Evolution and Ethics

The name of Sir Arthur Keith deserves to be associated with those of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley in the study of the evolution of man. During the last half century, Keith has been the foremost British student of human phylogeny and of fossil man, and, in the opinion of many, has exhibited the greatest mastery of this subject shown by any anthropologist. In his early career Sir Arthur acquired a sound knowledge of anatomy of the great apes which he subsequently utilized in interpreting the fragmentary remains of fossil man and demonstrating their relationships to each other and to subhuman primates. Sir Arthur has always displayed an insight into the physiological, functional aspects of primate evolution almost unique among morphologists. His boldly original theories have sometimes been condemned as fantastic by more pedestrian students of human origins, but subsequent discoveries have vindicated Keith far oftener than they have confuted him. For example, he was for many years the solitary champion of the theory that anatomically modern man, Homo sapiens, existed early in the Pleistocene period, before apelike Neanderthal man lived in the caves of western Europe. This theory has been substantiated by the recent find of the Swanscombe man. I became, in some sense, a disciple of Arthur Keith when I was a student of anthropology at Oxford nearly thirty-five years ago and was making my first essay at studying the bones of ancient man. I was working upon a collection housed in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, of which Professor Arthur Keith was then Conservator. Although Dr. Keith had no formal teaching duties, he was always ready to instruct and to guide aspiring young students. He had the faculty of building up the self-confidence of the ignorant neophyte by insinuating his own ideas and apposite excerpts from his own vast knowledge into the problem of his pupil, in such a way that the latter imagined that the solution was his own and not Keith's. Among the several great teachers I have had, none was his superior. Few eminent anthropologists have engaged in scientific controversy as often as Sir Arthur Keith, and I know no other who has shown such consistent tolerance, fairness, and courtesy in the face of acrimonious criticism. In the present book, Sir Arthur Keith steps out of his usual role as the interpreter of man's anatomical evolution to present his conclusions upon the relation of evolution to ethics and the function of war in evolution. The findings of Sir Arthur will afford little comfort to facile political idealists who refuse to recognize the brutal and predatory course of man's rise from apedom. For those who believe that it is better to be optimistic and wrong than realistic and right, Sir Arthur's cogent essays, presented at the age of eighty years, will be unpalatable and even subversive. For myself, I have so often begun upon a theory of Keith with the opinion that he was wrong and have had to admit in the end that he was right that I may as well come forward at once to the mourners' bench without waiting for a reconviction of personal sin.