Page 3 - DARWIN AND THE HUMAN FUTURE

research group soon included prestigious members from throughout the rest of Europe clear on out to China.For nearly a decade we had labored on this magnificent mission but seemed to be getting nowhere. Tossing about, unable tosleep, I was hounded by the feeling that something very big was missing in the great tangled mess of theory and theorizing we were wrestling with.Here was this great man, Charles Darwin, the revered founder to whom we all paid lip service—but whose books few of us bothered to actually read any more. By our slam bang modern expectations Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were cumbersome, wordy, quaint, sure to be old hat stuff for which none of us had thetime. So literally almost all of us— not only in our group but everywhere —relied on secondary sources.In other words, our thoughts, and discussions, and writing, and teaching was based on what others told us was Darwin, the whole truth and nothing but the truth— but only in a lonesome quote here and there were we given the context and what he himself had said.What had Darwin really written?I had a computerized copy of The Descent of Man in which Darwin specifically tells us this.In consequence of the views now adopted by most naturalists, and which will ultimately, as in every other case, be followed by others who are not scientific, I have been led to put together my notes, so as to see how far the general conclusions arrived at in my former works were applicable to man.3