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mankind from the urgency of sexual impulse, so that
they could live contented celibate lives, instead of the
unsatisfied celibate lives that are the compulsory lot of
such a large fraction of the present population of the
world. If these discoveries should be made and this is
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really by no means impossible man would be able to
carry out the sex revolution which is the typical char-
acteristic of the insect civilizations. The detail would of
course have to be quite different, for instead of one
queen there would have to be large numbers of fertile
women to renew me population, whereas there might
be one king, literally the father of his country. Also it
is probable that on account of their greater physical
strength, it would be the men who would be the
workers.
Such an organization is certainly repellendy unattrac-
tive to most of us perhaps excepting some of the auto-
crats of the present world but it is not this that ex-
cludes the possibility of it. There is no danger whatever
of its happening, because of the inherent difference be-
tween vertebrate and insect, for the vertebrate is so very
much more flexible than the insect in its behaviour.
Most insects simply die if placed on an unfamiliar food
plant, whereas the vertebrate will always try experi-
ments if its normal diet fails. An insect can be used to
prey on and destroy another one that has become a pest,
and, when it has done so, the predator will die of starva-
tion; in the same role a vertebrate predator would
not die, but would start to destroy some other, perhaps
beneficent, species. Now of all vertebrates man is pre-
eminent in his willingness to try experiments, so that it is
inconceivable that he should settle down into the in-
flexible unquestioning course of life that is typical of
an insect. It would call for a quite radical change in his
whole nature. It would not be a mere change into a new
species of homo that would be needed, nor even a change
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into a new genus or family or order of the mammals.
It would have to be a fundamental change into a new
phylum of the animal kingdom, and that would not
take a mere million years, but many hundreds of mil-
lions of years.
There is no prospect of man's nature imitating an
insect's, but it is much more nearly imaginable that his
development should go, like that of the dogs, into a set
of breeds each specialized for a particular purpose. We
all of us know of whole human families which possess
gifts specialized in some particular direction, and if the
specialization were narrowed and the gifts improved till
all competitors were surpassed, such a family would
have turned itself into a breed. But all past history
contradicts this tendency, for it suggests that wherever
there have been such groups they have not increased
further in their specialized skills, but that after a very few
generations they have tended to merge back into the
general population. I will give some examples, though
my knowledge of history is hardly deep enough to cite
them with any confidence.
A first example may be drawn from the sanctity of
royal blood, which has been a prevalent idea in many
countries, and which would give opportunity for the
in-breeding that is essential for the production of a
specialized breed. The most extreme case is that of the
dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt whose blood was
counted as so sacred that the reigning house had to be
perpetuated by brother-and-sister marriages. Biologists
no longer now regard close in-breeding as necessarily
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deleterious, but still the possibility of its evil effects
might throw doubt on any positive conclusions we
could draw from the Ptolemies. But the only conclu-
sions that can be drawn are entirely negative; the record
of the dynasty is not very impressive, it is neither much
better nor much worse than that of other dynasties that
had not been in-bred, and in the end it collapsed, as did
the other dynasties, under the irresistible might of the
Romans. Neither in this extreme case, nor in other
more modern ones, is there any sign of a tendency for a
breed to arise that is specialized for kingship.
It might be contended that the number of individuals
in reigning houses is too small to give rise to a breed, and
my next example concerns a much larger population. It
is the military caste of German nobles in the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whatever the
extra-nuptial habits of this caste, its marriages were most
strictly regulated, so that it might have provided the
starting point for a specialized breed. It is undoubted that
these noble families provided some very good generals;
this was inevitable since in their own country they had
the monopoly of the officer ranks, but they were not
conspicuously better than other generals who did not
belong to the caste. In making the comparison it might
be argued that Louis XIV's generals should be excluded,
as themselves belonging to a similar caste, but the Ger-
man military nobles were also far excelled by others,
such as Marlborough, who, though of gentle birth, cer-
tainly was not drawn from the military caste. Further-
more, if this caste had shown promise of turning into a
breed, it should have produced better generals at the end
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THE NEXT MILLION YEARS
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