The Relations between Science and Ethics

IT was an excellent idea to base a general discussion on the relations between science and ethics on Dr. Waddington's stimulating and lucid account of the subject¹. What has been most striking about the comments which have been made on it is the failure which some of the commentators exhibit to understand his view of the nature of the evolutionary process. The persistent existence of the lowest forms of life (to which Prof. Ritchie directed attention), or the fact that parasites may achieve a high degree of adaptation to environment at the cost of profound degeneration, or the continuation of evolution (in Prof. R. A. Fisher's phrase) ``in the teeth of a storm of adverse mutations'', have nothing to do with the inescapable fact that, during biological evolution, the degree of complexity and organization has increased. With the appearance of man, the maker and user of tools, the speaker, the moulder of his surroundings, this process, the outward and visible sign of which has been a progressively greater independence of the organism vis-à-vis its environment, reached its culmination. Thinkers such as Herbert Spencer (whom some of the contributors go out of their way to attack), were perfectly correct in viewing social evolution as continuous with biological evolution. In social evolution we cannot but see a more or less continuous rise in level of organization parallel with the increasing size and complexity of human communities, culminating in the conception of the world co-operative commonwealth now dawning upon the minds of men. Though there have been backslidings innumerable, there have also been points higher than the main curve of human social evolution sweeping its way across the graph of history.