated by the story of the dogs that Spanish sailors
left on a barren island populated by hardy native goats.
Only the fastest dogs managed to catch the slowest goats,
so the slow dogs died of starvation. Relentlessly and inevitably, the average speed of goats and dogs increased with
each generation.
There are less stern methods of evolution, such as males
selecting females for beauty, and vice versa, and in some
species aggressiveness or endurance have their effect on
reproduction.

Our social instincts are the inherent cause of our efforts

to prevent or postpone death. Since we don't have any
fixed standards as to exactly who are to be guarded for
survival, the unintelligent and incompetent are saved along
with their opposites. The former, having few goals or purposes in life, then "let nature take its course." Is it any
wonder they have higher than average birthrates?
Biological change continues, but the trend toward
greater intelligence is reversed. The social appetite has
worked against evolution.
All of us probably have Cro-Magnon ancestors, both the
geniuses who first lifted us up and the dunces who later
pulled us down. Fortunately, evolution had its later innings
and brought us part way back up the trail. Now we are on
the way down again, as the statistics in Chapter 12 will
show.
Brilliant men may not know enough to be wise. CroMagnon excellence was sabotaged by Cro-Magnon ignorance. We, "the heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files
of time," could have had a much richer legacy of brain
power if our Cro-Magnon ancestors had realized that the
failures they kept alive by their charity would have a deleterious effect on the intelligence of their descendants. As
trustees for posterity they failed. Other trustees between
their time and ours have also failed. And we are also failing

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

91

as trustees for our children's children. Motivated by the

same social impulses that deceived our ancestors 50,000
years ago, we are traveling the same path they followed,
still giving no real thought to raising the intelligence level
of our descendants. Unless we change our habits, we too
shall leave to future generations more of our second-rate
than our first-rate genes. As Dan Bennett says, "History
repeats because people weren't listening the first time."
While we are using our wide-focus lens on history we
should observe an interesting parallel between the law of
population dynamics and the second law of thermodynamics. But first let's summarize the law again, this time from
the perspective of our social instincts.
(1) The social appetite fosters cooperation.
(2) The cooperation may be intricate and intense enough to
constitute a civilization.
(3) The division of labor obscures the importance or uselessness of individuals in their various roles.
(4) Some individuals are lacking in the ability to participate
usefully in production processes.
(5) The inability may be physical and/or mental.
(6) The social appetite of the capable permits the incapable to
share in the "gross national product."
(7) When the civilization is young, the burden of sharing is not
heavy.
(8) Those who have relatively few interests and relatively few
feelings of responsibility are likely to have less control of
their instincts and will consequently have more offspring.
(9) The increasing death rate of capable human beings in a
declining civilization is a type of functional disorder.
(10) The preponderance of the less adequate over the more
adequate will eventually interfere with the basic procedures
and processes of civilization to a point where it will cease
to function.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

In Physics from the Ground Up by Carr and Weidner (p.

228), the Second Law of Thermodynamics is described as
follows:
Any isolated system free to do so will always pass from a more
ordered state to a less ordered state until it eventually reaches
and remains in the state of maximum possible disorder, which
is the state of thermal equilibrium.

Expressed in terms of the Second Law ofThermodynamics, civilization is an "isolated system." When the evolutionary process fails to maintain the necessary intelligence
level, the system will "pass from a more ordered state" as
the less intelligent people become a larger proportion of
the population. Finally the system disintegrates and "eventually reaches and remains in the state of maximum possible disorder."
To tie the Second Law of Thermodynamics into history,
if we go back to Europe's warm years from about 98,000
to 68,000 B.C., we will find the Neanderthal people living
in a climatic Eden. In the preceding glaciation, they had
developed a high aptitude for problem-solving. Now as
vegetation and game became abundant, Europe became a
happy hunting ground.
Since hunting in those days was conducted in teams or
bands, we know that among the Neanderthal people group
effort was the rule, not the exception. The social appetite
manifested itself everywhere. Neanderthal weaklings were
given the greatest care and the death rate was relatively
low. And while all this was going on, Neanderthals multiplied and spread to all parts of Europe. In fact, their remains have been found as far away as Palestine.
The Neanderthals must have been rather prosperous, at
least in the early stages of their 30,000 "fat" years, as attested by the complexity, efficiency and number of their
tools. Nevertheless, the genetic damage that occurred during these 1,200 generations must have been consider-

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

93

able. Even with the new selection triggered by the Wlirm

II Glaciation, the later Neanderthals, who unknowingly
awaited the Cro-Magnon invaders, were not the men their
forebears were.
There is more in Carroll L. Riley's remark in The Origin
ojCivilization (p. 13) than meets a casual reading. "The first
Neanderthal men," he writes, "were somewhat more 'modern' than later 'classic' Neanderthals." That's a more restrained way of saying that the Neanderthals attacked by
the early Cro-Magnon intruders were the "bottom-of-thebarrel" leavings of 1,200 generations of men who had escaped the selective process imposed by a hostile environment. Men had not learned how to withstand the softness
that comes with prosperity. They still haven't learned how.
Though Cro-Magnons averaged the biggest brains in
proportion to body size of all peoples, they never produced
what we would call civilization. In fact, since all of the
civilizations known to us appeared long after the Cro-Magnon decline, we might well ask why have Cro-Magnon
achievements-aside from their great cave art-been so
insignificant in comparison with those oflater people? One
answer is that in any civilization the most spectacular
achievements come long after the "IQ" of a civilization has
passed its peak.
Civilization is an accumulation of improvements. The
hafted stone ax is an advance over a hand ax. A metal ax
is more efficient than a stone ax. A saw is still more efficient.
And though there is not much continuity between civilizations, there is generally some carryover from one to another, no matter how far apart they may be in space and
time. We build on what has gone before and we feel smug
about our accomplishments. We need a reminder of the
proverb, "A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees the farther
of the two." The Cro-Magnon people were the first giants.
Another reason why the more notable achievements of
a civilization follow a decline in average intelligence is that
brain power is unevenly distributed. The higher-than-aver-

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

age birthrate of the people ofless-than-average brains does

not prevent the birth of an occasional genius. A few wise
men, as long as there is some communication, organization, order and prosperity, can insure the continuation of
those aspects of civilization which arouse admiration even
while the incompetents are having a field day.
A third reason why a civilization flowers after it has already started to wilt is that, though the more ordinary
requirements for citizen comfort keep the achievers busy
in the early period of civilization, once the cultural patterns
are institutionalized inertia takes over and allows ideas that
require a long and uninterrupted period of incubation a
chance to hatch. The organized routines of society protect
both the incompetent and the innovators, so that the problem-solvers are able to take on projects like the pyramids
or moon flights. The great brains of the latter days of a
civilization, although they may be fewer in number and
even smaller in size than those of the founding fathers, can
perform their miracles because they are freed from the less
spectacular but more difficult task of putting the civilization
together.
If the duration of the Interstadial Amelioration was 25,000 years, at least through half of that period, say 500
generations, Cro-Magnon intelligence would have declined
considerably. During this time Cro-Magnon culture could
have been maintained at a fairly high level, even though the
biological foundations for intelligence were deteriorating.
Eventually, however, would come the punishment for the
double sin of permitting a population explosion while having no effective substitute for the now dormant evolutionary process. The great wild herds of elephant and rhinoceros dwindled and the aurochs and wild horses became
vanishing species. Hunger descended on the land, perhaps
a hunger as great as in present-day Calcutta.
The food scarcity developed many centuries after the
Cro-Magnon culture had peaked. With many more mouths

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

95

to feed, men used the skills their ancestors had taught them
to augment the dwindling meat supply. But by this time not
enough Cro-Magnons had the analytical ability to find the
larger sources of food needed for the larger number of
people-and the brains needed to provide the social organization for a more divergent and less self-reliant population.
At this point we might recall that in our own civilization
only two decades ago city officials were boasting about how
many new factories and how many thousands of people
they were luring into their municipalities. Even now an
occasional newspaper writer or chamber of commerce
booster will advocate overloading their city's already
strained facilities with huge new housing developments.
Cro-Magnon leaders in the time of their "ameliorated"
conditions were probably just as nearsighted. Though they
probably had more brains than our own politicians and
statesmen, their sources of information and knowledge
were more limited.
Both they and we have followed similar patterns of environmental mayhem. We both exterminated or nearly exterminated several animal species. The Cro-Magnons killed
off all the European mammoths and elephants, and we have
almost eliminated the still larger blue whales. Cro-Magnons spread their destruction over many thousands of
years. We are doing a more thorough job of it much faster!
At some stage of Cro-Magnon proliferation and decline
one or more of the tribes which had their home base near
the sea increased their dependence on seafood. In hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, they were responsible
for piling up the "kitchen middens," the vast shell heaps
at which our archaeologists gaze in astonishment.
Then came the icy gloom ofWUrm's final blasts, lasting
from about 26,000 to 16,000 B.C. Very likely the ten millennia of glaciation and the sudden return of arctic weather
about 10,000 B.C. cut the European living standard down
to a bare survival level. Only the best genetic stock

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

managed to muddle through, while almost all the rest died

of starvation or cold. When good weather returned, the
survivors were ready to invent and adapt to new ways of
living; ready for agriculture and animal husbandry; ready
for the mining and refining of metals.
Then, as amateur farmers learned how to make two stalks
of wheat grow where one had grown in the wilds, there was
another age of proliferation accompanied by deterioration.
Robert Klark Graham explains (p. 57):
We know that brain size and intelligence tended to increase
under the severe natural selection which food-gathering and
hunting imposed. We know that the increase apparently ceased
with the advent of mixed agriculture. It is not difficult to see why
this should have occurred, for food production permitted millions witl-llesser brains to survive who would not have qualified
for survival under the more rigorous selection of the hunting
stage.

By the end of the last Ice Age, some 8,000 years ago,
dogs, sheep, goats and cattle had been domesticated; wheat
and barley added to the food supply; boats built and fish
nets invented. Someone discovered the wheel, which may
have first been used horizontally in the making of pottery.
But the new knowledge spread slowly and many of these
great inventions would not be widely known for hundreds,
even thousands of years. Where geographic conditions
were favorable, the news traveled faster.
A smooth, chronological continuity in the story of human
advancement has not yet been established, but the archaeologists are trying hard. Colin Renfrew, who has specialized in the dating of prehistoric objects by the Carbon-14
method, found that copper metallurgy was common in
Greece at a much earlier date than had previously been
supposed (Scientific American, Oct. 1971). Discovering that
Balkan villages had been in existence 1,000 years earlier
than those in "ancient" Asia Minor, he decided: "The cen-

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

97

tral moral is inescapable. In the past we have completely

undervalued the originality and creativity of the inhabitants
of prehistoric Europe."
But since much more is still known about the early
achievements of man in the Middle East, it is there we must
turn our attention.
The Caspian Sea, although drying up, is still the biggest
lake in the world, having five times the area and more than
twice the depth of Lake Superior. It has no outlet and is
now nearly a hundred feet below sea level. But over the
thousands of years that glacial ice was melting in Northern
Europe, the Volga, Ural and Kura rivers made the Caspian
Sea much bigger than it is now. Carleton Coon found many
seal bones in Belt Cave, a Caspian site inhabited by humans
11,500 years ago. At 6,500 B.C. their favorite dish was gazelle. By 5,800 B.C. the inhabitants had domesticated goats
and sheep. At approximately 5,300 B.C. Belt Cave occupants began to make pottery and added pork and grain to
their diet. It is still undetermined whether the grain was
wild or was planted by man.
Among the earliest of towns was jericho in jordan. Andrew Thomas says in We Are Not The First (p. 40): "The
famous jericho skulls, filled in with clay and shell, depict
exquisite Egyptian-like faces. They have been dated to
about 6,500 B.C., which is roughly some 1,500 years before
the beginning of Egyptian civilization."
Other early towns were jarmo, in northern Iraq, and
what is now called Chatal HUyUk, in Anatolia. HUyUk means
mound, a wart on the landscape which signals the remains
of a long-departed town or city. The Chatal mound, 50 feet
high, is at an elevation of 3,000 feet. Nearby, across an
ancient river bed, is a more recent mound, 20 feet high.
Chatal, 8,000 years ago, was a bustling town, about a
third of a mile long, occupying 32 acres, only one of which
has been excavated. The town consisted of twelve layers,
the bottom one going back 8,350 years, the top 7,600 years.
The houses were built of sun-dried mud bricks, which were

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

made with straw in wooden molds and were of different

sizes in the different levels. They were bigger than our
bricks, many over two feet long, and were set in a board
frame of squared timbers, with mortar made of ashes and
bones. Squared timbers were used as roof beams.
The town was compact, the buildings being placed side
by side. The general appearance was not unlike the Pueblo
dwellings at Taos, New Mexico. Buildings were of different
heights and light entered through openings near the roof.
At night, illumination was provided by stone lamps.
There were no doors, inside or out. The entrance was
a hole in the roof, which was somehow protected against
the rain. The hole was reached by ladders and the inside
ladder was fixed permanently to the south wall. Inside, a
few inches above the floor, were openings in the walls for
passage between rooms.
The roofs consisted of bundles of large reeds laid on the
supporting timbers and amply covered with earth. The
walls were plastered, some of them a hundred times.
Furniture and decorations were built in. Hearths were
raised and had curbs to retain the ashes. Ovens were partly
projected into the walls. Smoke went out the same hole in
the roof that was used as the entrance. Sleeping platforms
were constructed of earth.
A typical room was ten by thirteen feet, but some were
twice that size. A typical house had five rooms, the kitchen
being the largest. There were sleeping platforms for five
people and rooms for storage, especially for grain, with
bins about a yard high. More storage space was provided
by coil baskets and containers made of animal skins. There
were carbonized remains of wheat, barley, peas and vetch.
Some rooms may have served as shrines and even burial
places. The former were found in what were apparently the
homes of priests. They had sleeping platforms and
benches, as did the living rooms of other homes. But the
shrine rooms had abundant wall paintings, baked clay re-

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

99

liefs and sculptures. Various animals were represented, but

most of the sculptures were bull's heads.
Human remains in Chatal burials were wrapped in cloth,
which, woven about 8,000 years ago, could have been the
earliest ever manufactured. We have not yet learned what
sort of weaving frames were used.
The range of colors in the paints is remarkable, and may
have involved the earliest use of minerals. The green and
the bright blue probably came from malachite and azurite,
which are carbonates of copper. Iron oxides and, less
frequently, mercury oxide supplied the basis for the red
shades. Cinnabar, a mercury sulfide, yielded vermillion.
Manganese made a paint of silvery white and galena, a lead
ore, was used for gray. In one instance pounded mica was
mixed with purple paint to make it sparkle.
The Chatal people seem to have had a mania for paint.
Whenever there was any excuse for it, they covered their
walls with white plaster, which they seem to have taken
from a dry lake bed. Any wall which stood for seventy years
or so would have nearly a hundred coats of plaster. Baked
clay figures of animals might also have as many as a hundred coats of paint. Paint was also applied to plaster reliefs,
skeletons, wooden boxes, rush baskets, pottery and ladies'
eyebrows.
Some of the wall paintings are geometric figures in
repetitive patterns, remarkable in their intricacy and color
combinations. The designs are not too different from those
in modern Turkish rugs. Other paintings are replete with
circles, stylized flowers, stars, hunting scenes, birds, bulls,
leopards, foxes, weasels, stags, rams, boars, human beings
and landscapes. Brush strokes indicate a variety of paint
brushes, some very fine.
The artifacts in Chatal would stock a department storewooden trays, bowls, cups, forks, spoons and carved
wooden boxes with closely fitted covers. Some of the implements are made of imported flint, more of carved bone, and

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

many of polished green obsidian (volcanic glass). Ladles

and spatulas for spreading plaster are of bone, as are the
sewing needles. Pins are of wood or bone. There are arrow
heads, spearheads and a few sickle blades of obsidian.
There are hooks and eyes and belt toggles of bone for
clothing. There are stamp seals of baked clay, which could
have been used for stamping designs on cloth. Several
female graves contain obsidian mirrors.
Both sexes wore jewelry. Necklaces, bracelets, armlets,
anklets, amulets and pendants are fabricated of stone,
shell, clay, bone, animal teeth, copper and lead. Some
bracelets are of marble, alabaster and white gypsum.
A few of the statuettes are of marble, though most are
of baked clay. Statuettes of a regal-looking boy and several
versions of a corpulent woman seem to have a religious
connotation. The latter may have been a fertility goddess.
Although religion played a considerable part in the lives
of the Chatal people, nowhere was there any evidence of
animal or human sacrifice.
Chatal's defense was served by the solid front provided
by the close-packed buildings. Men on the roofs, armed
with bows and arrows, spears and with baked clay balls for
their slings, would have been difficult to dislodge. There
is no evidence that their town was ever attacked, which
cannot be said for towns we will examine later.
Chatal came into being, bloomed, matured and lost its
vigor. Eventually it died, was buried by the desert sand and
forgotten. The last ten of its thirty-two generations appear
to have been comparatively uncreative.
Here in miniature we see the rise and fall ofa civilization.
Can we read its lessons? Chatal can be considered as an
early application of the self-destruct principle.
Chatal has not been nominated as the first civilization;
merely as one of many places where human beings led
organized lives in the centuries closely following the Ice
Ages. We can never know the whole story, partly because
that general area, as the weather improved, had many hav-

The Social Appetite Versus Evolution

101

ens where caves were unnecessary and where surface shelters (like many of our modern farmhouses) were too fragile
to endure.
One archaeologist has listed sixty-six early towns and
villages somewhat similar to Chatal in Anatolia alone.
Some of them were so early that they could have had only
the most tenuous contact with others. Many, like Chatal,
were without ramparts, though by the beginning of recorded history massive protective walls had become usual.
Cause and effect were operating in the decline and death
of these settlements and in the dozens and perhaps hundreds of civilizations that have preceded and followed
them.
Dozens and hundreds? The fact that there have been
many-each one traveling the same route to oblivion
-ought to arouse some suspicions that something is fundamentally wrong with the pattern they followed; suspicions that we too, who are following the same route, may
be doing something with lethal consequences.
The world has seen many more civilizations than those
unveiled by Arnold Toynbee in his Study of History. If we
combine our new knowledge about the number of civilizations that have been extinguished with our new knowledge
about the mechanics of genetic deterioration, perhaps we
can devise measures to prevent our own civilization from
going the way of all previous ones.

Chapter 9

The Fall of Civilizations

It came without a sound,

Without the slightest tone
Of warning to be found,
By which they might have known;
With neither trumpet call
Nor finger beckoning;
With nothing said at all,
Aloud or whispering
To wake their faintest fears,
Except what they had read
Each day for years and years
And had not credited.
Lord Dunsany

Complexity distinguishes all those cultures that have

usually been designated as civilizations-even the earlier
ones, which were much simpler than our own. A central
feature of any civilization is specialization, especially in activities directed to the production of economic goods. Specialization in production allows the accumulation of surpluses which in turn support other forms of specialization,
such as music, art, architecture, formal education, amateur
and professional sports and religion.
Specialization goes hand in hand with trade, transportation, communication and government. Commerce, a basic

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103

component of civilization, almost always depends on a

money system, though some early societies which exchanged goods by barter were complex enough to be designated as civilizations.
Trade requires an effective transportation system. So
does communication, one form of which is writing. Printing
moves civilization further along, as do voice recordings,
microfilming, photography and the electrical transmission
and storage of sounds and symbols. Civilization also includes the development of formal education and a political
structure.
There are fringe phases of civilization-chivalry, charity,
"bread and circuses," welfare, various forms of insurance.
Many people think of these as the real substance of civilization. If a person fails to participate in or benefit from some
of these marginal institutions, he is likely to be thought of
as "uncivilized."
There have been more civilizations than we once imagined, most of them lasting a thousand years or less, then
gradually disappearing. Egypt had dark ages of disorganization interspersed with periods of magnificence. The
parade of the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Chaldean civilizatiQns in the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys followed invasions and infiltrations by outlanders. China's
civilizations have been rhythmic in their rise and fall, while
that of the Mayas seems to have had one great efflorescence
and was then extinguished.
The rhythmic nature of civilization has been a great fascination to historians. As Greece faded and the Roman
Republic drifted into dictatorship, the poet Lucretius
elaborated on the mortality of nations. Voltaire put the
same idea this way: "History is only the patter of silken
slippers descending the stairs-to the clatter of hobnail
boots coming up."
What Voltaire was saying is that a nation, grown too
luxurious, is likely to yield its place in the sun to some

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~Vhy

Civilizations Self-Destruct

coarse and swashbuckling, but energetic and self-confident

newcomer. Nations, he indicated, grow soft as they become
successful.
Louis Wallis wrote in An Examination of Society that Egypt,
Babylonia, Assyria, Phoenicia and Israel gradually succumbed to assaults from without, yielding to Elamites, Kassites, Ethiopians, Scythians, Medes, Persians, Greeks and
Romans. "It would seem," said Wallis, "that Oriental Society, having waxed powerful up to a certain stage, ought
to have repelled these enemies instead of offering a weaker
and weaker front to their assaults. But the contrary was the
case; and the genius of progress at length departed from
the eastern world."
Those Middle East regions, through all the shabby centuries that followed, acted as if they had forgotten they
were once the center of a civilization. After the conquerors
listed by Wallis stood successively in the limelight for their
brief moment, they joined their victims in history's graveyard. Lord Byron gave his version of this sad time table in

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

There is the moral of all human tales:
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory-when that fails,
WealLh-Vice-Corruption-Barbarism at lasl.
The Englishman, Conyers Middleton, made a similar
point when discussing the Romans' low opinion of Britain:
From their railleries of this kind, on the barbarity and misery
of our island, one cannot help reflecting on the surprising fate
and revolutions of kingdoms; how Rome, once the mistress of
the world, the seat of arts, empire, and glory, now lies sunk in
sloth, ignorance, and poverty ... while this remote country,
anciently the jest and contempt of the polite Romans, is become
the happy seat ofliberty, plenty', and letters; flourishing in all the
arts and refinements of civil life; yet running, perhaps, the same
course which Rome itself had run before it, from virtuous in-

The Fall of Civilizations

105

dustry to wealth; from wealth to luxury; from luxury to an impatience of discipline and corruption of morals: till, by a total degeneracy and loss of virtue, being grown ripe for destruction, it
falls a prey at last to some hardy oppressor, and, with the loss
ofliberty, losing everything that is valuable, sinks gradually again
into its original barbarism.

When we compare England's present state with her

happy genius of, say, 150 years ago, it is easy to imagine
a couple in a portrait looking at their own portrait, in the
same pose and the same setting. And in that smaller portrait they are looking at themselves in a still smaller portrait
-and so on. Similarly Americans can now see America's
pattern in England as English scholars saw England's future in Rome's past, and probably as Romans looked back
to Greece, Greeks to Crete, and Cretans to Egypt and Sumer.
Britain was still on the upgrade w!'len Byron and Middleton observed that her course might be a repetition of
Rome's. By 1900 the British Empire had risen to the pinnacle of world power, with "dominion over palm and pine."
Perhaps some crumbs of glory remain for Britain in the
future, but there can be no doubt that the high point is past.
"History hath but one page," said Byron.
F. L. Lucas strikes a true but pessimistic note in "Beleaguered Cities:"
Build your houses, built your houses, build your towns,
Fell the woodland, to a gutter turn the brook,
Pave the meadows, pave the meadows, pave the downs,
Plant your bricks and mortar where the grasses shook,
The wind-swept grasses shook.
Build, build your Babels black against the sky;
But mark yon small green blade, your stones between,
The single spy
Of that uncounted host you have outcast;
For with their tiny pennons waving green
They shall storm your streets at last.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Build your houses, build your houses, build your slums,

Drive your drains where once the rabbits used to lurk.
Let their be no song now save the wind that hums
Through the idle wires while dumb men tramp to work,
Tramp to their idle work.
Silent the siege; none notes it; yet one day
Men from your walls shall watch the woods once more
Close round their prey.
Build, build the ramparts of your giant town;
Yet they shall crumble to the dust before
The battering thistle-down.

Eric Fischer, author of The Passing of the European Age,

writes that a civilization is rarely reborn where an earlier
one has died. Even in countries that seem to have had a
recurrence of brilliance, the center of the new culture has
usually been a new center. Chinese civilizations, Fischer
says, had successive centers in the Valley of Wei, along the
middle course and lower estuary of the Yangtze Kiang and
in China's Northern Plain. In the valley of the Tigris and
Euphrates the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Chaldean
civilizations had different focal points. Even in the long
history of Ancient Egypt, the numerous revivals of civilization had different capital cities.
A civilization may be transplanted to new soil, however,
and survive while the parent culture declines. Selected features of the old society may be retained and some of the
deficiencies discarded. In this manner, Fischer points out,
the culture of Greece was transferred to the Hellenistic
world-and the culture of Europe to America.
But why does not the cumulative knowledge that comes
with experience result in ever greater wisdom and ever
better adaptation to new conditions? Louis Wallis worked
on that problem by analyzing the effect of concentrated
land holdings on morals and morale. But such a limited

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107

study is totally inadequate to explain the fall of all societies,

and much too narrow to explain the hazards faced by our
own.
Fischer has a somewhat different idea. He tells us that
society's creative juices, when they reach their fulfillment,
jell and harden. The revolutionary forces, having won their
victory, entrench themselves. What is new then becomes
disruptive. When utopia turns into a fact no more changes
are permitted. Fischer also shows the new centers themselves are a reason for the decline of the old ones. There
is a shift in the center of gravity-by which he means a
disturbance in the delicate equilibrium of commerce, industry, art and government.
Tom B. Jones in his masterful book Ancient Civilization
(Chapter 27) advances a comparable analysis. He mentions
the completion of a pattern, particularly in trade and industry as one reason for decay. In the Near East, cities
traded with the countryside and distant seaports by exporting manufactured commodities and importing raw materials. Greek manufacturers, for example, shipped finished
goods to their colonies along the Aegean Sea and imported
raw materials. The development of Rome was similar. The
end of the chain of classical urban development, according
to Jones, occurred when the Roman Empire reached the
point of greatest territorial expansion in the second century A.D. Next came a period of economic decentralization
as cities developed in the remote settlements. Regression
in the center followed. While defensive frontiers and internal disorder demanded military expenditures and high
taxes, the opportunities for profits and for an adequate tax
base contracted. Gradually the whole economic structure
disintegrated.
Another thesis that deserves attention is that of W. C.
Lowdermilk, author of the pamphlet Conquest of the Land
Through Seven Thousand Years, written while he was chief of
the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. Lowdermilk concluded

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

that civilizations die when their supporting agriculture

fails. As erosion carries away the soil or silts up the water
supply, the social order eventually finds itself in desperate
straits. In ancient Mesopotamia, when the public works
projects of cleaning out the canals were interrupted by
internal revolutions or foreign invaders, the canals were
choked with silt, which "depopulated villages and cities
more effectively than the slaughter of people by an invading army."
Lowdermilk found the accumulation of silt on a Cyprus
plain to a height thirteen feet above the old level of a
church floor. He wrote of great Roman cities in North
Africa that were completely buried in dust.
He also described erosion in ghost towns in Syria, where
the land has been washed away from the buildings, leaving
the doorsills three to six feet above the exposed rock. The
disappearance of the soil meant the disappearance of food.
So the towns became uninhabitable.
Lowdermilk wrote about the silt-laden Yellow River of
China, winding forty to fifty feet above the farm land on the
floor of the valley, its tenuous elevation maintained by bare
hands working forever on the dykes. The author followed
the silt to its source-the raw hills which for a thousand
years had been washing away after man had ravaged the
forests that once protected both the hills and the plains
below.
Of the people whose food sources were jeopardized by
the logging there may have been some, but not enough,
who saw the danger. Today only a few of us are uneasy
about burning the autumn leaves; about installing a waste
disposal sink because it routes organic matter to the sea;
about the incineration instead of the composting of garbage; about the Mississippi dumping the "four hundred
million tons of top soil into the Gulf of Mexico every year."
It takes better than average brains to comprehend the connection between cutting down a brush lot in Ohio and
increasing the height of a levee in New Orleans.

The Fall of Civilizations

109

Brooks Adams' great book The Law of Civilization and

Decay was published in 1896. Charles Beard, the noted
American historian, spoke of it as one of the outstanding
historical documents of modern times.
Before Brooks Adams wrote a word, there had been a
vague but widespread assumption in America that history
was a one-way street toward better and better conditions.
It was believed that whatever is is somehow better than
whatever was, but not so good as the things that are yet to
be.
Brooks Adams replaced this beautiful illusion of eternal
social progress with the stern fact that earlier civilizations
had not only risen but had fallen-mainly, he felt, because
of an increasing centralization of power. Adam's thesis is
in harmony with Willis]. Ballinger's idea in his book By Vote
of the People that democracy declines as a consequence of
the concentration of economic power.
Concentration of power is synonymous with concentration of decision making. It may reasonably be argued that
such concentration is primarily the result of managerial
efficiency. But in scattered and parochial decision making
a wrong decision is likely to have only a local effect, whereas
a wrong decision on the national scale is a hazard to the
whole society.
In the five or six thousand years of recorded history,
government by the people or by their elected representatives has been a rare and fleeting experience. Relatively few
civilized peoples have ever lived under rules of their own
making, and it appears that all earlier civilizations eventually diluted the rights of individuals to the vanishing point.
With the passing of time our own government has taken
over many of the most important decision-making functions of our economy.
About two decades after the publication of Brooks
Adams' work, Oswald Spengler, a German schoolteacher,
wrote a massive historical study, which in its English edition is called The Decline of the West. Spengler likened civiliza-

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

tion to an organism and compared its stages to the succession of the seasons. In its springtime it is organized around
agriculture. By the time of its autumn its energies are
largely devoted to industrial production and the building
of huge cultural vacuums called world cities. Then comes
the winter and it is finished.
Another treatment of the rise and fall of civilizations was
undertaken by S. Colum Gilfillan, whose lead poisoning
theory will be mentioned later. In an article entitled "The
Coldward Course of Progress," Political Science Quarterly
(September 1920), he concluded that civilizations, as a
rule, have successively moved northward. The same theme
was later adopted by Ellsworth Huntington and Vilhjlmur
Stefansson.
In his Family and Civilization Dr. Carle C. Zimmerman has
interpreted the decline of civilization to be a result of family
disruption. Husbands, wives, sons and daughters become
so independent of each other and so far apart in their
interests that the family breaks up and with it the civilization. Here we may add to Zimmerman's interesting thesis
by observing that the loosening of family ties is due in part
to the creation of new institutions which have taken over
the family's functions-and these new institutions are
themselves attempts to adapt to the growing inadequacy
of many families to hold together. Education is only one
of the historic social functions that has been removed from
the family. Entertainment is another. Economic opportunity for women is now widely available outside the family.
Government aid is being substituted for such traditional
family responsibilities as care of the sick and the aged.
A century ago general education became too complex
and time-consuming for the average parent to handle. Today the same thing is occurring in sex education.
Entertainment or amusement gradually loses out as a
family function when commercial enterprises take over, in
the form of motion pictures, radio and television. At the

The Fall of Civilizations

III

same time much of the context and content of present-day

entertainment (and the arts as well) lead to family disintegration.
Recent divorce rates speak eloquently of the family
breakup. And the incredible number of murders and acts
of violence committed every day cannot be expected to
strengthen domestic ties. Neither can the nationwide inundation of pornography.
Of all present-day hazards to family solidarity-and to
civilization-television should be put at the top of the list.
Alistair Cooke, who has had more than his share of experience in the medium, has no illusions about its net effect to
date. Unfortunately, he says, its influence on the development of a child is far greater than that of either school or
church.
To be sure, most family functions are still performed, but
no longer by the family. The trouble is that many people
think these functions are now being performed better elsewhere. Those who learn to depend less on the family come
to depreciate it.
The decline of the family is accelerated by the increasing
complexity of the social environment, since the government agencies and institutions which are replacing the
family have a fragmenting rather than an integrating effect
on society as a whole.
A novel theory that bears on the decline of society, as
well as civilization, has been propounded by Dr. Joseph
Unwin, a British social anthropologist. In a monumental
volume entitled Sex and Culture he points to a positive correlation between achievement and sexual restraint. When a
civilization relinquishes its sexual discipline, Unwin asserts,
it loses its "energy," and its accomplishments diminish.
The achievements of societies are proportional "to the
amount of continence they have suffered."
In today's context, this means that our innate drives for
food, sex, attention and so forth can be somewhat appeased
by an interest in social achievements. If, however, these

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

"inner demands" are immediately fulfilled, there is no

drive left for social accomplishment.
Unwin defines monogamy as a form of sexual restraint,
considering it as the only alternative to the haphazard sexual promiscuity that prevailed in many primitive tribes. He
warns us:
No society and no group within a society, has ever tolerated
[monogamy 1for long. Every society that has adopted it has either
abandoned its monogamy or constantly revised its method of
regulating the relations between the sexes; and in the course of
this revision-sometimes, it seems, without conscious intent
-sexual opportunity has been extended.

Unwin's reason for the fall of civilization boils down to

the simple idea that after a nation has become successful
it becomes increasingly sexually permissive and as a result
loses it cohesion, its momentum and its purpose.
One of the not so obvious causes of our own decline is
the rapid and tremendous outpouring of data that no man
and no organization can possibility digest. At a recent
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, about 1,500 papers were read. How can anyone
begin to keep up with all this information? No matter how
important a particular contribution may be, only a very few
people are ever likely to read or hear about it. Too many
other innovators, as distinguished from bona fide inventors
and bona fide artists, are competing with it for public attention.
The number of books printed each year is now passing
60,000. A work which may contain something of first-rate
importance is likely to receive only passing notice and may
quickly be forgotten. Each year in the United States 55,000
journals are published, containing 1.2 million articles, not
to mention millions of research reports. How well-educated can a well-educated man be?

The Fall of Civilizations

113

Harold H. Smith used the increasing speed of human

travel as a chronicle of cultural change (Saturday Review,
Jan. 8, 1955). When horses were domesticated over 5,000
years ago, man was able to travel more than twice as fast
as he did on foot (from a maximum velocity of 15 mph to
38 mph). For several thousand years this was the speed
limit. Then in 1829 a steam locomotive went 44 mph. In
1901 a train went 120 mph. In 1910 automobiles took over,
with a speed of 131 mph. In 1939 an airspeed record of
409 mph was set. In 1953 jet-propelled planes went 753
mph in level flight. In 1956 the Bell X-2 reached 2,178
mph. Early in 1959 the X-15 increased this to 4,500 mph.
On August 29, 1965, L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., and Charles
Conrad, Jr., ended a space journey in which they circled
the earth 120 times in less than eight days, having traveled
at about 17,500 mph.
Smith pointed out that speed is only an index. The fundamental change has taken place in knowledge-in the
technology that is exercising such a profound impact on the
environment. The chief item of Smith's concern was the
plight of educators whose job it is to give students a broad
education in a world of increasing specialization.
According to Smith the biological basis of intelligence
has been the same for many thousands of years and is likely
to remain so far into the future. The truth is, as our earlier
chapters have endeavored to show, man's capacity for
problem-solving is not static and undergoes significant
changes.
Smith's mistake, however, does not invalidate his main
point. "No matter how long or how intensive the schooling," he says, "each generation will know relatively less per
individual of the total cultural heritage than the previous
generation. "
The individual, amid the multiplying inventions and the
organizational pyramiding, is confronted with an ever more
elaborate array of problems. As torrents of information
descend on him, the evaluation of the relative significance

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

of separate items becomes more and more superficial.

Consequently, the typical person has at his command fewer
facts with which he can feel at home, while his idea of the
outside world becomes impressionistic and often chaotic.
His role as a decision-maker is reduced to that of an
amoeba in a boundless ocean. He struggles for light and
for vision, but generally the educator is the blind leading
the blind. The complexity is just too much.
Overpopulation has caused the decline and fall of some
civilizations, particularly those extremely dependent on irrigation, as explained by Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan Possony in The Geography of Intellect (p. 84). At first, irrigation
is constructive and beneficial because it permits far more
grain to be grown in a given area than would be possible
without it. The ensuing agricultural economy provides
enough leisure to develop specialized activities which are
the prerequisites of civilization. It can therefore be said that
civilization depends on grain surpluses.
Weyl and Possony list among the civilizations most dependent on irrigation: Mesopotamia, beginning about
4,000 B.C.; Egypt, beginning about 3,000 B.C.; the Indus
Valley, beginning about 2,500 B.C.; and China, beginning
about 1,500 B.C.
But overpopulation can quickly wipe out such surpluses.
Once that happens, as Chi Ch'as-ting asserts in Key Economic
Areas in Chinese History, we have "class struggle and peasant
wars breaking down centralized authority." This is what
happened in ancient China, and this is probably what happened in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, the two other
civilizations which Weyl and Possony claim were most dependent on irrigation.
Too many people in a given area have lately been widely
recognized as a serious threat to those aspects of our civilization which we treasure most highly. In Population Roads
to Peace or War, Guy Irving Burch and the author of this
study spotted the danger more than three decades ago.

The Fall of Civilizations

115

Walter B. Pitkin's foreword and the postscript went well

beyond the authors' own Malthusian analysis.
The consequences of [population expansion] will please no Pollyannas . . . . it is primitive man's nature to breed up to the limit
of his food; and most people on earth are still primitive or first
cousins to primitives. Even if we were to find new food for the
three billions on earth by the year 2000, these citizens would
blithely breed and breed and breed until the world held four
billions, then five billions, then ten billions. And man, the individual, would at length vanish in his own multitudes. . . .

Interesting, isn't it, that we who knew the score, so

grossly underestimated the growth rate. In 1945 Pitkin predicted the horrendous population figure of three billion
people by the end of this century. We are already one
billion past that and the best present estimate of the number of humans that will overload the earth in that milestone
year is more than six billion.

Chapter 10

The Heredity Factor

DISaster built deceptively

Tradition said "a' K. ..
The people thought the trend was good!
How blandly blind were they!
Anonymous

Let's summarize the various reasons for the fall of civilizations given by the eminent scholars and philosophers
mentioned in the previous chapter.
Voltaire: When people become soft, they invite conquest.
Louis Wallis: Concentration of land holdings adversely
affects morals and morale.
Eric Fischer: Old cultures become unadaptable to new
conditions.
Tom B. Jones: (a) Completion of a pattern, as in architecture or any other field of endeavor, leaves no direction to go but
down.
(b) Raw materials are first exported,
then used up at home, then imported, until they can no longer be
afforded.

The Heredity Factor

117

W. C. Lowdermilk: When its agriculture fails, the civilization fails.

Brooks Adams: Concentration of power and of decision
making mortally wounds the social organization.
Carle C. Zimmerman: When family ties loosen, civilization decays.
J. D. Unwin: Permissive sex mores are anathema to civilized behavior.
Harold H. Smith: Increasing complexity and knowledge
have a Tower-of-Babel effect.
W. B. Pitkin: A vast population militates against individual achievement.
Note that none of these gentlemen emphasizes or even
mentions heredity. In fact, all of them seem to have gone
out of their way to avoid any references whatever to the
part human genetics plays in the fall of civilizations.
No one, including the author of this book, claims or
suggests that the deterioration of heredity destroys a civilization all by itself. One or more of the causes summarized
above certainly enters into the picture, and sometimes
disaster strikes quite independently of any heredity change.
However, the main thesis of this book is that every civilization normally has a built-in, self-destruct mechanism,
which insures that the less capable half of every generation
become the parents of more than half of the succeeding
generation.
The point is that the most intelligent and the least intelligent people have sharply different attitudes toward childbearing. Reliable statistics show that this attitudinal difference results in the more successful segments of our society
having fewer children. Part of this is due to the fact that
intelligent couples marry at a later age.
In Science News Letter (March 3, 1962), Ann Ewing wrote
about "a survey of 31 women who participated in the first

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

and second Science Talent Search of 1942 and 1943." By

1962 most of these highly intelligent women had attained
important positions in science, but "of the 31, 20 were
married while 11 remained single." It seems that the influences which stimulate talented women to take up a profession tend at the same time to remove them from the marriage market. In this case thirty-five percent of them were
unmarried, compared with about ten percent of the women
in the population at large.
Here are some of the reasons why intelligent couples are
increasingly unwilling to have a large family, or any family
at all:
1. In spite of hard times and inflation, relatively thoughtless couples are likely to marry younger, and then to reproduce with less thought of the future than prudent couples. Sensitivity to the cost of raising children is keener
among the more affluent members of society, even though
they can afford the cost better than the less affluent members.
2. Intelligent couples are more likely to know about
birth control and improved methods of contraception than
less intelligent couples. Conversely, the less people know
about such things, the more babies they have.
3. People of intelligence frequently develop a strong interest in the professions, in the arts, in business, in science,
in hobbies or in any number of other activities. Such interests may leave them little time or inclination for children.
4. It is an old cliche that the more there is of something
the less it is worth. That may not be the attitude of parents
to their own children after they are born, but it is true that
the more boys and girls there are at home, the less importance another child will have. Such matters are not likely
to be thought about in advance by the unintelligent in
connection with childbearing, but may restrict the number
of children by the intelligent.
5. Highly intelligent women are usually purposeful.

The Heredity Factor

119

Adopting the role of men, they disparage their own inborn

function as women (womb-men) and leave child-bearing to
those of less intelligence.
6. The problem of disciplining children in a permissive
age is often foreseen by capable couples, so they have fewer
children. Less capable couples discover too late that they
are slaves of TV toddlers and tempestuous teenagers who
justify the definition of gratitude as "the lively expectation
of further favors."
7. In 1949 the British Royal Commission on Population
found that high standards of parental care were a reason
for the general decline of the British birthrate. Obviously
these high standards were honored by the more conscientious, not the less conscientious, Britons.
8. The intelligent parent is quicker to note the prosperity of the small family and the poverty of the large one.
The disproportionate fecundity of less capable mothers
was a crucial threat to ancient Rome, particularly after the
Republic gave way to the Empire. In The Women of the Caesars
the noted historian Guglielmo Ferrero wrote: "that glorious Roman aristocracy which had escaped the massacres
of the proscriptions and of Philippi, ran grave danger of
dying out through a species of slow suicide . . . . " Among
a variety of social laws which the emperor Augustus had
enacted in 18 B.C. to correct this evil was the lex de maritandis
ordinibus which attempted by rewards and penalties to force
aristocrats to marry and have offspring. Deeply disturbed
by the increasing incidence of celibacy and small families,
Augustus fixed at three the number of children which every
citizen should have "if he wished to discharge his whole
duty toward the state." But some got around the injunction
by adoption, an increasingly common process. The aristocracy and the better class of citizens were becoming "less
numerous, less prolific, less virtuous."
Tenny Frank very definitely asserted that the heredity
factor was the key reason for the decline of Rome. Admit-

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JVhy Civilizations Self-Destruct

ting that the old Romans had all but disappeared, he wrote
in his History of Rome (p. 567), "The original peoples were
wasted in wars and scattered in migrations and colonization
and their places were filled chiefly by Eastern slaves.
Charles Deming, an expert on demography who lives in
Los Angeles, has a more widely applicable genetic theory
that stresses the tragedy of replacement of farsighted creative founders with irresponsible recruits. He wrote in a
letter to the author:
lTJhere is something regular in these early civilizations
the timing is remarkably similar. ... The growing city would
allract the attention of other people who had not built a city; it
would be seen like a mountain in the desert. Many of these
people would migrate lO the city. As they continued to do so, of
course, the talents that would establish a city would soon be
diluted and then be subordinated ... The city civilization would
have to go down. The fall therefore would be due to something
very akin to that perhaps unkind word 'degeneracy.'
Tenny Frank's mention that early Romans were wasted
in wars requires some qualification. From the genetic
standpoint it is possible some wars can have a beneficial
result. The Thirty Years War in Germany may have eliminated many Germans who were incapable of planning for
the worst. On the other hand, the Roman wars of conquest
must have had an adverse genetic effect by keeping Romans
under arms so long that they could hardly have escaped
being killed on the battlefield. We can be sure, however,
that even if the descendants of the original Romans had
continued to govern Rome, the disproportionate birthrate
would eventually have laid the empire low.
Frank eulogizes the early Romans in these words:
That calm temper of the old state-builders, their love for law
and order, their persistence in liberal and equitable dealings, in
patient and untiring effort, their deliberation in reaching decisions, their distrust of emotions and intuitions, their unswerving

The Heredity Factor

121

devotion to liberty, their loyalty to tradition and to the state, are

the things one expects to find so long as the old Roman families
are the dominant element in the Republic.
We cannot speak of the spirit of Rome or the culture of
Rome, says Frank, "without defining whether the reference
is to the Rome of 200 B.C. or 200 A.D."
History must take cognizance of this change, and in doing so
it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the change is primarily
due to the fact that the Romans partly gave way before and partly
merged their inheritance in a new brood which came largely from
Asia Minor and Syria. According to this view the decline of Rome
had begun in the last decades of the Republic.
Frank notes other causes of the decline, one of the most
important being faulty judgment, which derives from diminishing intelligence. Tangible causes include excessive
taxation, debasement of the coinage, slavery, unemployment among skilled workers and exhaustion of the soil. But
he adds:
The economic factors to be considered in discussing the decline of the Roman empire, while numerous, do not seem to be
the most vital ones. Most of them may be defined as symptoms
of a general decay in the intelligence and vitality of the people
then in possession of the government and its policies.
If from these many causes of Rome's decline we must select
the more potent ones, we should be inclined to name first Rome's
rapid and ill-considered expansion, the existence of slavery on
a vast scale, and as an immediate consequence of these two, the
thoroughgoing displacement of Romans by non-Romans.
Theodor Mommsen in The History of Rome (trans. W. P.
Dickson, Vol. 5, p. 337) also attributes Roman decadence
to the disappearance of the original gene pool: "The patrician body . . . had dwindled away more and more in the
course of centuries and in the time of Caesar there were

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes (clans) still

in existence." Caesar himself sprung from one of them. He
was given the right of creating new patricians, but they
soon bred themselves out of existence.
In the time of Augustus, according to Brooks Adams,
some Romans were conscious that the sterility of the upper
class must eventually deliver their city into the hands of the
barbarians. When legislation passed in A.D. 4 failed to encourage marriage, new laws were introduced five years
later. Some of the patricians protested and asked that the
legislation be repealed. Augustus called them to the Forum
and gave them a lecture that was passionate, even violent,
in its earnestness. Those among them who were single
were the worst of criminals, he asserted. They were destroyers of the race. Did they expect men to spring out of
the ground to replace them? "While the government liberated slaves for the sole purpose of keeping up the number
of citizens," Augustus thundered, "the children of the
Marcii, of the Fabii, of the Valerii, and the julii, allowed
their names to perish from the earth."
But Augustus might as well have remained silent. The
trend continued. "The bearing of children became unfashionable," said G. M. McCleary, in the Hibbert journal (April
1947). "[As] bourgeoisie and nouveaux riches strove to
emulate their betters in Rome, their families died out."
There is a study in Mankind Quarterly (january-March
1965) by S. C. Gilfillan entitled "Roman Culture and Dysgenic Lead Poisoning." Gilfillan draws on the opinion of
other scholars as well as his own to propose an additional
reason for Roman decline-the upper-class habit of cooking wine, grape syrup and acid foods in leaden or leadplated vessels and storing liquids in lead-glazed pottery.
Lead, Gilfillan alerts us, "produces sterility, miscarriage,
stillbirth, heavy child mortality and permanent mental impairment in children."

The Heredity Factor

123

Lead was plentiful and more easily worked than any

other metal in classical times. Since its harmful effects were
scarcely known, lead utensils were in great demand by
those who could afford them. The wine jugs of the poor
contained very little lead. Acid foods if stored, and especially if cooked, in copper or bronze produce copper acetate, which is greenish, bad tasting and sickening. Lead did
not broadcast its poisonous qualities so obviously.
Lead colanders, toys, pencils, and wall paint were other
sources of the poison, as well as lead pipes, roofs and cisterns. Some of the poor shared those risks, but except for
those who worked with the metal, the lead danger for the
lower classes was minor.
The low birthrate of the aristocracy meant succeeding
generations were diluted with people promoted from the
poorer segments of the population. In this way, if Gilfillan's
theory is correct, the cream of each crop was brought to
the top and then sterilized. It's a wonder Rome lasted as
long as it did!
The lead culture, which was developed in Greece and
may have been a cause of the intellectual collapse of that
civilization, may also present a subtle genetic danger to
modern man. Irving M. Shapiro writes in the Journal of the
American Dental Association (Feb. 1, 1973) that he and his
co-workers tested six brands of toothpaste. All contained
lead, with a larger proportion in tubes that were nearly
empty. Shapiro estimated that if a child brushes his teeth
twice a day he gets 1,800 parts per million of lead each day
from toothpaste, in addition to 130 ppm from food. The
lead does not pass through the body, but accumulates in
the bones.
Robert Gayre, the editor of Mankind Quarterly, wrote in
the 1972 Fall issue a brief but significant article entitled
"The Rise and Fall of Nations: Genetic Impoverishment."
Here are a few excerpts:

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Despite the fact that all scientists concerned with biology have
ineluctably been forced to accept the implication of genetics, we
find that these laws have had little or no effect on a large body
. . . of sociologists, social anthropologists, political thinkers and
philosophers, very many psychiatrists, and practically all politiCIans . . . .
It is therefore not surprising that the decline of nations is
attributed to environmental causes . . . . Or, putting the matter
another way, the result of immigration, emigration, war, taxation
and other social forces are not seen at all in their genetic setting.

Dr. Cayre uses his thesis to explain the collapse of the

British Empire:
For centuries overseas service had been dysgenic since its adverse effects had fallen disproportionately upon the elite of the
nations making up the United Kingdom. This was particularly so
from the nineteenth century onwards. One has only to visit Christian cemeteries in India to see the names of whole companies of
men and their officers struck down by cholera in the same month
to realize that overseas service in the nineteenth century was
bleeding the nation of its adventurous elite . . . .
These continuous campaigns went on to the South African
war, and then came the first Great War with its incalculable losses
in manpower . . . for instance, after the battle of Loos, a second
lieutenant came out commanding the remnant of a gallant Highland regiment. When it is realized that Britain (like Spain before
her) was wedded to a principle which was a selective recruitment
of only the best for slaughter . . . then the genetic loss becomes
evident. It was not only that a generation was virtually wiped out,
but it was selective of the leadership in all classes. The Second
World War continued this same trend, although on a less stupendous scale.

Dr. Cayre concludes with evidence from more recent

history:
Eleanor Rathbone, a well-known liberal Member of Parliament,
brought in an Act for family allowances, as a consequence of
which, just at the very time when middle and upper classes had

The Heredity Factor

125

to restrict their birth rates, the least endowed elements genetically of the population were encouraged to expand theirs. Following this came Lord Beveridge and his welfare state which has,
as a consequence, continued and developed this trend further.
Cooperative living and interdependence are the essence
of civilization. Since one man's work is usually dependent
on another's, orderly ~nd systematic patterns of behavior
are necessary. Interdependence can be described as a form
of reciprocity. In a complex civilization the importance of
an individual's part in the production process is difficult to
evaluate. This seems to account for the common failure to
render equal service for service given.
When cooperative living becomes highly developed, the
weeding out process reduces to zero. The strong create
living patterns that protect themselves, but also protect the
weak and the uncooperative. The social appetite is glorified. Service to others, and especially to the helpless, is
recognized as the primary moral imperative. Then the adverse birth rate differences take effect. The less intelligent
multiply more rapidly than the more intelligent. In its net
effect, evolution doesn't merely stop; it goes into reverse.
Gradually a weakening of average intellectual capacity
sets in. Soon the wisdom needed to maintain the complexity of civilization is no longer available. At the same
time the problems themselves grow more difficult. Judgments become more ill-advised. Government moves farther from the people. Issues have to be settled by force.
Suffering increases. Long-time objectives are abandoned
as people live more for the moment. The civilization may
then be overcome by conquering invaders, or it may sink
into a dark age of its own creation.
Civilizations break up because family and domestic incentives are often superseded by incentives for social accomplishment. The breeding is left mainly to those who are
incapable of achievement of any sort. As we have said,

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

civilization is cooperative living. But without brains to direct the cooperation there is only barbarism.
In our own civilization we see a lessening of the struggle
for survival. Welfare does away with natural selection.
Nothing in our present environment can serve as an adequate substitute for the harsh means evolution adopted to
prevent the weaker elements of civilization from playing a
major part in the formation of subsequent generations.
Compassion, unfortunately, is the enemy of biological
progress.
Being, in part, an accumulation of skills and know-how,
of buildings and tools, of transportation and communication, civilization must necessarily lag behind the concentration of brain power on which it dep~nds. And since the
visible forms and structures of a civilization are an accumulation, they may endure for decades after average intelligence has declined far below the level required to create
the civilization.
The following chart serves to illustrate these points.

Period of
civilization's
beginnings

Period
of
flowering

Period of
disintegration

Lag of a civilization behind the rise and fall of the intelligence on which it depends.

At the left part of the two curves the environment is

harsh. Though the less fit have more children than the
more fit, the children of the latter survive in greater num-

The Heredity Factor

127

bers, so average brain power increases. As the broken line

showing hereditary intelligence reaches its apex, cooperative living takes over and more and more people of below
average intelligence are kept alive. Their birthrate being
higher, they survive in larger numbers. Average intelligence declines.
To sum up: (l) the cause of the rise in the civilization
curve is the antecedent rise in the intelligence curve; (2)
the cause of the leveling out and downturn of the intelligence curve is the rise in the civilization curve.
At the stage at which the less intelligent offspring dominate the birthrate, specialization and other chief attributes
of civilization are not yet very far advanced. But since artifacts and organization are accumulating, civilization continues to expand, even while intelligence is declining
through the adverse differences in survival ratios. The
growth stops, however, when average intelligence falls beIowa minimum level.
As a general rule, in any civilization the less capable have
birthrates higher than those of the more capable. In
polygamous societies, however, this rule does not hold.
Usually, however, polygamy surrenders to monogamy
before a civilization gathers momentum.
That the less capable have a higher birthrate is important, but in the difficult times that precede civilization it is
not of crucial importance. If it were, there would never be
any such thing as civilization.
Let's consider the more intelligent segment of the female
population of a tribe. How do the female offspring who live
long enough to reproduce compare with their mothers in
numbers? The new potential mother (npm) rate is the number of female children who reach the age of reproduction,
compared with the number of women of the same age in
their mothers' generation. In a prehis toric society a thousand women in the higher classification typically would
have 4,000 female babies, of whom 3,000 would themselves

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

become mothers. Consequently the npm rate of the thousand women is 3. A thousand women in the lower classification would have 8,000 female babies, of whom 2,000 would
be new potential mothers. The npm rate of the latter is 2.
That 3 to 2 ratio is characteristic of prehistoric times and
is both the stimulus and precondition of civilization. Since
the more capable women have a higher npm rate than the
less capable women, tribal intelligence rises with each succeeding generation. Accordingly, the higher birthrate of
the less intelligent group is not controlling. The npm rate
is the deciding factor.
In tribal times, the social structure is embryonic. People
have to spend almost all their days caring for themselves
and their offspring. As the less capable can't do this very
well, their infant death rate is high, and their npm rate is
low. The more intelligent element does better, in spite of
its lower birthrate.
As for the "survival rate," it is usually taken to be the
number of survivals compared with the number of original
offspring. At every stage of civilization the survival rate is
higher in the more capable group. But after welfare programs raise the survival rates of everybody, though the
survival rate of the more fit is still a little higher than that
of the less fit, the npm rate of the latter surpasses that of
the former. When this happens, the civilization is doomed.
After centuries of inertia, disintegration begins. Whether
or not a new civilization can start up in the same geographic
area depends on: (1) conditions again being right for the
sorting out of the inadequate; (2) an invasion of people
who have themselves been subjected to the sorting process.
Looking again at the diagram on page 126, we are now
in a position to get a passing grade on the following exam:
Question: What causes the rise of civilization?
Answer: An earlier rise in problem-solving ability.

The Heredity Factor

129

Question: What causes the problem-solving ability to level

off?
Answer: The civilization, which now puts a strong emphasis on cooperation, protects people indiscriminately. Men no longer need brains and character
to stay alive. The weeding out process has ceased.
The broken line in the diagram flattens outbefore the civilization curve moves significantly
upward.
Question: What makes the broken line start to sink?
Answer: The birthrate for the mentally slow is higher than
the birthrate for the mentally agile. Consequently, when the weeding out ceases, the offspring of the former become more numerous
than the offspring of the latter. The result is a
decrease in average intelligence.
Question: Why does the civilization curve continue to rise
long after the intelligence curve starts to descend?
Answer: Civilization is an accumulation of ways and means
of living. Although a smaller and smaller propor. tion of people are creative, their inventions and
innovations add up to an impressive total and the
social structure becomes increasingly rich and
complex.
Question: Why is the importance of high intelligence to
civilization generally overlooked?
Answer: The time lag between the decay of intelligence
and the decay of the civilization obscures the total
dependence of civilization on human creativity.
The outward splendor manages for a time to hide
the inner rot.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Let us imagine an observer stationed on the solid line,

a little to the right of its intersection with the broken line
of the intelligence curve. He would not be likely to foresee
that the rising "world line" of his civilization would soon
change its direction. Few men, no matter how intelligent,
would know that the curve of average intelligence had already peaked some time in the past and was already sloping
sharply down. Few would sense that the downturn in the
broken line resulted from carrying out one of mankind's
most honored moral commands-not only to love one's
neighbor but to preserve his life, no matter how counterproductive his existence may be to the population as a
whole.
To bring things into better focus we can divide the life
span of a civilization into three stages:

Intelligence

Time

Civilization

An arrow shows the direction of major influence at the indicated stage.

At Stage A, the civilization curve begins because the intelligence curve has risen to a high enough level to make
cooperative action successful.
At Stage B, civilization has reached the point where it just
offsets the weeding out process. The problem makers still
have a high deathrate, but their birthrate is also high, so
their proportion of the population remains the same. At
this stage civilization is beginning to exert a depressing
influence on average intelligence by insuring a longer life
for the unfit, thus ending the rise of the intelligence curve.
As it proceeds to the right of B, the civilization becomes

The Heredity Factor

131

still more efficient, but average intelligence now decreases

because the increased npm rate of the unfit makes them an
increasing proportion of the population.
At stage C, average intelligence, because of the birthrate
differential, has declined to such a low level that the civilization begins to deteriorate.
Although the point is hard to grasp, the benefits of a
civilization go hand in hand with its decline, while at the
same time being the causes of its decline. The collective
activity which is the hallmark of civilization provides not
just more and more goods and services but, particularly in
Western civilization, an almost suffocating amount of
security in the form of doles, grants, gifts, food, housing,
clothing and health care. This cradle-to-grave security,
needless to say, is not limited to those who can and do carry
their part of the load. The weaklings, the ne'er-do-wells,
the antisocial elements of the population share in and come
to dominate the welfare programs. As a result, the social
organization is weakened through the subsidized proliferation of its most unproductive elements. If the burdensome
members of society who received all these benefits would
agree to refrain from increasing the load they put on others, if they agreed to refrain from reproduction, the social
organization would be more enduring. But security has the
habit of destroying itself by wrecking the social organization that provides it.
Earnest A. Hooton, the late Harvard anthropologist,
wrote in The Twilight oj Man:
Material prosperity encourages the preservation, pampering,
and reproduction of the biologically inferior elements which are
parasitical upon rich civilizations. Then some . . . culturally
crude stock crashes in and wipes clean the slate . . . . We can
either prune off our own rotten branches or submit to a ruthless
cutting down and thinning out by more vigorous conquering
stocks.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

All the negative influences listed in this and previous

chapters have been operative in the civilizations of the past
and in differing degrees have been the causes of their decline. It is our thesis that, if mental ability increased instead
of declined as the problems of a civilization became more
complex, the people would be able to control both the
quantity and quality of their population, conserve their
resources and prevent the complexity of the social order
from getting out of hand. In short, if capable, intelligent
people had the most offspring, society would solve its problems instead of merely wrangling about them.

Chapter 11

The Squandering of Genius

o weakneJs

of the great l 0 folly of the wise l

Where now the haughty Empzrr that was spread
With Jllch fond love Y lIer very Jpeerh Is dead.
Jj'llham Wordsworth

The Sumerian civilization began six thousand years ago

in the lower Mesopotamian Valley, in what is now Iraq.
Mesopotamia means "between the rivers," between the
Tigris and Euphrates, which flow southeastward and eventually join and continue on to the Persian Gulf.
Sumer is usually designated as the most ancient civilization, the first to establish a matrix of homogeneous cities.
There were other cities before Sumer, such as Jericho,
Jarmo and Chatal HUyiik, but most historians refuse to
classify them as having belonged to any "civilization." Neither has the advanced culture of the Cro-Magnon people
been described as "civilized." The Megalithic peoples, including the builders of Stonehenge, may have had authentic civilizations, but on this point history books are noted
for their ambiguity.
A story in A'ature (j une 7, 1974) states that at Newgrange,
a tourist mecca in County Meath, Ireland, there is a 5,000year-old rocky eminence about the size of a football field.
A passage, about sixty feet long, leads to a burial room
which contains the fire-scorched bones of five individuals.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

During the winter solstice the sun shines down the entire
length of the passage to the burial chamber! Irishmen of
5,000 years ago not only lived in a complex social organization, but some of them must have been astronomers.
About 200 such passage caves are said to exist in Ireland.
Though Newgrange is the only one known to exhibit a
knowledge of astronomy, we may well ask if its occupants
or the occupants of any of the other 200 sites were "civilized?" And if so, did their civilizations precede Sumer's?
Can we be certain that future archaeologists will not
disclose evidence of civilizations much more ancient than
we have hitherto imagined? Before Sumer was named the
oldest civilization, Egypt held the title. The Indus civilization, now considered the third oldest, was not even discovered until 1921 and its importance has been recognized for
little more than a generation.
No one knows exactly where the Sumerians lived before
they came to Sumer. They may have come from the hill
country in the north or arrived by sea across the Persian
Gulf.
One argument for assigning the origin of the Sumerian
founding fathers to the highlands is their places of worship.
They built their temples on artificial hills or ziggurats
which, not the Egyptian pyramids, may have been the models for the Mayan buildings in Mexico. The latter, being
step pyramids, more closely resemble Mesopotamian architecture. Also, the Mayans used their "artificial hills" for
temples, as did the Sumerians. But in 1962 it was discovered that at least one of the Mayan ruins was the tomb of
a king. An inscription informs us that about 1322 years ago
the occupant had ascended to the throne at age 28 and
ruled for twelve years.
The Sumerian ziggurats must have served as a blueprint
for another historical marvel, the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon, one of the ancient world's Seven Wonders. Nebuchadnezzar is said to have built them to please his homesick

The Squandering of Genius

135

wife, who longed for the hills of her birthplace in Media.

The lush gardens on their several levels were irrigated by
water pumped from the Euphrates.
Not a trace remains of the Hanging Gardens, but there
are ruins of a ziggurat not far away at Ur that may be older
than any other pyramid on earth. Of solid brick, it is rectangular in shape, 250 feet long by 150 feet wide by 70 feet
high.
Sumer, in its first thousand years, expanded to a territory
of 10,000 square miles, the size of Massachusetts. By that
time it comprised several city states, ruled by kings and
priests. Each city was nourished by about 100 square miles
of fertile farm land.
From 3,000 to 2,500 B.C. has been designated as Sumer's
early dynastic period. It was outstanding for the building
of temples and palaces, and the development of foreign
trade. The scarlet pottery, which characterized the beginning of the period, gave way to metal containers and more
prosaic pottery-adapted to the large-scale production required by a thriving commerce.
Sumerian cuneiform, now considered the world's first
writing, seems to have come into use as an organizational
tool for agriculture. The economy turned socialistic under
the direction of the priests, as the financial records show.
Tom B. Jones in his book Ancient Civilization states that
cuneiform clay tablets indicated the Sumerian production
of barley to be twenty-five to thirty bushels per acre. In
mathematics, the Sumerians, whose priests used doubleentry bookkeeping, employed a number system based on
sixty, which is still popular in Western geometry and timekeeping.
At first the cuneiform system of writing consisted of pictographs. It may not have developed into ideographs and
syllable symbols until after the Sumerians had passed from
the scene.
The Sumerian pantheon contained a variety of godspersonal, city, state and universal. The sky god, Am, was

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

given the serial number of sixty, considered the perfect

number. Enlil, number fifty, was an organizer and promoter. Enki, forty, was the god of wisdom, medicine and
writing. All the universal gods had local headquarters.
There were fifty temples at Eridu, for example, and forty
at Nippur. Some of the male gods had wives who were
addressed with a title equivalent to "Lady."
In all, there were three Sumerian dynasties, the final one
beginning about 2100 B.C. when the Governor of Ur, still
a Sumerian-speaking city, took over the kingdom. But in
a few more decades Sumer was no longer Sumerian. After
2000 years, about seventy-five generations, it had passed
into other hands.
A few words of Sumerian persisted in the language of the
Semitic peoples who were the heirs of Sumer, while the
most prominent features of the Sumerian scene-the ziggurats-became landmarks of the Babylonian and Assyrian
cultures ..
Why did the Sumerian civilization disappear? There was
no apparent reason. It was almost certainly the subtle erosion of heredity by birthrate differences. The Sumerian
civilization probably annulled, as all civilizations have tried
to annul, evolution's brutal way of dealing with incompetence.
Brilliance must have been a common intellectual trait of
the early Sumerians. But after sixty or seventy generations,
the number of Sumerian leaders capable of making wise
decisions about complicated problems must have dwindled
catastrophically. The state was now ready to be taken over
by the Semites who, in the environmental harshness of
their deserts, had been breeding up in the two thousand
years in which the Sumerians had been breeding down.
Egypt, the second civilization to flower, whose inhabitants were probably as inherently gifted as the Mesopotamians, was not an uninterrupted social continuum. Each major burst of innovation was as new as the Gothic explosion

The Squandering of Genius

137

that followed Europe's Dark Ages. And Egypt's ups and

downs reveal certain processes and workings of civilization
that justify their inclusion in this study.
The geographic area of early Egypt was, like that of
Sumer, about the size of Massachusetts and contained a
life-giving river. The fertile strip of land (550 miles long
by 30 miles wide) watered by the Nile permitted a high
density of population and the complex social order that
went with it.
As Egypt entered its historical era about 6,000 years ago,
there were forty-two separate states between the sea and
the Nile's first cataract. These states, called "nomes," seem
to have been peopled by tribes or clans, each with its own
river frontage.
Because the Nile's soil was extremely fertile, the population expanded to the stage where social relations were
institutionalized and authority formalized. The long, navigable river, which flowed past each "nomesite," greatly
stimulated communication and commerce.
In the days before Egypt's unification, the people were
already making pottery, fishhooks and boomerangs. Later
they added copper objects and ceramic figurines, while
their pottery became a work of art. Trade flourished, as
proved by shells from the Red Sea, ivory from the tropical
south, turquoise from Sinai and cylinder seals from
Mesopotamia.
Since the Nile runs from south to north, Southern Egypt,
the first part of the country to be unified, is Upper Egypt.
Lower Egypt was consolidated soon after. In The Social
Thought of the Ancient Civilizations J. O. Hertzler tells us that
even in the days before the nomes were organized into
federated kingdoms there was a great deal of innovation
and "culture borrowing." Houses were built of sundried
brick; pottery was decorated; cloth was made of domestic
flax; animals were domesticated; grains were farmed; and
tools were of bronze, carved ivory and stone. Boats had
sails and oars, and were used for trade with other nomes.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

As villages took shape, writing came into being-the idea

probably coming from Sumer.
Some scholars, including Edward MeyerandJ . O. Hertzler,
assert the Egyptian calendar was in use by4200 B.C., though
others say it was not invented for another 1400 years. It
had the 365-day year, divided into twelve months of thirty
days each, plus five holidays.
A personage named Menes became the first king of Upper Egypt, presumably by overcoming the chiefs of several
nomes. He and his dynastic successors began the amalgamation of the separate states of Upper and Lower Egypt,
which was completed by the pharaohs of the Second
Dynasty.
Beginning with the Third Dynasty, about 2700 B.C., a
period of 500 years is designated as the Old Kingdom. It
was a time of prosperity, growth and remarkable achievements, reflecting an uncommon concentration of brain
power and an absence of the "emergency problems" which
demand so much energy and attention in the later stages
of civilization.
This 500-year span was about twenty generations. How
many of us can trace our ancestry back twenty generations?
The question is raised to illustrate the long life span of the
Old Kingdom, and the great number of changes that must
have taken place in the population during these centuries.
It was during the Old Kingdom, circa 2400 B.C., that the
Great Pyramids were constructed. The first one was built
by King Zoser of the Third Dynasty. It was a step pyramid,
which is impressive evidence that the design was borrowed
from Sumer, where the ziggurats were all step pyramids.
The oldest known mummy was found in Zoser's massive
tomb-the remains of a musician named Nofre, wrapped
in jute in a sarcophagus painted red, yellow and blue.
The largest pyramid, built by King Cheops a century
later, is 784 feet on each side and 482 feet high. A hundred
thousand workmen labored on it for twenty years. Consider

The Squandering of Genius

139

the organization that such a project required. There is no

more striking example of man's emphasis on the self than
Cheops's Great Pyramid.
The first twenty generations of the Old Kingdom were
an era oflaw, order and tranquility. The self-destruct principle, however, would have reliably predicted the disorder
that took place in the 7th through 10th Dynasties, the "First
Intermediate Period," whose time span has been variously
estimated from 100 to 300 years. If it was only 100 yearssay four generations-the elimination process must have
been severe to have reduced the proportion of the antisocial elements to the point where order could again prevail.
Genetic deterioration is not the only reason why the Old
Kingdom expired in chaos. Some historians blame the later
pharaohs for ruling neither wisely nor well.
The deterioration seems to have set in in the fourth of
the Old Kingdom's six dynasties. One pharaoh, satisfied
that his pyramid had provided an imposing resting place
for his own eternity, allowed his courtiers to erect their own
expensive tombs. He also gave them lands to supply their
tombs with provisions. This may have become a common
practice. As the pharaohs deeded away tax-free lands, they
gave up some of their power.
Pharaonic rule was also diminished by another cause.
Though the nomes had been tribal societies in primitive
times, when they were consolidated into kingdoms, they
were ruled by governors appointed for short terms. This
kep~ them dependent on the continued approval of the
pharaoh. But as the centuries passed, the gubernatorial
posts were made hereditary. The governors grew richer
and more independent at the expense of Egyptian unity.
The interlude between the Old and the Middle Kingdom
was a time of troubles, as we learn from the testimony of
a highly placed government official named Ipuwer, who
wrote:

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Forsooth, the laws of the judgment hall are placed in the vestibule. Yea, men walk upon them in the streets and the poor tear
them up in the alleys.
Forsooth, many dead men are buried in the river. The stream
is a sepulchre, and the pure place [embalming place] is become
a stream.

This last passage has been interpreted to mean that the

dead were too numerous to be embalmed and buried, so
were thrown into the canals and the Nile. Here we might
remember that in eras of stress the death rate of unadaptable individuals shoots upward. But since natural selection
is not geared to definite specifications, many capable individuals die along with the unadaptable. But the latter, as
a rule, die in greater proportion.
Some other observations of Ipuwer delineate the evils
that may doom our own civilization unless we make drastic
changes in our reproduction practices:
Forsooth, the land is full offoes. A man goeth to plow carrying
his shield.
Forsooth, plunderers are everywhere . . . . The women are
barren, and there is no conception. . . . Plague stalketh through
the land and blood is everywhere.
Forsooth, every town saith: "Let us drive out the powerful
from our midst."
Forsooth, squalor is throughout the land. There is none whose
clothes are white in these times.
Forsooth, the river is blood.
Forsooth, men are few. He that layeth his brother in the
ground is everywhere . . . .
Forsooth, great and small say: "I wish I were dead!" Little
children say: "He ought never to have caused me to live."
Forsooth, all female slaves have power over their mouths.
When their mistresses speak, it is irksome to the servants.
Forsooth, men sit in the bushes until the benighted cometh,
in order to take from him his load. What is upon him is stolen.
He getteth blows of the stick . . . and is slain wrongfully.

The Squandering of Genius

141

Behold, it is come to this, that the land is despoiled of the

kingship by a few senseless people.
Behold, the officers of the land are driven out . . . from the
houses of the kingdom.
Behold, they that possessed clothes are now in rags. He that
wove nothing for himself now possesseth fine linen.
Behold, the poor of the land have become rich, he that possessed something is now one that hath nothing.
Behold, they that possessed beds now lie upon the ground.
Behold, he that had no yoke of oxen, now possesseth droves.
He that could not procure himself oxen for ploughing now possesseth herds.
Behold, the mighty ones of the land, none reporteth to them
the condition of the common people. All goeth to ruin.

Why did Egypt's Old Kingdom, a magnificent civilization, "crumble to the dust before the battering thistledown?" Very simply, the less capable had the most offspring and a high degree of social organization permitted
this offspring to survive and then produce offspring of their
own.
When a civilization's orderly processes break down, evolution automatically becomes effective again. In Egypt's
Dynasties VII through X, many family lines were terminated. If death failed to snip the line in the first generation, it had additional chances in each subsequent generation until order was restored. Eventually the elimination of
the less fit raised the average intelligence level of the remaining Egyptians to where the land was ready for a new
cycle of civilization.
Egypt's second great civilization, the Middle Kingdom,
lasted 347 years, from 2133 to 1786 B.C. Its high points
took place in the lith and 12th Dynasties.
Egypt's capital was now moved to Thebes, 350 miles
south of Cairo, where as a result of three and a half centuries of intensive building there remains "the most extensive
area of magnificent ruins to be found anywhere in the

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

world." The "pylons, courts and columned halls," the

stone columns and lintels, the temples and palaces are
mute testimony that there was a time when Egypt possessed
inventiveness and adaptability that have rarely been surpassed, as well as patience and persistence in following
long-range objectives that have never been equalled.
Genius readily found expression in architecture, engineering and literature during the lith Dynasty. But in the
12th Dynasty, from 1991 to 1786 B.C., the emphasis seems
to have been on military force.
The first monarch of 12th Dynasty, Amenemhet I, regained much of the power that had been lost by shortsighted pharaohs before the First Intermediate Period. In
1971 B.C. he made his son Sesostris co-regent, and for the
last ten years of his father's reign, Sesostris was the more
active partner. Egypt assumed control of Nubia (now Sudan), and had copper mines in Sinai.
Amenemhet II, the grandson of Amenemhet I, ruled
from 1929 to 1895 B.C. He gave most of his attention to
foreign policy and to the mining of precious metals in
Nubia and Sinai.
Amenemhet III (1842 to 1797 B.C.) raised the Middle
Kingdom to its zenith. He completed a system by which
water was brought into Lake Moeris southwest of Cairo. In
addition to draining marshes, he kept the mines of Sinai
busy and he supervised the construction of the elaborate
temple complex in Thebes.
The reign of Amenemhet IV (1798 to 1790 B.C.) was
peaceful and prosperous, but it was followed by Egypt's
Second Intermediate Period-eight generations of internal
turmoil. Again a civilization practically vanished overnight,
as factions split the empire into small kingdoms. The fragmented land was an invitation to the Hyksos, a nomadic
and mixed people whose numbers had been expanding in
the area northeast of Egypt. They conquered several of the
small kingdoms, relying in part on the psychological effect
of their horses, chariots and bronze armor. It was the first

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143

time that Egyptian armies had been confronted by this

advanced military technology.
After approximately 200 years of war and mindless drifting, Egypt's third civilization took shape, lasting from 1580
to 1099 B.C. It began with the 18th Dynasty which organized the states into an empire that remained in the hands
of one family of pharaohs for almost 200 years. Amosis, its
first pharaoh, expelled the Hyksos and reestablished control over the local kingdoms and Nubia. His successors
conquered Palestine, Phoenicia and Syria. Amenhotep III,
"The Magnificent" (1417 to 1379 B.C.), is the most renowned of Egypt's "New Empire" leaders. He continued
the imperial era that was the pride of his father Amenhotep
II. He pushed the copper mining in Sinai and Nubia to new
records of production, and was responsible for many of the
huge buildings which are major attractions for present-day
tourists, including the main portion of the temple of Luxor
and part of the temple of Karnak. Diplomatic contacts and
political marriages for his sisters were important considerations in his royal projects.
Amenhotep IV (1379 to 1362 B.C.), son of Amenhotep
III, was the monotheist who believed that the one and only
god was the sun. His incredibly beautiful wife, Nefertiti,
presented him with six daughters. But he spent so much
time on his religious reforms he neglected the affairs of
government. Egypt went into a slow but continuous decline, from which it has never recovered.
The records reveal diminishing competence in all areas
of statecraft. There was no rush to chaos this time, just an
all-embracing torpor. Egypt's greatness was gone-forever.
Another early civilization of the riverine type was that of
the Indus Valley. Here fertility and the regular watering of
the soil encouraged large-scale agricultural production,
political organization and all the other prerequisites of urban society.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

The discovery of the Indus Valley civilization in what is

now West Pakistan came as an archaeological surprise.
Egypt had remained in man's historical consciousness and
had been known to scholars for thousands of years. Sumer,
the Shinar of the Bible, has also been generally known,
although only in recent decades had its efflorescence been
recognized as preceding Egypt's. But the Indus civilization,
contemporary with Sumer and Egypt, and more extensive
than both of them put together, had been erased from
human memory for some three thousand years.
Almost a century ago railroad builders in Pakistan, then
a part of British India, dug out bricks from old buildings
in a buried town and used them in their construction projects. They were kiln-dried bricks, and consequently no one
imagined they represented an ancient civilization. As time
went on, puzzling artifacts came to light, whetting the interest of archaeologists. In 1921 systematic digging was
begun. Three cities have been excavated, all of them between Hyderabad and Lahore. Of the three, Harrappa is
the largest. But it is the least preserved because the buildings had served as the workers' brick quarry. Mohenjodaro, downstream from Harrappa, has provided most of
the surprises.
The Indus civilization, as demonstrated by the location
of the mounds of its several cities, comprised the largest
civilized area in the world at its time. Among other things,
it luxuriated in domestic animals: cattle, goats and sheep;
cats and dogs; water buffaloes, zebus, asses, horses, camels,
even perhaps domesticated elephants. There were granaries and mills, with comparatively humble dwellings nearby
for the workmen, who were probably slaves.
The people wore cotton clothing and such ornaments as
bracelets, combs, necklaces, rings and nose-rings. Men
shaved their upper lips.
Families lived in two-story houses whose rafters and
doors were of wood. The houses themselves were built of

The Squandering of Genius

145

wood, bricks or stone. Roofs were fiat, and there were no

windows. Candles furnished the illumination. Heating
seems to have been provided by portable charcoal stoves
carried from room to room. Cooking was performed in a
courtyard. Sanitation was furnished by clay pipes from the
houses to sewer drains covered by stone slabs.
For the chilc;lren there were rattles, whistles and such toy
animals, someot them on wheels, as bulls, donkeys, dogs,
elephants, pigs and rhinoceroses.
Indus craftsmen made pottery that was decorated with
black designs on a red background. They used a potter's
wheel and much ofthe pottery was mass-produced for commerce. Artisans worked in gold, silver, copper, lead and
bronze, and made swords, spears and arrowheads, as well
as saws, axes and adzes, and knife blades and razors. One
bronze saw, dug up in Mohenjo-daro, was the finest tool
of its kind to be found in any early civilization and was not
surpassed until the Roman era.
For transportation the Indus people relied on boats and
oxcarts. There is evidence of trade as early as 2350 B.C.
-westward to Mesopotamia and eastward to the Far East.
Weights and measures were standardized. The Indus
equivalent of our foot was from 13 inches to 13.2 inches.
The cubit was 20.3 inches to 20.8 inches. The weights used
on balances were stones cut in cubes in the geometrical
series: 1, 2,4,8, 16, 32.
In addition to bronze, Indus artists relied on alabaster,
terra cotta, soapstone, sandstone and limestone for their
creations. But compared with Sumerian and Egyptian
craftsmen, they were not very competent. One of the most
common Indus figurines, sitting in the yogi position, had
three faces and horns and may have been the forerunner
of the Hindu god Shiva.
The streets of Mohenjo-daro were laid out in grids, north
to south and east to west-an indication of an advanced
culture when the city was founded. The close attention to

146

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

geometry may have affected burial habits. The graves were

in a north-south position with heads to the north. Often
the dead were buried with an ample supply of pottery.
In both Harrappa and Mohenjo-daro there was an enormous forty-foot artificial hill, which served as a strongly
fortified citadel topped by a palace and a temple. Each hill
covered an area twelve times as big as a present-day football field. Could the idea have come from the ziggurats of
Sumer?
The Indus people had writing, but discoveries so far have
been restricted to seals and inscriptions in copper. The
symbols, totalling about 400, have not yet been decoded.
Most of the writing was probably on something as impermanent as paper and has turned to dust over the centuries.
The forty generations of the Indus civilization taxed its
heredity base too much. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica
(l4th edition) says of Mohenjo-daro:
One thing is clear. The city was already in an advanced stage
of economic and social decline before it received the coup de
grace. Deep floods had more than once submerged large tracts
of it. Houses had become increasingly shoddy in construction
and had often been carved up into warrens for a swarming lowergrade population. Everywhere standards had fallen. The final
blow was sudden, but the city was already dying.

Notice the phrase "swarming lower-grade population."

The official end of the civilization seems to have been
marked by an invasion of aliens, though signs of violence
have been found only in Mohenjo-daro.
There is a tentative theory that the destroyers were the
Aryans, the founders of India's most enduring civilization.
Quite likely some of the seeds of the culture the IndoEuropeans planted in India were taken from the Indus Valley.
The desecraters of Mohenjo-daro, whoever they were,
left dead men, women and children where they fell. Their

The Squandering of Genius

147

skeletons, together with those from recently unearthed

graves, are said to reveal two types ofIndus residents, some
long-headed, some with heads of the Australoid shape. The
former were supposedly the masters, the latter the subjects.
The culture of the indigenous village peoples that
preceded the Indus civilization had no apparent links to
that of the 2500 to 1500 B.C. period. So it seems that the
founders of the Indus civilization were themselves invaders.
In forty generations of relative order and stability the
indigenous tribes overrun by the Indus invaders would
have been provided the opportunity to greatly outnumber
their masters and would have created conditions that would
certainly have brought about an era of stagnation or worse
for the civilization. Paradoxically intelligence, not stupidity, leads to the extinction of family lines in a civilized
society. And the reason lies in the advanced social order
which the intelligent people devise, but which works for
their undoing.
In this chapter we have discussed five of the earliest
multiple city cultures: Sumer, the Old, Middle and New
Kingdoms of Egypt and the Indus Valley. Just as Egypt was
the geographic locus of several enduring social structures,
other civilizations besides the Sumerian existed in the
Mesopotamian vaHey. The most prominent were Babylonia, Assyria and Persia. Add to these China, the civilizations of the Olmecs, Mayas, Aztecs and Incas in America,
the hundreds, even thousands, of early city states that the
archaeologists are gradually uncovering, and what a wealth
of material there would be for a college course called Civilizations in Comparison! By studying the growth and decay
stages of a multitude of civilizations we would learn much
more than by the standard method of isolating one specific
culture and conducting a microscopic inspection of its various political, economic and social manifestations.
In the single-city and multiple-city civilizations examined

148

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

in this chapter we have again proved the rule that persons

of high intelligence have wide and intense interests, the
variety of which, absorbing so much of their energies, limits
the number of their children, and thus reduces the intelligence available for the maintenance of civilizations. Consequently, while the less gifted segment of the populace proliferates, every civilization squanders the genius of its
orgamzers.

Chapter 12

The Self-Destruct Principle at Work

in America

The true test of civilization is .

turns out.

. the kind of man the country

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Though many educated people are aware that children

from large families usually make lower grades on intelligence tests and school examinations than children from
small families, only a few have sensed the true significance
of this phenomenon.
The causal forces are both environmental and hereditary. The parents in larger families are usually less effective
in educating their children. Equally important, in statistical
terms, though with many exceptions, the larger the family
the lower the intelligence level of their children.
Environmentalists view the facts from one side only.
They blame the low achievement of members oflarge families on nurture not nature and claim it is correctible. The
problem, they say, can be solved by raising the family'S
standard of living and providing an enriched environment
for both parents and children.
Nevertheless, the proposition that heredity is a significant factor in achievement cannot be dismissed. And even
if our present rate of deterioration derived entirely from
environmental influences, at this stage of our history there

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

would be no hope of halting the trend toward chaos unless

we established some kind of brake on reproduction. Birthrates of low-income groups are getting out of hand. We
must give the world's poor people more constructive things
to do than the production of more poor people.
At this juncture in our study we will focus on civilization
in America. We will try to fathom what will happen to our
civilization when more than half of every generation
springs, as it is now doing, from the lower achieving half
of the previous generation. This is the kind of reverse selection that has destroyed a hundred civilizations before ours.
When the manuscript of this book was sent to Dr. Max
Rafferty, Dean of the School of Education at Troy State
University and former head of California's Department of
Education, he observed that nationally standardized tests
given to students in California grade schools might lend
support to the thesis that birthrate differentials were causing a deterioration of the national IQ
Dr. Rafferty was referring to "The Statewide Standardized Test Results" for two different grades in the school
years 1969-70, 1970-71 and 1971-72 conducted by the
Office of Program Evaluation of the California Department
of Education (see opposite page).
California, the most populous state, has the largest number of public school pupils and is among the top ten states
in educational expenditure per capita. Yet there was a falloff in the average pupil score for every subject.
On the basis of similar and more sweeping evidence U.S.
Education Commissioner Terrel H. Bell has recommended
the "major rethinking of education on several levels. " Bell
was deeply disturbed by a government study that showed
fourteen percent of all adults were unable to make out a
check correctly. Of 17-year-olds, only one percent could
correctly balance a check book, and only ten percent could
figure out a taxi fare. Of adults, 29 in 100 could not compute the wages due if the pay check included some time-

The Self-Destruct Principle at Work in America 151

CALIFORNIA STANDARDIZED TEST RESULTS
Median Scores Grade 6

Verbal abilily
Reading
Language
Spelling
Arilhmelic
Median Scores Grade 12

Verbal abililY
Reading
Expression
Spelling
Quanlilalive

1969-70

1970-71

1971-72

98.1
61.7
58.3
22.6
74.9

97.2
61.2
57.5
22.5
72.6

96.6
59.8
55.5
21.9
69.8

1969-70

1970-71

1971-72

101.5
21.5
40.8
8.2
13.2

101.0
21.2
39.9
8.1
12.9

99.1
20.8
38.6
7.8
12.8

and-a-half for overtime. The 13-year-olds of 1974 could

not write as well as those of 1970. Spelling was worse,
vocabulary more primitive, sentence structure more haphazard. The examiners were led to conclude, "American
teenagers are losing their ability to communicate through
written English."
The same trend was apparent in the College Entrance
Examination Board's Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT)
scores. In 1963 the average score for Verbal Ability was
478; in 1975 it was 434. The score for Mathematical Ability
in 1963 was 502; in 1975 it was 472. Since Scholastic Aptitude Tests are taken by about a million students each year,
educators are becoming greatly concerned about the unmistakable decline in the learning curve.
As to the cause or causes of this decline, most attention
so far has been devoted to educational methods. Other
factors have been considered, such as TV, home influences,
and the type of neighborhood. As might have been expected, all the theories put forth to date have related solely

152

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

to the environment. Doubtlessly, some of them have validity. On the other hand, the diminishing learning capabilities of our teenagers may be part of a larger and more tragic
story in which biology plays the dominant role.
Recent census studies make it possible to compare present-day birthrate differences with family living standards
(see PC(2)-3A, U.S. Census of Population, 1970, Women by
Number oj Children Ever Born, Table 58). It turns out that
family size is inversely proportional to economic wellbeing. Some 1970 census figures, for example, correlate
housing characteristics with number of children per thousand mothers. The table is broken down into such categories as regions, property value and rent. Most revealing are
the figures relating to plumbing.
TABLE 58
Children per 1,000 IV!others
White
Negro

Housing with all plumbing facilities

Lacking some facilities
Without any plumbing facilities

3,280
4,403

4,048

5,055

6,827

5,773

Those with no plumbing facilities are likely to be ardent

advocates of equal opportunity but by having five children
per family they are not providing their children with opportunities equal to those enjoyed by children in smaller families. Parents without plumbing have more children than the
average reader of this book, and more than the average
taxpayer. The children of the poor constitute a disproportionate share of their generation. How many generations
is it likely to take before they put enough pressure on
political leaders to make their wishes the controlling national policy?
Figures for the 1960 census were tabulated somewhat
differently, but they tell the same story (see PC(2)-3A, U.S.
Census of Population, 1960, Tables 41 and 42).

The Self-Destruct Principle at Work in America 153

TABLES 41 and 42
Children per 1,000 Mothers
Nonwhite
White
Sound Housing

With all plumbing facilities

Lacking only hot water
Lacking other plumbing

2,617
3,596
3,880

3,148
3,789
4,778

3,590
4,324
4,700

3,737
4,080
5,201

5,001

5,201

Deteriorating Housing

With all plumbing facilities

Lacking only hot water
Lacking other plumbing
Dilapidated Housing

In the United States as a whole, white mothers in dilapidated housing had almost twice as many children as mothers in sound housing with all plumbing facilities.
Affluence is only a partial indicator of intelligence because many worthy objectives which an intelligent person
may pursue are only tenuously related to size of income.
However, a man who does not have a bare survival income
probably fits into the classification of those with too little
intelligence to have stayed alive in tribal times. In prehistoric eras such a misfit would have been extremely vulnerable to evolution's pruning knife. Both he and his family, if
they had been in northern areas during the ice ages, would
probably have died of starvation.
The rule that people with small incomes have more children than those of larger incomes is supported by Tables
50 and 51 (see next page) from the 1970 version of the
previously cited population study.
Comparing tbe income of husbands, the 1970 population study shows that in every case the less prosperous
outbred the more prosperous.

154

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

TABLES 50 and 51
Children per 1,000 Women
White
Negro

Wives 35 to 39 Years Old

With incomes
$1.00 to $1,999
7,000 to 9,999

3,322
3,082

4,652
3,473

3,328
2,975

4,659
3,423

3, III

4,278
3,091

Wives 40 to 44 Years Old

With incomes
$1.00 to $1,999
7,000 to 9,999
Wives 45 to 49 Years Old

With incomes
$1.00 to $1,999
7,000 to 9,999

2,722

Children per 1, 000 Women

Negro
White
Wives 35 to 39 Years Old

Without reference to
husband's income

3,116

3,851

Whose husbands had

no Income

3,168

3,870

Without reference to
husband's income

3,040

3,893

Whose husbands had

no Income

3,225

4,103

Without reference to
husband's income

2,803

3,514

Whose husbands had

no Income

3,027

3,890

Wives 40 to 44 Years Old

Wives 45 to 49 Years Old

The Self-Destruct Principle at Work in America 155

As we have said before, the problem is not new, though
it is getting worse. Here are the comparable data from
Table 37 of the 1960 income figures.
TABLE 37
Children per 1, 000 Women
White
Negro
Women 35 to 39 Years Old
Without reference to
husbands' incomes

2,664

3,299

Those whose husbands

had no incomes

2,905

3,472

Women 40 to 44 Years Old

Without reference to
husbands' incomes

2,550

3,156

Those whose husbands

had no incomes

2,860

3,974

Women 45 to 49 Years Old

Without reference to
husbands' incomes

2,377

2,951

Those whose husbands

had no incomes

2,785

3,309

The extent of parents' education is probably the best

statistical gauge the Census Bureau's population studies
gives us for judging parental intelligence, and consequently the best gauge of the heredity transmitted to their
children. Since some highly intelligent students leave
school at a young age, they must be included in the figures
of those with only a few years' schooling. But these categories also include practically all the dropouts who do not
have the intelligence to make the grade and whose reproduction rate is of tremendous significance when compared
with the reproduction rate of the well educated. The statistics from Tables 40 and 41 of the 1970 population studies

156

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

includes only wives aged from 40 through 44 because their

families are most nearly complete.
TABLES 40 and 41
Number of Children
Per 1,000 Wives
Negro
White

Husband and wife, each with less

than eight years of school

4,221

5,725

Husband and wife each with

four years or more of college

2,914

2,349

If the eight years of schooling were broken down further,

we should learn much more about the relative intelligence
of the parents. Even in the simple, all-inclusive form given
above, however, we are told a great deal. For one thing,
the comparisons show that though the whites are breeding down, the blacks are breeding down much faster.
The 1960 figures were similar, as we can see from Tables
26 and 27 below. Since for that year the Census Bureau's
classification by ages was different, comparisons cannot be
exact.
TABLES 26 and 27
Number of Children
Per 1,000 Wives
White
Negro

Where husband and wife each has

less than eight years of school

3,479

3,510

Where husband and wife each has

four years or more of college

1,922

1,315

We see that in 1960, as well as in 1970, uneducated

Negroes had almost three times as many children as educated Negroes. For every hundred babies of educated Negro parents, there were 266 babies of uneducated Negro
parents. Interestingly enough, educated blacks were reproducing even less than their white counterparts. And they
still are.

The Self-Destruct Principle at Work in America

157

Bear in mind that these tables report married couples

living together. Children of unmarried persons and deserted wives, who would be even more of a burden on
society, were uncounted.
One more set of figures from Tables 36 and 37 of the
1970 population studies should complete the message.
TABLES 36 and 37
Children per 1, 000 Women
over 5 a years of age
White
Negro

No school year completed

3,658

3,021

Elementary:

I to 4 yr.
5 to 7 yr.
8 years

3,668
3,047
2,635

3,189
3,064
2,839

High school: I to 3 yr.

4 years

2,308
1,950

2,660
2,059

College:

1,848
1,644
1,238

1,894
1,602
1,233

I to 3 yr.
4 years
5 or more

As the figures in this chapter have demonstrated, we have

come to a stage at which the intelligent and more prosperous in this country must spend an ever greater amount of
energy, time and money taking care of the less intelligent
and the less prosperous. If the trend continues, creative
and constructive work may soon become an impossible
extravagance. Unless we revise our attitudes toward the
"rights" of those who are dragging us under, unless their
reproduction rates can be dramatically lowered, the United
States will soon follow the pattern set by two earlier-and
extinct-Western Hemisphere civilizations: the Mayan and
the Incan.
There is no deadlier form of self-destruction than forcing the worthy elements of a civilization to become the
servants of the drones.

Chapter 13

A Ratchet for Reproduction

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and
dogs than of their children.
William Penn

Of the ancient civilizations that we know about, most

have vanished "not with a bang but a whimper." Since their
decline and disappearance are chiefly caused by the erosion
of the citizenry's mental faculties, this chapter will be devoted to ways and means of reversing this debilitating
trend.
As a start, we should remember these two fundamental
aXIOms:
1. Evolution's removal from the gene stream of the less adaptable and less capable was the most effective method of raising
man above the other mammals.
2. A civilization's defenses against the brutality of the evolutionary process increase the number of social misfits, who in time
destroy what they were insufficiently gifted to create and are
incapable of maintaining.

Does a civilization in order to endure have to find a

substitute for nature's traditional and successful means of
upgrading mankind? We say it does, and we suggest that
one such compromise is sterilization.

A Ratchet for Reproduction

159

G. C. Thosteson, M.D., a syndicated columnist, recently

publicized a new sterilization technique for women called
"band-aid surgery." It is new in that the operation is accomplished by two tiny openings near the naval. One opening is for a light; the other for inserting the surgical instrument, which cauterizes or ties up the fallopian tubes. The
openings are so small they require no stitches, just a bandaid. The patient is in the hospital or clinic for only one day
and suffers a minimum of discomfort. Some clinics report
women have been released a few hours after the operation.
Male sterilization, called vasectomy, has become much
more popular because it is even simpler. The New York
Times (April 4, 1971) reported that in 1970, 750,000 American men were sterilized, adding that today "most vasectomies are performed in twenty minutes in doctors' offices
under local anesthesia, without more than a day or two lost
from work. In this operation, tiny incisions are made on
both sides of the scrotum-and the vas deferens, the tubes
that carry the sperm, are cut."
Since sterilization has been approved in many areas of
the world as a means of birth control, there is all the more
reason to approve it for population control. As a substitute
for evolution, it could actually save Western civilization.
Because the "public good" is too abstract an idea to be
understood by those who, for the public good, most need
to be sterilized, incentives would have to be offered. Up to
now, these incentives have been in the negative direction.
Those who are a burden on society actually receive rewards
in the form of additional welfare if they increase the burden! Some of them actually make a business of increasing
the burden! Proposed laws for a minimum family income,
with no strings attached, will aggravate rather than alleviate
the problem. A much more sensible approach would be
legislation granting small payments for sterialization.
H. L. Mencken once suggested that men should be given
$100 to be sterilized (American Mercury, Summer 1937).
Something similar has been in effect in the Ernakulam Dis-

160

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

trict of Kerala, India (Family Life, April 1972). Publicity was

lavished on a month-long "Family Planning Festival,"
which promised a small cash reward, a week's free rations
for his family, free transportation to and from the "Festival," and free articles of clothing to any man who attended
and allowed himself to be sterilized. More than 63,000
vasectomies were performed.
Mencken thought a $100 bonus would attract the kind
of men whose offspring would have a negative effect on
society, and that $100,000, would be enough to get the
plan underway. He added that "ten or fifteen million dollars would be enough to rescue the whole of Arkansas!"
Many years later Graham French gave a grant to the
widely respected Association for Voluntary Sterilization.
The fund was too small to permit bonuses, and it was rapidly consumed in surgeons' fees. Later a realtor named
Jesse Hartman gave $25,000 to a similar project in Kentucky. Although those in charge of the Kentucky project
put its emphasis on environment, not heredity, there was
no conflict about the ultimate objective, as the committee's
statement makes clear:
Appalachia's most tenacious and devastating problems are
created and perpetuated by the continuous avalanche of babies
amidst poverty-stricken families. These unfortunate children are
doomed to a life of deprivation. Not only is there not adequate
food and shelter, but the most essential elements for emotional
growth, such as being wanted, loved and appreciated, are denied
them. They are deprived of social, cultural and educational opportunity. These children then have no alternative when they are
adult but to join the vicious poverty cycle.

Were Mencken, French and Hartman thinking in terms

of a ratchet for reproduction? An automobile jack works
on the ratchet principle. Its handle moves up and down,
but only the downward movement raises the car.
Evolution had a Tatchet effect on human intelligence.

A Ratchet for Reproduction

161

There are favorable births and unfavorable births, but only

the favorable births accumulate to make the species more
adaptable. The less gifted children simply have no effect
because they die early.
Civilization, which brings with it an automatic pardon for
evolution's "death penalty for inefficiency," removes nature's control over the low achievers. The result is that
inefficiency inevitably triumphs over efficiency-with society the big loser. But individuals also come out badly.
They will be represented in future generations, if at all, by
descendants of lower intelligence than their own. This is
the insidious meaning of the birthrate differential.
Let's consider the case of the exceptional parents who
have a high IQand yet have half a dozen children. Among
the half dozen some are likely to be more intelligent, some
less, than their parents. Let's assume that three are more
intelligent than the parental average. More likely than not,
these three will have fewer children than the less intelligent
siblings.
Although children will generally have the same median
intelligence as their parents, grandchildren will have, on
the average, less intelligence. Parents usually think the continuity of their family line is secure if they raise children
like themselves. This is likely to be true for only one generation. Their grandchildren by their superior children will
almost surely be fewer than the number of their grandchildren by their inferior children. The same rule applies to
subsequent generations.
Now let's examine a club or organization in which there
are 12 couples quite similar to each other in age, intelligence, education and social status. Altogether these 12
couples have 24 children. Let's assume 8 children are close
to the average intelligence of all the club members, while
8 are above that level and 8 below. The question is which
group of8 children will themselves have the most children?
If they conform to standard patterns of civilized behavior
those below the parental average will have the most chil-

162

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

dren; and those above the parental average will have the
least.
What all this means is that the social group with whom
our children and grandchildren will normally mingle will
be less intelligent than our social group. The opportunity
for intelligent people to marry intelligent people is lessening every day. Consequently, our children and grandchildren will have a narrower choice of partners.
If the erosion of civilization seems rather distant from
our personal interests and social life, the genetic deterioration of our descendants should at least give us some second
thoughts.
Consciousness awakened in human beings tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago, depending
on our definition of man. Heredity has renewed that consciousness for countless generations. We are the living representatives of all the members of our family line that have
gone before. More important, we represent the sole possibility of life of millions of individuals yet to come, and in
our brief stint here on earth we are not only the crucial cog
in our own descendants' future, but in the future of mankind. What we do now in our own family will have an effect
on the quality of human beings far ahead in time.
It is human nature to look forward to something, something beyond ourselves and beyond the present. The prospect of something better gives us the courage to hold on
when the times are out of joint. The well-functioning human being cannot organize himself around any concept
that leaves out the weeks, the months and the years to
come. Our mind's eye requires the long view.
Survival is biological succession-the continuation of the
gene stream that has already carried the gift of consciousness through numberless links in the heredity chain and is
ready to carry it through the numberless links to follow.
Our own children become the vehicles of self. Our physical
and mental characteristics are carried along in their

A Ratchet for Reproduction

163

chromosomes and in the chromosomes that will flow in

from other family lines. We should be highly concerned
about those "other family lines" with which our own
heredity will be merged. To have descendants of substantially less intelligence is not a happy prospect.
And with or without children of our own, for tranquility
of mind we have to think of, and prepare for, a social order
and a civilization, which we can approve and which will not
come with mere wishing. The chaos into which we are
drifting points to many generations of misery, stress and
hunger. Our goal must be a vast improvement in the problem-solving ability and character of our representatives yet
to be born.
In summary, we must actively arrange a future in which
the emphasis is on human quality. Then like our ancestors
in early Greece and Rome, in the Germanic forests and in
the thirteen colonies, we and our posterity will again get
busy building a tomorrow that is better than today.
Joseph H. Simons in his book Gebo, Successor to Man (p.
93) puts his emphasis on our bodies rather than our minds,
but his thinking on heredity deserves attention:
Medical practice has the ability to preserve the lives and also the
capacity for breeding of many who in the absence of medical
service would die or at least would not reproduce. If those saved
by medicine have genetic defects of body, mind and emotion
which can be inherited by their progeny, their preservation without sterilization tends to weaken the genetic stock and increase
ills, diseases and defects of coming generations. Nature is always
producing mutations and genetic faults but is also removing
them by deaths of those having them. If medicine replaces nature
in the life span of the afflicted, it must then replace nature in
preserving the species and protect its genetic strength.

As a first step toward a biologically sound society, Simons proposes licensing prospective parents (p. 116):

164

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Any married couple can obtain a permit [to reproduce] by

request provided they are not in arrears on their taxes, not supported by the state on a dole or welfare, are not convicted criminals, are healthy and compatible, and do not have a serious inheritable fault, defect, disease or abnormality.

There are others besides Simons who have expressed the

idea that reproduction should be limited by licensing
procedures. In 1973 Roger W. McIntire of the University
of Maryland presented one such plan to the Eastern Psychological Association (Science News, May 12, 1973). Professor McIntire stresses the fact that the offspring of irresponsible parents get a bad break. He believes the public is
about fed up with the miserable prospects of many hapless children and is ready for a licensing law for parenthood which would protect both society and the prospective
child.
In regard to the licensing of child-bearing, we might
remember how many activities are licensed these days by
our federal, state or local governments. Without a license
we can't fly an airplane, drive a car, teach in an accredited
school, build an office building, operate a beauty salon or
even own a dog. If all these activities call for governmental
supervision, what about the most important function of
all-parenthood?
Jessie Chasko, a California housewife, tackles the subject
from a different perspective (Science News, July 14, 1973):
[Ilt would be ideal if [the reproductive organs of] males and
females could be tied off at puberty, and when both parents
decide that they want a child, they go through the formality of
applying for permission, passing a course in child care, child
nutrition and how to love and cherish the child. Having gone
through that formality, they would stand miles apart from the
thoughtless and drunken conception that now brings rejected
children into the world to be persecuted or at least neglected.
It is the major, number one disgrace of the earth.

A Ratchet for Reproduction

165

We should bear in mind, however, that proof of intelligence should be included in an application for a license
that gives human beings the right to reproduce.
Plans for salvaging civilization, the final subject of discussion in this chapter, can be classified under three headings:
(a) licenses to have offspring; (b) elimination of that part
of the welfare system that encourages childbearing; (c) new
marriage laws. Since we have already touched on (a), the
remainder of the chapter will deal with welfare and marriage laws.
The basic point to make in regard to changing the welfare system is that no person who is already a burden on
the government or becomes such should receive money or
aid to increase the burden. An application for unemployment or disability benefits should certainly include in addition to proof of unemployment, illness or incapability, an
agreement not to become pregnant or have children while
receiving payments.
The applicant should also agree that if the woman of the
family does become pregnant while the family is receiving
payments, she must accept abortion at government expense. Also, if the applicant so wishes, he or she can be
sterilized at government expense at any time while on welfare.
The promise not to have children should extend for at
least three years after the cessation of government payments, so that individuals could not withdraw from the
benefits, have a child and then go back on welfare. Moreover, people of child-bearing age who receive welfare benefits should be instructed by the government in the techniques of contraception to insure compliance with the law.
The legal stipulation that those on relief must refrain
from giving birth to another generation on relief is justified
by the statistics of the Great Depression. Between October
1929 and October 1933 there were 1,612,891 infants born

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

to families on relief. Those infants constituted 12.7 percent

of the total relief roll population, whereas children born
in the same period to families not on relief comprised 9.6
percent of the population as a whole. This is one more
illustration of the rule that the more irresponsible elements
of society have the most children. We must, of course, take
care of the unfortunate segment of our population. But to
let those who are now a part of the load increase the load,
while more prudent citizens delay their marriages and their
child-bearing till better times, is social insanity.
The welfare changes that have been suggested by our
present lawmakers do nothing to reverse the higher birthrate of welfare recipients. The only practical way to reverse
this dangerous birthrate differential would be a marriage
law.
Marriage, of course, has always been a matter of concern
to the community or state. The Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, in its comprehensive study of marriage, asserts,
"Society everywhere limits the choice of biologically possible partners .... Marriage until the most recent period has
never been primarily directed toward sentimental qualification of the spouses." In various European countries a man
had to own a house or a plot of land before he could get
a permit to marry. Until recently in this country, many
states refused to permit marriages between whites and nonwhites. But today young, inexperienced and even unemployed couples can have as many children as they want (or
don't want) with or without benefit of marriage. The interests of society are not even considered, except in the matter
of venereal disease.
One reason for Western nations' "decontrol" of marriages and matings was the Industrial Revolution, which
stimulated the fragmentation of the social order. Today,
the general lack of responsibility toward marriage has
reached a new low, as demonstrated by the following letter
that appeared in a popular advice-to-the-lovelorn column:

A Ratchet for Reproduction

167

Dear Ann Landers: My boyfriend and I want to get married.

Please tell us what states do not require a blood test? We will go
to the closest one. We believe a mandatory test is unconstitutional and an invasion of privacy. If people wish to be married
without a blood test, they should be able to do so. Thank you.
-100 Per Cent American
Dear 100: You thanked me too soon. Unfortunately a few backward states do not require blood tests, but I won't tell you which
ones. Your resentment reflects ignorance. The state is trying to
protect people against bringing blind, retarded or dead babies
into the world, which is what can happen if a parent has V.D.

Ann Landers, of course, told only part of the truth in her

reply. But the public is so starved for information about this
subject that half a loaf is better than none.
The following is the proposed text for a marriage law
which, the author believes, would appreciably improve the
intelligence and health of the American population in a few
generations.
WHEREAS, unfavorable differences in birthrates have existed in
earlier civilizations and seem to have been a basic cause of their
decline, and
WHEREAS, as shown by United States census figures unfavorable differences in birthrates prevail in this State, and
WHEREAS, we believe that both the heredity and the home
influences of our citizenry are deteriorating as a resulL of these
unfavorable differences in birthrates, and
WHEREAS, any State, by the nature of its marriage provisions,
necessarily determines in large part the heredity and the home
influences of its future citizensTHEREFORE, as this State's Marriage Law, be it enacted:
1. That this Act shall not affect marriages heretofore consummated; that the organization for the law's operation shall be
established as soon as efficiently possible and before a date
nine months after the passing of this Act; and, that after the

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

establishment of the Marriage Office all marriages must take

place under the terms of this Act.
2. That no marriage have validity without a license issued by
the Marriage Office.
3. That the collection of information concerning marriage candidates, the granting of licenses and the keeping of records
shall be the full time employment of licensing officers so that
they can be thoroughly familiar with their duties and their
responsibilities.
4. That the licensing officers be on salaries and not on a fee
basis, since licensing officers paid by fee might be tempted
to grant licenses contrary to the public interest.
5. That no person be given a license to marry unless he or she
present ample evidence in an examination conducted by a
licensing officer of being well informed in contraceptive techniques. This restriction will be waived if one or both of the
prospective marriage partners are sterilized.
6. That no person be given a license to marry except as she or
he is suitably employed or has adequate financial means. This
restriction is waived if one or both of the prospective marriage partners are sterilized, or if a convincing case be made
before a licensing officer that no social burden will result
from the marriage.
7. That no person be given a license to marry unless or until
he or she presents to the licensing officer a physician's certificate evidencing: (a) that he or she has had a blood test and
such other tests as are necessary to disclose venereal disease
and that he or she has no communicable venereal disease;
(b) that he or she has no other serious contagious or inheritable diseases.
8. That no person be granted a license to marry except as he
or she pass a standard IQtest in the 20th percentile or above,
and except as he or she present proof of at least four years
of satisfactory work in grammar school education or equivalent. This restriction will be waived if one or both of the
prospective marriage partners are sterilized.
9. That no person be granted a license to marry, if he or she
is a habitual criminal, habitual drunkard, or a drug addict.
This restriction will be waived if applicant is sterilized.
10. That no person be granted a license to marry if he or she,

A Ratchet for Reproduction

169

as a result of heredity, is blind, deaf since early infancy,

seriously deformed, or insane. Every candidate for marriage
will be examined for these defects by an approved examining
board, and the licensing officer is forbidden to issue a marriage license except as a favorable certificate from the said
board is in his possession. These restrictions will be waived
if the candidate for marriage is sterilized.
11. That any unmarried person who engenders a child or is
pregnant shall be examined by the licensing officer concerning his or her eligibility for marriage, and if he or she is not
eligible for parenthood and if the discovery is within the safe
period for the woman, she is to be aborted at state expense.
It shall be the duty of any physician or nurse under whose
care the person comes, and of anyone else learning of the
circumstances, to report such cases to the licensing officer.
12. A pregnant woman entering this state from another jurisdiction must register within one month with a licensing officer
and conform with the marriage law except as he or she can
show that residence within the state is temporary.
13. That each couple given a license to marry must have stipulated on the license and on the state's record, by the licensing
officer, the maximum number of children permitted the couple under the laws of this state. Parents are required to report each child to the officer of the licensing office both six
months before it is born and at the time of its birth. After the
conception of the final child authorized for the couple, but
before it is born, the parents may submit to the licensing
officer the records of any qualifications which they think may
entitle them to a still larger number of children. If the parents qualify for a larger number, they are to be given, by the
licensing officer, a certificate indicating the new maximum.
If the parents submit no evidence, or having submitted evidence, still do not qualify for a larger number, they or either
one of them, may at that time or later, if they so desire, be
sterilized at the expense of the state. In any case, if the wife
becomes pregnant after the couple's quota is attained, she
is to be aborted at the expense of the State, and both husband and wife are to be sterilized at the expense of the State.
In case one of the children has died before the couple's quota
is complete, it is not to be counted as part of the quota.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

14. That the licensing officer make arrangements for the sterilization without fee of persons for whom it is required or who
request it according to the provisions of various Articles of
this Act.
15. Couples complying with other legal requirements are to be
authorized for reproduction according to the following scale.

IQ Percentile

20
50
60
70
80

Satisfactory completion of school

work

Fourth grade
Sixth grade
High school
or college
High school
or college
High school
or college

Standing in
class

Authorized
quota of
children

1
2

Top 3/5ths
Top 3/5ths

Top 2/5ths

Top l/5lh

no limit

16. There shall be a State Board of Human Genetics composed

of three members, each of whom must be well trained in
genetics, hold a Ph.D. degree from an accredited institution
and must, as prerequisite to taking office, publicly declare
his or her approval of the purposes of this law, in the administration of which he or she is to participate.
17. The Board shall appoint the licensing officers and shall oversee their work. It shall keep such records and conduct such
studies as it thinks appropriate. Funds shall be allocated to
its use for the purposes herein set forth.
18. Persons with socially beneficial qualifications not regularly
provided for in the foregoing may apply to The Board of
Human Genetics for a higher quota of children than that
specified by their IQ and educational attainment. Musical
ability, special achievement in the sciences or the liberal arts,
in mechanical invention or in organization are to be given
special consideration. The Board shall examine each case in
view of the employment conditions and the number of special allocations already made, as well as the likelihood of the
social benefits to society by the prospective children. The

A Ratchet for Reproduction

171

Board shall have the power to increase a person's quota

aiLhough it does not have the power to reduce it. The Board,
however, may recommend to the legislature, when it sees fit,
any changes in the classifications and quotas which its members believe would be of ultimate benefit to the State, selling
forth in writing the recommendations and the reasons for
them.

Gradually, it is hoped, people will come to see that the

universally assumed "right" to have babies is the right to
destroy our civilization. Only when child-bearing becomes
a reward, not a right, will large social organizations cease
their self-destruction.
A marriage law similar to the one proposed in this chapter will be "a rachet for reproduction" because it will allow
upward changes in heredity while preventing any significant shift downward. If such legislation is enacted, parents
for the first time in history will be assured that the capabilities of their descendants a thousand years hence will match
or outmatch their own!

Chapter 14

The Author Meets His Critics

Youth is looking Jor new answers-so they can question them.

Walt Kelly

Many questions have probably arisen in the reader's

mind as he tasted or, more hopefully, digested the contents
of this book. Some of them may have been answered as he
read on. Some of them may have not. Because of the controversial nature of his subject matter, the author is well
aware that some questions may have been stimulated more
by a feeling of hostility than by a desire for knowledge.
Consequently, the best way to answer these questions and
to relieve the tensions of some of the author's critics is to
make this closing chapter an interrogatory, which can also
serve as a summary of the book's principal points.
CRITIC: You express repeatedly the dependence of civilization on intelligence. In a general way nearly everybody
goes along with that idea now. Why make it such a refrain?
AUTHOR: People don't deny the connection of intelligence and civilization. But they assume that intelligence is
well distributed and that stupidity by itself could not be the
principal cause of a civilization's failure. I have tried to
establish that the rise of civilization is the result of a wide
dissemination of problem-solving ability and the fall of civi-

The Author Meets His Critics

173

lization is a result of problem-solving incapability. This is

another way of saying that civilization is the enemy of evolution. Evolution's modus operandi is selective killing.
Civilizations are social organizations which try to protect
their members against death or at least delay it as long as
possible. Today, the evolutionary process is mostly restricted to people suffering from ill health. But even in this
area it has been severely restricted as millions live on who
would have died at an early age in prehistoric times.
CRITIC: As I understand you, evolution is the nursemaid
of civilization, but civilization hates its nursemaid.
AUTHOR: The intelligence necessary to produce a civilization is a refinement of the brain capacity it takes for human
beings to evolve from lesser primates. Without mutations
and the culling out of less intelligent individuals, the human species would never have been clever enough to organize the specialized functions that go with civilization.
The continuing build-up of primate intelligence by the evolutionary process would have made civilization inevitable
because intelligence leads to efficient behavior and efficient
behavior is the seed corn of civilization.
CRITIC: You spent so much time on motivations in your
early chapters. I never thought you would get to your main
theme, why civilizations self-destruct?
AUTHOR: Each chapter is intended to have some part in
supporting the subject matter. The conclusions in the later
chapters are more convincing because they are anchored
in inherited behavior patterns. If we don't understand our
subconscious motivations, we are likely to consider our
social shortcomings superficial.
CRITIC: In your 1960 book The Next Civilization you discussed what you called "Heredity Corporations." Do you
still think so highly of this idea?
AUTHOR: Yes, I believe Heredity Corporations have great

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

possibilities. The greatest weakness of the present social

order-and of all civilizations-is the neglect of heredity.
As you may remember, the plan for Heredity Corporations
depends on artificial insemination, a practice often used in
families with sterile husbands. As long ago as 1941 the
Journal of the American Medical Association surveyed one-fifth
of the country's physicians and found 4,049 reported cases
of births by artificial insemination. Between 5,000 and
7,000 babies are born by artificial insemination each year
according to Dr. Alan F. Guttmacher of the Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. No doubt the yearly number is increasing as more people learn about this technique.
Heredity Corporations would put artificial insemination
to better uses. In the past, many great men died childless
or with very few offspring and were, so to speak, lost to the
world. To prevent this waste, different types of Heredity
Corporations would set up different arrangements for the
fathering and raising of children. One type would require
that each of its families have at least as many children by
artificial insemination from out-of-family great men as by
husbands. Imagine a corporation of fifty families with fifty
children by husbands in the corporation and fifty children
by the contemporary equivalents of: Aristotle, Beethoven,
Alexander Graham Bell, Chopin, Darwin, Da Vinci, Edison,
Benjamin Franklin, Cyrus McCormick, Michelangelo, Newton, Pasteur, Walter Reed and Shakespeare!
CRITIC: Wouldn't the male members ofa Heredity Corporation resent paying for the support of children who are
not their own?
AUTHOR: Men sometimes marry widows with children
and support them willingly. And adopted children seem to
get about the same care as if they were born in the family.
Besides, the main purpose of Heredity Corporations is to
serve the future-a project which would tend to unite the
family by giving it a higher sense of purpose. Moreover, the
husband's own children, having grown up with the fifty

The Author Meets His Critics

175

offspring of the selected "geniuses," would probably marry

among them, so husbands could be confident they would
leave as their own legacy to posterity offspring as capable
as, or more capable than, themselves. But Heredity Corporations, though they can serve as a bridge to a subsequent
civilization, would not be numerous enough or work
fast enough to save the civilization we have now. That is
why I have not mentioned them in the main body of this
book.
CRITIC: Your previous books dealt mainly with the population problem. This time you seem to avoid it. Why?
AUTHOR: I did not avoid it at all. What I have done is
emphasize the quality rather than the quantity aspect of
population. The truth is the two aspects must always be
considered together. In Population Roads to Peace or War,
which was published in 1945 by the Population Reference
Bureau and in its 1947 revision, Human Breeding and Survival, published by Penguin Books, Guy Irving Burch and
I realized that these two sides of the population problem
are practically inseparable.
In my 1951 book Population on the Loose, I stressed the
point that statistically the problem-makers are also the
baby-makers by writing (p. 166): "In pre-civilization days,
when the devil took the hindermost, the biological implication of success was survival of one's self and one's kin. But
now we save the unsuccessful, and they have most of the
babies. Now the biological implication of success is extermination.
In Sex Versus Civilization (1967), I wrote that "families on
the government dole have more children than the average
of the taxpayers who support them" and "among educated
people there has never been a population explosion." My
earlier books were published when the quantity issue was
making some headlines. But then and now most writers on
the subject of population have tended to ignore the quality
aspect altogether.

176

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

CRITIC: Do you think Americans should have more than

two children per family?
AUTHOR: No one can reasonably come up with a figure
and say, "Americans should have so many children per
family." Some should have fewer and some should have
more. We must remember that the effects of child-bearing
are not limited to the particular family that has the children.
Number of offspring should depend on the potential benefit or danger to society. To the extent that it is successful
"Zero Growth" gives the illusion that the population problem is being brought under control. Since incapable parents will continue to have more offspring than capable parents, the quality problem will continue to worsen with every
"Zero Growth" generation. The marriage law proposed in
the preceding chapter is one way to correct the population
problem. It would reward merit instead of penalizing it, as
present laws do. Unfortunately, in the implementation of
the law there is bound to be some injustice, though less
injustice than offered by our present system and much less
injustice than future evolution has in store for us, if we
continue to drift.
In 1968 Dr. Garrett Hardin, president of the Pacific Division of the Association for the Advancement of Science,
made a scintillating address entitled "The Tragedy of the
Commons." The commons were areas of communityowned land in England, in which any resident of the village
could pasture his cattle free. The incentive of each herdsmen was to increase his number of cattle. When the pasture
was overgrazed, the effect of too many cows was borne by
all of the herdsmen, while the man or men whose additional
cows caused the trouble would suffer but little. In the short
term, he would actually benefit. Freedom in the use of the
commons brought disaster to all. What was good for the
individual was not good for the community.
The principle is widely applicable. For instance, if we
don't restrict the use of our national parks, Hardin points

The Author Meets His Critics

177

out, we invite their destruction. And he shows that pollution of the air and streams works the same way. The group
that does the damage suffers with everybody else in the
long run, though it profits in the present because the cost
is borne by the community.
CRITIC: The Declaration of Independence crystalized the
idea that all men are created equal. Isn't your book inconsis tent with that doctrine?
AUTHOR: The Declaration of Independence was formulated long before Charles Darwin did his pioneering
work in evolution. Thomas Jefferson's lofty words were
really meant to convey that the colonists were Englishmen
and that Englishmen had attained a measure of self-government which should rightly be extended to their cousins
overseas. The findings of Darwin and his successors actually strengthen Jefferson's case for separation from England, though some revision of his wording is in order. The
colonists had been through the mill of natural selection as
a result of their early hardships and were thus really better
equipped for self-government than those who had remained in England.
CRITIC: Polygamy was a common practice in ancient societies. The dominant male frequently had the most offspring, as did the dominant male of many animal species.
Doesn't that contradict your statement that less intelligent
people always have more babies?
AUTHOR: I never said "always." At any rate my study
applies not to people in all situations but to people in
civilizations. Polygamy in civilized communities has been
the exception. And even in civilizations the rule that the
less intelligent half of the population regularly has more
than half of the babies does not always apply to small
groups. In fact, the smaller the group the less likely the rule
is applicable.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

CRITIC: Why is it so hard for people to understand that

average intelligence is declining?
AUTHOR: Partly because a civilization, in its visible aspects and in its methods, represents an accumulation of
knowledge. This knowledge keeps on accumulating even
though the problem-solving capabilities are contained
within a dwindling segment of the population. We are
amazed at the moon landing and the exploration of Mars
and think these projects represent the zenith of human
intelligence. But average intelligence is another story. The
moon landing says nothing at all of the increasing proportion of people who are steadily undermining the foundations on which earlier generations have built. The weakness
of a civilization doesn't become apparent until the whole
structure starts to crumble.
CRITIC: Several writers agree that since the primate stage
our forebears have been hunters. Robert Ardrey in African
Genesis interprets our fierce past as the reason for so much
of the violence in movies and TV. Perhaps the greatest
enemy of civilization is our instincts.
AUTHOR: The drift of literature as well as of movies and
TV toward sex and violence goes along with the reverse
action of evolution. As intelligence evolved, interests became widely diversified and violence and sex were a diminishing part of life. But as successive generations obtained
their majorities from lower and lower levels of intelligence,
the worthier interests are held by an ever smaller number.
People who have difficulty with abstract thinking are more
directly occupied with instincts. A busy market for the
lower forms of entertainment is a consequence.
CRITIC: In a world threatened with thermonuclear war,
don't birthrates have a bearing on peace?
AUTHOR: They certainly do. Population growth constitutes a steady push toward international and civil conflict.
Anybody who denounces war, if he is consistent, has to be

The Author lv!eels His Critics

179

an advocate for population control. As other countries allow their populations to increase beyond bounds, some
"experts" think we will have to do likewise. They are completely wrong. Raising population quality, not population
quantity, means less drag on national income, so more
funds would be available for building up a more efficient
defense force. Also, the higher level of intelligence assured
by quality control would promote a better statecraft for
avoiding wars or better weapons for winning them.
CRITIC: I am interested in your analysis of egocentricity
versus the social appetite. Aren't they equally important?
AUTHOR: They are, but at present the social appetite has
reached a state of hypertrophy. By protecting the weak, we
save the lives of individuals who cannot do their share of
society'S work. Concurrently, we are increasingly lenient
toward people who prey on other people. We should continue to protect the free loaders-but only on condition
that they refrain from proliferating other free loaders.
CRITIC: You have linked kindness with the social appetite
and have implied that people have too much of it. You are
not going to get much support by knocking what most
people consider to be a virtue and a religious duty.
AUTHOR: What I am criticizing is not kindness but blindness in kindness. Being kind without limits is being socially
injurious rather than socially beneficial. A century ago John
Stuart Mill had this to say about charity, which is kindness
in action: "As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on persons directly concerned, and the ultimate
consequences to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another."
Kindness is a paradox. We probably could not have a
civilization without it. Indeed, many people consider it the
very essence of civilization. Yet kindness with no restraints
on reproduction leads directly to a civilization's collapse.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

Only if we increase human quality, can we render and receive kindness without the present disastrous side effects.
CRITIC: Why are there often conflicting attitudes about
charity even among people who seem to be of the same
social level-within the same chamber of commerce, the
same golf club, even the same church? One man will favor
a specific charity and another will oppose it. Why does
charity frequently have such a marked effect on people's
blood pressure?
AUTHOR: Usually the difference of attitudes reflects a
difference of knowledge about the effects of charity. Those
who are aware that charity with no strings attached is really
antisocial will realize the importance of strings.
CRITIC: Incidentally, do you contend there is something
original in your argument that our mental abilities and our
psychological makeup are heavily dependent on heredity?
AUTHOR: No, but it has been so unpopular for the last
forty years that the environmentalists and "nurturists" are
now running the show. Only recently have the hereditarians been coming out of their holes. Tom Alexander in
Fortune (October 1972) has an excellent article "The Social
Engineers Retreat Under Fire." He tells of a number of
developments which give us hope that serious studies of
human and animal behavior are breaking through the suffocating taboos imposed by the social scientists who worship the equalitarian and environmental viewpoint. But
don't think the truth will have an easy time of it. As Alexander sees it, anyone who questions the pet theories of the
environmentalists "finds himself attacked with a virulence
unprecedented in scientific circles since the days of
Galileo."
Alexander lists a few of the brave men now battling the
antiheredity establishment and who somehow manage to
get published. Edward C. Banfield, Harvard political scientist and author of The Unheavenly City, is one of them. Ban-

The Author Meets His Critics

181

field classifies people according to interests and finds they

differ in the degree of their orientation "to the future."
There is, of course, a high correlation of intelligence with
such an orientation. But Banfield errs, along with his major
critics, in aiming all his lightning against prevailing social
and political values, and none against the genetic deterioration.
Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger, anthropologists at Rutgers
University, have written The Imperial Animal. They conclude
that man's mind, like his body, is influenced by millions of
years of tribal environment organized for hunting and defense. What they are really saying is that much of our
behavior was genetically fixed millions of years ago in the
course of our remote ancestors' adaptation to hunting as
a basic way of life.
Arthur Jensen of the University of California has seriously criticized academia's currently held assumption that
races are equal in intelligence. He asserts the fifteen IQ
points by which blacks trail whites is mostly a result of
inheritance.
Richard Herrnstein, the Harvard psychologist, has compared upper-class and lower-class IQs and discovered that
the former are higher. Herrnstein's work parallels that of
Bruce Eckland, a sociologist at the University of North
Carolina, who had earlier analyzed status-determined intelligence differences in the American Sociological Review.

CRITIC: It is hard to believe you when you say that the

Cro-Magnon people were, on the average, more intelligent
than the people of today. They lived like savages.
AUTHOR: What proportion of your friends have enough
intelligence to make leather tie-strings for a bearskin coat,
or bind a sharpened stone to a stick to make an ax? How
would you carve an artistic design on a bone? Without
metals, even the Cro-Magnon Edisons and Plancks had to
live crudely.

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Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

CRITIC: I understand that Nobel laureate William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, has been trying for
years to get the National Academy of Sciences to conduct
a research project to determine whether or not "retrogressive evolution" is occurring in the United States. Isn't retrogressive evolution what you have been writing about?
AUTHOR: It is; and Shockley's name for it is very appropriate. Indeed, the Census Bureau has been lifting the curtain on "retrogressive evolution" just about every time it
goes about the business of accumulating vital statistics. As
for the National Academy of Sciences, it is behaving as if
it is afraid of the truth. We might remember Louis Pasteur,
the French scientist, who discovered that disease is carried
by germs and who invented a number of antitoxins. He was
opposed by almost the whole medical profession. We have
a replay of Pasteur's experience in the struggle of Dr.
Shockley with the National Academy of Sciences.
CRITIC: A high-ranking geneticist has said: "We want the
human genotype to improve and this must come about
through differential fertility. The trouble is that all the eugenic programs so far have failed because they were oversimplifications. We still don't have enough information to
establish a workable system." I suppose you would disagree.
AUTHOR: We have plenty of information about breeding
animals. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years
to get results comparable to what animal breeders obtain
in a few decades. As to oversimplification, a simple system
is likely to work best. The difference between improving
the breed of animals and improving the breed of human
beings is that for human beings we have to set up incentives.
CRITIC: In the long run aren't you, with all your comments, proposals and projected laws, interfering with freedom?"

The Author A1eets His Critics

183

AUTHOR: Freedom never is, never has been, and never

could be an absolute. The individual always finds it necessary to accommodate to other individuals. The denser the
population, the more people have to accommodate to
other people. Since population itself becomes a problem,
restrictions on reproduction become necessary to prevent every large city on earth from becoming another Calcutta.
As to many other socially imposed limitations on freedom, most people don't think twice about them. The man
who is drunk is not allowed to drive a car, and may be jailed
for doing so. Very few people object to this curb on freedom. Neither do they object when a man is put away for
a year or two for stealing a car.
A woman who becomes pregnant while on welfare and
who has half a dozen children and no husband is doing a
lot more harm to society than the average thief. The evil
she does lasts long after her death. Our civilization itself
is imperiled by her behavior.
Intelligent people are likely to understand the necessity
to limit freedom although they sometimes grumble at certain types of interference. On the other hand, unintelligent
people usually resent any and all regulations and restrictions which affect them directly. But if we don't have regulations, we have anarchy and have to put double locks on
our doors. As the population increases, we lose a certain
amount of freedom either to government or to nonconforming individuals or both. However, a society with a high
proportion of responsible people will need fewer regulations and laws than a society of irresponsibles.

CRITIC: If the less accomplished half of the population

were prevented by marriage laws from having enough children for their own replacement, wouldn't there be a rapid
decline in the country's total population? The top half
hardly replaces itself now.

184

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

AUTHOR: There would be no decline in the total population unless people were convinced it was for the country's
benefit. The adoption of the marriage laws would put the
quietus on the mischievous slogan that all men are innately
equal, while offering an incentive for highly qualified people to have as many children as the laws would allow.
Today the goals of our most capable people focus on an
expensive car, a diploma, writing a bestseller or an address
before a learned society. Bringing children into the world
receives no status points at all. In fact, children now get in
the way of activities that win social recognition.
When the number of children in a family is evidence of
parental merit-as provided for in my proposed marriage
law-children 'would be status symbols. Present birthrate
differences would then be reversed.
CRITIC: You passed rather briefly over the work of Tenny
Frank, who stressed the effect of immigration on a country's future. Doesn't the point deserve more discussion?
AUTHOR: It certainly does. The American Tenny Frank
in Economic History of Rome and the German Otto von Seeck
in Downfall of the Ancient World both did topflight work in
the area of immigration. However, by centering their attention on the negative influences of alien peoples, they diverted attention from the basic aspect of the problem-the
domestic birthrate. Why, we might ask, were immigrants
from Greece and the Middle East incapable of carrying on
Roman civilization? Their mother countries had once been
beacon lights of human creativity. The answer is that in
each of those countries the less capable half of the population had, in every generation, produced more than half the
offspring. Consequently at the time immigrants were
swarming into Rome, the intelligence level in their homelands was way below the high average of earlier times. And,
of course, this inferior influx had a negative effect on
Rome's survival.

The Author Meets His Critics

185

CRITIC: I wonder if you saw a network TV program entitled The IQ Myth. It contradicted many of the ideas behind
your proposed marriage law.
AUTHOR: The program's title was more disparaging than
the program's content, which admitted there was at least
some substance to IQtesting, insofar as it helps determine
a student's learning capability and the speed at which he
can absorb formal education. Although generally hostile to
the whole concept of grading intelligence, the program did
not present any alternatives. If IQ testing in schools is
eventually halted, the results will probably be an accelerated decline of academic standards.
CRITIC: If birthrate differences can explain why civilizations disintegrate, do they also explain why an increasing
proportion of our taxes must be allocated to education?
AUTHOR: Disproportionate birthrates account for much
of the increasing cost of education. As average intelligence
declines, students have more difficulty learning, have less
interest in learning, and more and more of them are getting
a poorer start at home. Birthrate differentials also explain
the increase of crime, the higher cost of welfare, our international problems and the blundering performance of government at every level.
CRITIC: Coming back to your marriage law, you build it
almost entirely on intelligence. What evidence do you have
that intelligence is inherited?
AUTHOR: Intelligence has inherited brain cells as its very
basis. Recent research presented by Dr. Joseph Hunt to the
First International Congress on Twin Studies at Rome,
1974, "clearly shows that individual differences in intelligence among individuals in Western cultures are primarily
determined by genetics. . . . IQ scores of adopted children are much more closely similar to, or identical to, their
biological mothers-whom they never saw-than to the

186

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct

scores of their adoptive parents." This statement, which

appeared in the National Obseroer, agrees with the longstanding evidence provided by the IQ scores of separated
identical twins.
Our present aid programs discriminate very heavily in
favor of reproduction by persons who are low achievers.
If we don't do something about this soon, things will get
much worse. We don't have unlimited time to work out
complicated rules for reproduction according to individual
accomplishments. IQis the best simple test we have. Later
we can work out suitable refinements. We should not worship IQ, but we should respect it.
CRITIC: In view of the present climate of public opinion,
isn't there very little chance that a majority of voters will
agree with any of your proposals?
AUTHOR: When the federal government's funds run low,
when the taxpayers' protests grow louder, when irresponsible government borrowing leads to runaway inflation, people will become increasingly disturbed and elect congressmen who will eventually have to give emergency powers to
the president. He will then be able to enact executive orders that welfare payments be given only to persons who
volunteer to be sterilized or promise not to have more
children than permitted by their respective quotas. I originally intended my recommendations for the states, but I
see no reason why they wouldn't work nationally. Once in
operation, their benefits would be clear.
Also you must remember that the proposed law in no way
affects "marriages heretofore consummated." Since the
majority of voters are already married, they might support
a marriage law that is inapplicable to them, yet would serve
the country as a whole.
CRITIC: You say that the self-destruct principle has been
responsible for the death of all previous civilizations. How
can we possibly expect that it won't doom our own?

The Author i'v/eets His Critics

187

AUTHOR: Until now it has never been recognized as a

principle. The great minds of the past have rarely given
attention to human breeding and survival. So many environmental factors seemed to require immediate attention
that the scholars were sidetracked. Now, with trouble ahead
for everyone, and with the cause of the trouble defined,
they will have to meet the situation head on.
CRITIC: In the final analysis, how would you assess the
prospects of our civilization?
AUTHOR: Unless we act swiftly, it will grind to an agonizing end. But since nothing is more important than preventing the collapse of the social structure in which we live,
however slim the chances of saving our civilization may be,
we still have to try!

Index

Abou Ben Adhem 35

Adams, Brooks 109, I17, 122
adaptability 16
adoption 119
aggression 54
agricultural revolution 66
Alexander, Tom 180
altruism 30, 31, 42
Amenemhet I, II, III, IV 142
Amenhotep I, II, III, IV 143
amity 51
Amosis I 143
Anastasi, Anne 47
Andrus, Ethel Percy 35
anticipation 12
apes 42, 47
Ardrey, Robert 8, 10,31,42, 178
Armour, Richard 48, 51
art 85
Augustus 119, 122
Aurignacian culture 87, 94
Australoid man 147
Australopithecus 57-61, 76
baboons 10, 31
Baird, James 29
Bacon, Francis I
Ballinger, Willis J. 109
Banfield, Edward C. 181
Batson, C. Daniel 31

Beard, Charles 109

behavior 5, 16
codes 52
coordination II
behaviorists 5, 17, 47
Bell, Terrel H. 150
Bennett, Dan 91
Bernard, L. L. 17
Berrill, Norman 84
Bining, Arthur 71
birth control 159
birthrate 179, 184
attitudes 117
differences 152-157, 161, 167,
185
Black Death 66
blood test 167, 168
blushing 24
Boicourt, Dorothy ix
Braid, James 29
brains 2, 4, 44, 94, 95
capacity 81-84, 173
Cro-Magnon 81, 84, 85, 93, 95
intelligence 81
growth 84, 88
Neanderthal 8 I
breeding 65
Broom, Robert 58
bubonic plague 65

190
Burch, Guy Irving I 14
Byron, Lord 104
Caesar, julius 122
calendar, Egyptian 138
cannibal feast 78
captives 53, 56
Carnegie Hero Fund 31
Caspian Sea 97
Caucasian race 79
caves 85
census figures 152-157
chariot wheel I
charity 37, 180
Chasko, jessie 164
Chatal HUyUk 97, 99, 100, 101,
133
Cheops 138
Chi Ch'as-ting 114
child bearing 171
children 164
adopted 186
discipline of 119
quotas 169, 170, 176
status symbols 184
chimpanzees 42
China 106, 114
Choukoutien Caves 78
chromosomes 163
Cicero 36
city states 147
civilization vii, 14, 133
an accumulation 126--29
dangers to 108, 109, 131, 136
decline of91, 93,142,178
dependance on agriculture
108
dependance on attitudes 54
dependance on grain I 14
duration of 103, 132
new ones are northward I 10
saves unfit 130, 158
stages 103, 127
Clarkson, Paul S. ix

Index
class
divisions 10, II
stmggle 114
claustrophobia 18
codes of behavior 52
communication 41-47, 151
companionship 23, 33, 51
competitIOn 10
conditioning 16
Conrad, Charles,jr. 113
conscience 32, 35, 52, 53
consciousness 1-3,7,18,45,162
functions 2
of kind 50, 51, 53
site of emotions 18
systematizing role 3, 7, 9
consistency 40
stmggle for 4
constraints (see social appetite)
contraception 165
Cooke, Alistair III
Coon, Carleton 44,59, 78, 79, 84
Cooper, Gordon, jr. 113
cooperation 7, 23, 39
in aggression 55
facilitated by speech 42
for survival 33
cortex, interpretative 4, 82
Cox, Catherine Morris 21
creativity 21
crime 185
Cro-Magnons 79, 81, 84-88, 93,
95, 133, 181
culture transfer 80
cuneiform 135
Darley, john M. 31
Dart, Raymond 42,46,57,61
Darwin, Charles 16, 23
death 57-72, 173
Deming, Charles 120
democracy 54
depression 165
descendants 91, 126

Index
desire
for domination 10
for recognition 9
for security 9
deterioriation 86, 94
genetic 162
Dewey, John 12
discrimination 51
disintegration 128
drive
searching 3
restrained 13
Dunsany, Lord 102
dUly 36
dysgenics 125
Eckland, Bruce 181
education 54, 103, 110, 113
ego 8, 12,32, 139
vs. social drives 39, 51
Egypt 114, 136, 137, 140-43
early 137
Middle Kingdom 141
Old Kingdom 138
Elliotson, John 29, 30
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 149
Emiliani, Cesare 76
emotions 14,21
inherited 24
social 24
enmity 49, 51
environment 47
equality 10, 180, 184
erosion 108
Esdaile, James 29, 30
eugenics, negative 62
evolution 14,42,57-72,76,79,
89, 125, 141, 158, 160, 173
brutality of 136
human 61
in Ice Ages 73-85
retrogressive 182
reverse 125

191

evolution (continued)
variety of 90
vs. social appetite 86--101
weather effect 76
evolutionists 83
Euphrates 135
extrasensory perception 18
family 110-11
disruption 110
larger 149
line 163
planning 160
famine 48, 66, 94
fangs 58
fantasies 40
fear
of falling 15
instinctive 18
survival value of 18
Ferrero, Guglielmo 119
fertility differential 182
fire 78
Fischer, Eric 106, 116
Font de Gaume caves 85
fossils 75
Fouts, Roger 46
Fox, Robin 181
Frank, Tenny 119, 184
Franklin, Benjamin 68, 69
freedom 39, 52, 183
French, Graham 160
Freud, Sigmund 64
friendship 24
Gardner, R. Allen and Beatrice
46
Gayre, Robert 123
gene
pool 80
stream 162
generation gap 51
genetic
changes 15

192

Index

genetic (continued)
decay 101
deterioration 139
effects 81
quality 10
genetics 117, 181, 186
board 170
war influence 123-24
Giddings, Franklin 50
Gilfillan, S. Colum ix, 110, 122
Gill, Timothy V. 47
glaciations (see Ice Ages)
God 14,47
gods of Sumer 135
Goldsmith, Oliver 36
Goodall, Jane 42, 60
government 54
supervision 164
sterilizing 165
Graham, Robert Klark 57, 86, 87,
96
gregariousness 23, 25,48,52,54
inherited 48
limited 53
motivations 23
restraints on 50
group
sanction 29
unity 25
groups 48
captive 56
Gulliver 7
Gunz Glaciation 74
Guttmacher, Alan F. 174
Hanging Gardens 134, 135
Hardin, Garrett 176
Harrappa 144
head size (see intelligence)
Heidelberg Man 74, 78
herd activity 28, 53
heredity 16, 47, 64, 119, 124,
146, 162, 163, 174, 180
achievement 149

heredity (continued)
corporations 173
and education 155
and environment 47
in Rome 119
of social appetite 51
transfer of 81
heroes and heroism 31, 56
Herrick, C. Judson 43
Herrnstein, Richard 181
Hertzler, J. O. 137, 138
Hobhouse, Leonard 12, 18-20
Homo erectus 61
Hooton, Earnest A. 131
housing 153
hunger (see famine) 94
Hunt, Joseph 185
Hunt, Leigh 35
Huntington, Ellsworth 66, 67,
110
hypnotism 28-30
Hyksos 142
Ice Ages 73-85
Ikhnaton (see Amenhotep IV)
immigration 12
income 152-157
India 160
Indus civilization 114, 134, 143145
Industrial Revolution 66, 166
insemination, artificial 174
instinct 5, 9, 14-24
intelligence 2,12,19,20,43,44,
52, 87, 129, 130, 146, 149,
152, 161, 172, 181, 183, 185
apes 47
decline of 129, 151, 178
head size 82, 83, 181
inherited 185
origin 19
effect on reproduction I 18
survival value 44
tribal 128

Index
interglacial charts 77, 88
interglaciations 74-81, 87, 94
Ipuwer 139, 140
I.Q 21, 93, 150, 161, 168, 185,
186
Iraq 133
Ireland 133
iron 70, 71
Jamestown 68
Jarmo 97, 133
Jefferson, Thomas 177
Jenkins, James J. 81
Jensen, Arthur 181
Jericho 97, 133
Jones, Tom B. 107, 116, 135
Kamikaze 31
Kamm, Jacob O. ix
Kelly, Walt 172
kindness 179, 180
Klinefelter, Mary ix
Knapton, Earnest J. 69
Konig, Marie E. P. 85
Kroeber, Alfred L. 84
Lana 46
Landers, Ann 167
laws, marriage 165, 167-170
Leakey family
Louis 60
Mary 60
Richard 60
Le Bon, Gustave 26, 27
lead poisoning 122, 123
learning ability 151
learning curve 151, 152
Lemmon, William 46
Lenneberg, Eric H. 44
Libet, Benjamin 27
license
marriage 165, 168
parental 163
Lorenz, Konrad 55

193

Lowdermilk, W. C. 107, 117

loyalty 49
Lucas, F. L. 105, 106
Lucretius 104
Lundman, Bertil 82
Mann, Horace 36
Marais, Eugene 31
marriage
laws 165, 167-170,176,184
office 168
qualifications 166
Marshack, Alexander 85
Maya civilization 134
Mayflower Compact 66
Mayr, Ernst 84
McCleary, G. M. 122
McIntire, Roger W. 164
Mencken, H. L. 159, 160
Menes 138
Mesmer, Franz Anton 29
Meyer, Edward 138
Middleton, Conyers 105
migration 12
Mill, John Stuart 179
Millican, Alta ix
mimicry 28
mind I
subconscious 37,40
Mindel Glaciation 74
Mindel-Riss Interglaciation 75
misery 163
Mohenjo-daro 145
Mommsen, Theodor 121
money 103
Morris, Desmond 42
mortality, infant 64
mothers, types 152
motivations I, 4, 5, II, 15, 4042,47,58,59,62, 74, 79, 173
emotional 22
genetic 15
harmful 15
persistence of 5, II

194
motivations (continued)
subconscious 173
survival value 49
Muller, H. J. 15
mutations 49
pocket principle 79
Neanderthal Man 79, 80, 92, 93
Nefertiti 143
neolithic age 76
nerves 5, 6, 17
neural system 2
New England 66, 70
Newgrange, Ireland 133, 134
npm rate 127, 128
objectives, long range 142
organization, social II
orientation 6
overpopulation 114
Packard, Vance 10, II
parables 40
Pasteur, Louis 182
patents 68, 69
Paterson, Donald C. 81
patriotism 49
Pearson, Karl 26, 82
pecking order 10
Peking Man 78
Penfield, Wilder 44, 45, 81
permissiveness 55
Phillips, Kevin 50
Pilgrims 60, 66
Pitkin, Walter B. 115, 117
plumbing and birthrates 152
Polhem, Christopher 69
polygamy 127, 177
population 87-89
books on 175
increase 54
problem 65, 175
quality 75, 87, 88, 120, 163,
175, 179

Index
Possony, Stefan T. 83, 114
potassium-argon dating 61
poverty 152, 160
problem solving 44
production, mass 69
proliferation 75, 76, 88
prosperity 89, 93
Puritans 67
purpose 2, II, 12
pygmy vii
Pyramids 138
race 26, 54, 80, 122, 166, 181
rachet principle 160
Rafferty, Max ix, 150
reasoning 14, 53
religion 33, 34, 37
remembering 2, 7,44
Renfrew, Colin 96
reproduction 184
permit 164
rates 90
responses
instinctive 19
intelligent 19
collective 28
responsibility 183
revolution
agricultural 66
industrial 66
Revolutionary War 70
Roberts, Lamar 44
Roddam, John 83
Romans and Rome 120, 121
Rumbaugh, Duane M. 47
Salmons, Josephine 57
self 3,6, 32, 162, 187
selection, natural 67, 87, 150
sex 25, III
Shapiro, Irving M. 123
Sheldon, W. H. 59
Shinar 144
Shockley, William 182

Index
Sid is, Boris 26, 27
sign language 46
Simons, Joseph H. 163
sleep 3
Smith, Harold H. 113, 117
Smith, John 70
social appetite 23-40
constraints on 48-56
vs. evolution 86-101
social structure vii, 12,37,38
sociologists 16
Solutrean culture 87, 94
Sorokin, Pitirim A. 72
specialization 102
speech 41-47
motivation 4 I
origin 41, 42
Spengler, Oswald 109
Spock, Benjamin 12
standards 33, 119
status 7, 10
Stebbins, G. Ledyard 84
Steele, Richard 36
Stefansson, Vilhjlmur 110
Steinheim Man 78
sterilization 158, 159, 163, 165,
168, 169
Stoddard, Lothrop 7, 8
Stonehenge 133
Storr, Anthony 55
strangers 50
stratification 10
subconscious 2, 3, 5, 18, 26, 29,
37, 40
suggestibility 27, 28
Sumerian civilization 71, 133,
135, 136
survival 4, II, 12,49
of fittest 16, 62
and income 153
and intelligence 153
ratios 127
value 5

195

sympathy 23, 33
Swanscombe Man 78
Taungs skull 58
television III
Tennyson, Alfred 31
Ternefine 78
territorial imperative 49
territorialty 56
tests, college entrance 151
Thebes 141
Thomas, W. 1. 9
Thosteson, G. C. 159
tickle 25
Tiger, Lionel 181
Tinbergen, Niko 55
touch 25
Toynbee, Arnold]. 68, 71,101
tree dwellers 42
tribal
exclusivity 49
functions 34, 48-53
life 49
loyalty 50
psychology 50, 181
tribe 33, 34, 48, 49, 79, 80
tropisms 4
Trotter, Wilfred 28
Twain, Mark 52
Tyler, Leona 82
unconscious 4
unity 25
Unwin, Joseph Ill, 117
vasectomy 159, 160
Veblen, Thorstein 9
Visher, Sargent 68
Voltaire 116
Wallace, George 10
Wallis, Louis 106, 116
war 124, 179
Ward, Lester F. 26

196
Washburn, Sherwood L. 58
Washoe (chimpanzee) 46
wasps, intelligence of 19
weaklings 68
Wechsler, David 83
weeding out process 87, 88, 89,
93,96, 125
welfare 103, 124, 159, 165, 166,
183, 185, 186
and birthrate 166
load 177
reverses evolution 126
Weyl, Nathaniel 83, 114
Whitney, Eli 69
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler 36

Index
Winnicott, D. W. 55
Winthrop, John Jr. 70
women 24, 68, 81, 118, 119
Wood, Clement 62
Wordsworth, William 36, 133
Young, Clarence W. 84
Young, R. B. 58
ziggurat 135, 136
"Zero Growth" 176
Zimmerman, Carle C. 110, 117
Zinjanthropus 60
Zoser 138
Znaniecki, Florian 9

THE AUTHOR
Elmer Pendell, one of the world's foremost population experts and the holder of a Purple Heart and a Distinguished
Service Cross, acquired his B.S. at the University of Oregon,
M.A. at the University of Chicago, LL.B. at George Washington
University and Ph.D. at Cornell.
Dr. Pendell's teaching career has included posts at the Universities of Nevada, Arkansas and Oregon, as well as Jacksonville State University and Cornell. His central life-long interest
has been rates of human propagation and their influences on environment. As co-author of Society Under Analysis, Population
Roads to Peace or War and Human Breeding and Survival, and
author of Population on the Loose, The Next Civilization and
Sex VERSUS Civilization, he has worked long and brilliantly
on both short-term and long-term solutions to population problems.
In this latest and by all means his most significant book, Dr.
Pendell plows into the crucial demographic phenomenon of our
age-the accelerating decline of our institutions and our way of
life caused by the higher reproduction rates of those who should
reproduce least. Perhaps his most important contribution to
modern thought-a contribution which comes through strongly
in this volume-is his linkage of the inherited social drives of
individuals to the universal tolerance extended to socially intolerable birthrate differences.

WHY CIVILIZATIONS SELF-DESTRUCT

Dr. Pendell's book is of major importance because it explains
more simply, more clearly and more accurately than any other
work the reasons for the decline not only of our own civilization
but of all previous civilizations. Advance readers have had the
following to say about this penetrating study of human genius
and human folly.
Dr. Charles C. Josey, former Chairman of the Psychology Department of Butler University: A major contribution to sound
thinking regarding the most important problem confronting
mankind.
Dr. Max Rafferty, Dean, School of Education, Troy State University: Eminently readable. I like it tremendously.
Lt. Gen. Edward M. Almond (ret.): Having read the manuscript with great interest and profit} I can truthfully say that I
feel vastly more aware of the cause of civilization's fall} as well as
the means of saving our own.
Bill Nichols, member of Congress: I am impressed with your
analysis.
Dr. Jacob O. Kamm, author, former President, Baldwin Wallace
College: Timely; a worthwhile book.
William G. Simpson, scholar and author: Your idea is absolutely
basic to any civilization's survival.
Albert P. Brewer, former Governor of Alabama: Very interesting and thought-provoking.
Dorothy Boicourt, poet: I hoped your latest book would be your
greatest. It is.