Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1148

1939?

Original -> 1140

 

 

 

 

 

No doubt it is presumptuous for a rank outsider to intrude his crude and undisciplined thoughts and conceptions among those who with scholarship and training have long and industriously pursued their examination of biological and related phenomena. My only hope of justification rests in the fact that occasionally it is from an outside source that a body of observation comes to be seen in sufficient perspective to discover some of its more important and sometimes fundamental relationships. The very diligence with which highly qualified persons pursue their special investigations tends to preclude the erection of hypotheses whose bases must lie in more than one of their respective fields.

 

In the biological sciences, however, there are instances indicating a tendency towards specialization, not alone in strictly narrow fields with respect to specific forms of life but also a wider specialization that has regard to numerous and very diverse forms of life with respect to a particular property, process or manifestation that is common to them all. Of this tendency the whole Darwinian episode is perhaps the outstanding example. The antecedents and processes of highly variant life forms have been generalized upon unitary genetic processes leading to repetition and replacement of the individual and continuity of his race. And the race itself is a similar consummation of its phylogenetic antecedents.

But a race is not necessarily a population. Its representatives may or may not be the beneficiaries of any social coordination and integration, and the degree of this when present may range from the most casual and rudimentary to the exceedingly complex. Population, therefore, is both prior and fundamental to everything of which a society consists. And the extent to which a society exists is not alone in the number of its individuals but also and more significantly in the extent and efficiency with which the associative relationship is developed and manifested among them.

Now it is clear that all associative relationships, to be efficient must be cooperative and reciprocal. This is a condition that can obtain only among adults and one that depends therefore upon the life span of the individuals beyond the point of immaturity and social, if not biological dependence. So it may be said that the socialization of a race depends first upon its members being gathered together in a specific place with such proximity as to necessitate some interactivity among them and then upon this interactivity taking such form as to enhance the vitality and hence the energy content or life span of its component individuals. This raising of the powers of the individual raises, in its turn, the possibilities of still higher associative relationships. The socializing process then consists essentially in whatever activities and relationships so improve the energy endowment of individuals as to lead to higher elaboration of the asso­ciative relationship itself.

The study of populations, at all levels of life, has been in the main, numerical and without special reference to kinds of individuals involved. Analogies have been sought between population trends in forms as widely diverse as micro-organisms and man without giving much if any weight either quantitatively or qualitatively to the vast difference of energy organization and capacity for associative relationships possessed by such diverse individual forms.

Energy content of individuals etc.