Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch
Bernard Shaw
Abstract
Flimsiness of Civilization^^' Tliis situation has occurred so often before, always ^;th the same result of a collapse of civilization (Pro- 'v \ .orFlinders Petrie has let out the secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying "Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die," and the poor, "How long, O Lord, how long?"But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those who help themselves.This does not mean that if Man cannot find the remedy no remedy will be found.The power that produced Man when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher Creature than Man if Man does not come up to the mark.What it means is that if Man is to be saved, Man must save himself.There seems no compelling reason why he should be saved.He is by no means an Heal creature.At his present best many of his ways *nre so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good.Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results^' ^^Man will not serve, Nature will try another -experini^n^.^What hope is there then of human improvement?^'^^Ccording to the Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no '"'''J^$ whatever, because improvement can come only ''^*^ough some senseless accident which must, on the '^^I citi'f* 1 average of accidents, be presently wiped out ' SyJ fe'or '^rrther equally senseless accident.''^^y \ Creative Evolution t this dismal creed does not discourage those who l.;c that the impulse that produces evolution is Back to Methuselah xix poses of high dvilization, mere children when they die; and our Prime Ministers, though rated as mature, divide their time between the golf course and the Treasury Bench in parliament.Presumably, however, the same power that made this mistake can remedy it.If on opportunist grounds Man now fixes the term of his life at three score and ten years, he can equally fix it at three hundred, or three thousand, or even at the genuine Circumstantial Selection limit, which would be until a sooner-or-later-inevitable fatal accident makes an end of the individual.All that is necessary to make him extend his present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the late war shall convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his taste for golf and cigars if the race is to be saved.This is not fantastic speculation : it is deductive biology, if there is such a science as biology.Here, then, is a stone what we have left un- turned, and that may be worth turning.To make the suggestion more entertaining than it would be to most people in the form of a biological treatise, I have written Back to Methuselah as a contribution to the modern Bible.Many people, however, can read treatises and cannot read Bibles.Darwin could not read Shakespear.Some Ts^ho can read both, like to learn the history of their ideas.Some are so entangled in the current confusion of Creative Evolution with Circumstantial Selection by their historical ignorance that they are puzzled by any distinction between the two.For all their sakes I must give here a little history of the conflict between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians (though not altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selec- tion, and that which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now anxiously looking. XX Back to MethuselahThe Early Evolutionists The idea of Evolution, or Transformation as it is now sometimes called, was not first conceived by Charles Darwin, or by Alfred Russel Wallace, who observed the operation of Circumstantial Selection simultaneously with Charles.The celebrated Buffoon was a better Evolutionist than either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon was born, the Greek philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of life are trans- formations of four elements.Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, effected by the two innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love and hate.As lately as 1860 I myself was taught as a child that everything was made out of these four elements.Both the Empedocleans and the Evolutionists were opposed to those who believed in the separate creation of all forms of life as described in the book of Genesis.This "conflict between religion and science," as the phrase went then, did not perplex my infant mind in the least : I knew perfectly well, without knowing that I knew it, that the validity of a story is not the same as the occurrence of a fact.But as I grew up I found that I had to dhoose between Evolution and Genesis.If you believed that dogs and cats and snakes Back to Methuselah xxiii The Advent of the Neo-Lamarckians I call your special attention to Lamarck, because later on there were Neo-Lamarckians as well as Neo-Darwinians.I was a Neo-Lamarckian.Lamarck passed on from the conception of Evolution as a general law to Charles Darwin's department of it, which was the method of Evolution.Lamarck, whilst making many ingenious suggestions as to the reaction of external causes on life and habit, such as changes of climate, food supply, geological upheavals and so forth, really held as his fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to.As he stated it, the great factor in Evolution is use and disuse.If you have no eyes, and want to see, and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes.If, like a mole or subterranean fish, you have eyes and dont want to see, you will lose your eyes.If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretch- ing of your neck, you will finally get a long neck, like