Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings.

  • Herbert Spencer Jennings
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    78/112 (page 74)
    PROMETHEUS This effect of improved conditions has given rise to a pessimism of un¬ relieved blackness, thorough-going, irremediable. Every improvement in conditions, it holds, inevitably weakens the stock. By a dreadful paradox, present amelioration means later deterioration. The more rapid the upward movement in conditions, the more headlong the downward plunge into degeneration. Every important cultural improve¬ ment certainly does shift the incidence of selective elimination. Nothing in the history of the race has so preserved and multiplied the weak and (pre¬ viously) unfit, as did the Promethean bringing of fire into the service of man. The invention of clothing, of tools, of social organization, of writing, have had the same degenerative effects. Com- [76]