The facts of life / C.D. Darlington.

  • C. D. Darlington
Date:
1953
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The facts of life / C.D. Darlington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    especially small and isolated groups such as those empirically described as imperial races and governing classes. They derive their dominant position from the fitness of their genetic character to the conditions they find or make for themselves. They also owe their later downfall, which always seems to follow, to changes in their genetic character, or in their external situation, or more usually in both. We may admire their rise and we may regret their downfall, or vice versa. But if we are able to put our feelings and our interest to one side we can assess the part played by genetic changes in these great events. The stability of classes depends in the first instance on the breeding system. A polygynous governing class can expand a culture rapidly whether in Islam or in Utah. It cannot, however, maintain a culture when expansion has ceased : for polygyny of one class is inconsistent with any stable system of inbreeding or outbreeding. The failure of Islam is the failure to establish governing or intellectual classes even with the imperfect qualities known in monogamous Christian societies. In monogamous class-forming societies we find the same kinds of relations that we have noticed existing between races. There is diffusion. There is hybridization. These processes are boosted by change. Whenever there is a social change, a social revolu¬ tion, the new governing class marries the old governing class. The Norman king marries the Saxon princess; the upstart Medici unite with the proud Orsini, the Cavendishes seek out the older aristocracy, the American heiress attaches her fortune to the title of a vicomte. In less illustrious circles the same process of hybridization is continually going on. Social change involving a depreciation of inherited wealth, and also of ideas of superiority, makes a marriage outside a homogeneous mating group profitable to both sides. To say that one class or one race displaces another, is therefore an unduly simplified and misleading account of history : the conflict of class arising from changes in the means of production and government is resolved by a new genetic synthesis which establishes a new economic order. 409