Man Unlimited

Many scientists' prophecies about man's future are dark and gloomy. Man is doomed, say the crepehangers, to overpopulate his planet and hang on, half-starved until something worse happens. British Biologist Julian Huxley is more hopeful. In his new book, Evolution in Action (Harper; $2.75) Huxley says that man is "not just an animal"; he is something new in evolution, and he has a boundless future.

Huxley tells how a particularly successful new species "deploys" over the earth, splitting into specialized branches. The reptiles deployed; then the mammals took over and deployed even more variously.

Ages ago, says Huxley "most of the possibilities available to living substance had been exhausted ... The efficiency of nervous conduction, of sense organs, or digestive systems, of mechanical construction, had all reached limits of one sort or another. Only one feature remained capable of improvement--brain organization and behavior. Only a greater flexibility of behavior and a higher organization of awareness enabled living substance to become capable of conceptual thought and symbolic language; and these ... are the two distinguishing marks of man, and the basis of the latest deployment of life."

Common Pool. Huxley moves from man's tree-borne forefathers, acquiring intellect, to full-fledged men, who began to teach each other what was learned by experience. This ability proved to be the evolutionary jackpot.

"The critical point in the evolution of man . . . " says Huxley, " was when he . . . could organize his experience in a common pool. It was this which made human life different ... Animal types have limited possibilities, and sooner or later exhaust them. Man has an unlimited field of possibilities ... He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience ... which supplements and largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection ..." As soon as man acquired the ability to accumulate and transmit knowledge, he bested all his rivals and possible rivals on earth.

Long Future. "To the historical specialist, the five or six thousand years of civilization seem intolerably long. But this is a minute interval to the biologist. Man is very young; the human deployment is in an explosive and very early phase. Man is the result of of two thousand million years of biological evolution: he has every prospect of an equal or even greater span of psychosocial evolution of the brain.

Viewed against such a long future, man's current problems seem to Huxley to be temporary. He does not ignore forces he believes tend to check human improvement. He denounces Communist attempts to control or stifle free scientific research, "not merely because . . . the promising unity of world science has been disrupted, but because a political party has imposed its own dogmatic view of what must be correct . . . " In the next paragraph he denounces "official Catholic pronouncements on birth control and sex relations," not only because they mean frustration and misery and ill-health and ignorance ... for thousands of millions of souls ... They are also wrong because they are asserted absolutely and dogmatically, instead of being conclusions arrived at by free inquiry ... "

For Huxley, such contemporary issues are passing trifles. "Once life had become organized in human form, it was impelled forward, not merely by the blind forces of natural selection, but by mental and spiritual forces as well ... Man can now see himself as the sole agent of further evolutionary advance on this planet, and one of the few possible instruments of progress in the universe at large. He need no longer regard himself as insignificant in relation to the cosmos. He is intensely significant.

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