Evolution by Cooperation

Cooperation has been a more important evolutionary jorce in the development of man than has the bitter competitive struggle for existence. So asserted a learned U.S. biologist last week in an attack on those who use the doctrine of evolution to justify totalitarian brutality and aggression. The attacker was Zoologist Alfred Edwards Emerson of the University of Chicago; his audience was the holiday meeting--in Dallas--of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Though evolutionists have long since modified and refined Darwin's theory that biological development is the result of natural selection, particularly of ceaseless strife and ruthless elimination of the unfit, Darwinism has been called in as scientific justification for the Marxist class struggle, the worst abuses of laissez-faire capitalism, the growth of militarism and competitive nationalism.

Since Darwin's time violence has sometimes been justified by aggressors and even accepted by their victims as biologically natural, i.e., just and not answerable to unscientific moral scruples. A climax in the misuse of Darwinian ideology was reached by the totalitarians who declared that it justified 1) deliberate brutality, 2) adoption of violence as the final arbiter in the relations among men, classes, states.

Said Professor Emerson taking this argument apart:

"Competition plays a tremendously important part in evolution but the survival of the fittest does not always mean the survival of the strong, the predators, the parasites or even the adequately defended organisms." Sheer struggle tends to be supplanted by cooperation, Emerson observed, in each evolutionary step upward from the single cell to the many-celled organism to the family to societies.

"The naked cell lived in less optimal conditions than did the cell in a group. Through division of labor and coordination between cells, the external environment of the single-celled organism became the internal environment of the multicellular organism."

Next came the rise of the family as a biological unit. Natural selection no longer worked on the individual organism alone. "The population was the unit of selection, much as the population of cells composing the multicellular organism was selected as a coordinated unit.

"But the end was not reached in family organization. More complex units could more thoroughly control the external environmental fluctuations." Guided by similar fundamental evolutionary forces, man and insects developed social systems, even though as organisms they were of widely divergent stocks. And societies, like family groups, further tend to supersede the individual as the unit of selection.

"It is our hope that the discovery . . . of the mechanisms and details of cooperative social organization will ultimately enable mankind to evolve beyond this present phase with its inefficiency and misery."

Some other events of the meeting:

Luminous Bacteria. A $1,000 prize went to Biologist Frank Harris Johnson of Princeton and Physiologists Dugald Edmund Smith Brown and Douglas Alfred Marsland of New York University for observing the action of enzymes in a living organism. The three collaborators worked with luciferase, the one enzyme which can be watched at work inside a living organism. It is the enzyme which lights up fireflies, and also lights up the bacteria which often make ponds and seawater phosphorescent. Working with flaskfuls of luminous bacteria, the researchers found that alcohol and anesthetics, when added in small amounts to the bacterial solutions, dimmed their luminescence. Greater amounts extinguished the glow altogether. (Conclusions: narcotics numb consciousness by affecting enzyme reactions, not--as hitherto suspected--by acting as fat solvents; human consciousness, which these drugs affect, is at least partly a chemical process sustained by enzymes.) The sulfa drugs acted like one group of narcotics on the enzyme, putting activities to sleep. (Conclusion: the sulfa drugs may perform their germicidal miracles by preferentially anesthetizing disease bacteria so that they are easily overpowered by the body's natural defenses.) When most narcotics had stopped bacterial luminescence, compression of the solution restored the glow. But pressure will not restore luminescence blacked out by sulfa compounds, chloral hydrate ("knockout drops") and some other drugs. (Conclusion: most narcotics put the enzyme molecules out of action by loosening their structure which can be put together again, but the sulfa drugs, chloral hydrate, etc., change the chemical composition of the enzyme.)

Arizona Cacti. The giant saguaro cacti, Carnegiea gigantea (named for Andrew Carnegie)--which are not especially useful, but add an exotic beauty to Arizona's landscape-have now & then fallen sick, but in 1940 a bacterial disease attacked them with unusual virulence. Some giants developed oozy cankers, bled to death in a fortnight. Some developed rot pockets. Some looked healthy, then toppled suddenly to reveal decayed roots. The disease still rages and Plant Pathologist James Greenlief Brown of the University of Arizona and co-workers told how to save the giant cactus from extinction. Small sores are now cut out of the cacti to halt further infection, badly infected cacti are uprooted by cranes, chopped to bits, treated with germicides and buried.

Bugs. Men who have spent their lives studying insects got a thrill from their first really close-up view of the delicate anatomy of these tiny creatures. Magnified up to 20,000 diameters (ten times larger than light-microscopes can do) by R.C.A.'s new electron microscope (TIME, Oct. 28, 1940), insect innards were revealed in photographs exhibited at the A.A.A.S. meeting by Zoologist Albert Glenn Richards Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, and R.C.A.'s Thomas F. Anderson. Bugmen buzzed with delight at the spectacle of mosquitoes' windpipes, a butterfly's scale, a roach's cuticle.

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