100 YEARS AGO

In the essay to which he refers in his letter in NATURE of January 29, Dr. Wallace attaches less importance to the rearing of a few men of exceptional qualities than to the weeding out of the worst and raising the average; but surely, without giving undue and exclusive credit for advance to the pioneers and prophets, we may take it that men like Darwin and Wallace himself, to mention only one type, will, under natural selection, render the later more conscious steps of man's evolution easier. Dr. Wallace, in the letter referred to, speaks of the “fittest” not surviving under existing civilisation, meaning that many of the specialised types, which form important elements in our polymorphic communities, are not fittest to survive, and continue to reproduce their kind in more primitive or ideal communities. But this, of course, accords well with the principle of the “survival” of those types “fittest” to the actual environment. (Survival, of course, does not postulate direct reproduction any more than it postulates long life; the “worker” bees “survive.”) Further, Dr. Wallace's hopeful attitude shows that he really trusts “natural selection” to steer the best races of man to a point whence their further, more self-conscious, progress (still, as always, under natural selection) will be more and more in accord with Nature's will, and so less wasteful and pain-fraught.

From Nature 12 February 1903.

50 YEARS AGO

Chinese Science Revisited (2). By Dr. Joseph Needham. Another emphasis which must be mentioned is that on popular education. There is a touching and genuine thirst for scientific knowledge among the Chinese people. Shops which sell anatomical models and geological charts have a crowd around the windows all day. If the visitor from the West wanders into one of the modern bookshops on a Sunday, he will almost have to step over rows of children and boys and girls of various ages sitting on the floor and against the bookcases reading popular science, and not paying the slightest attention to him. The assistants never insist on readers buying books, though they usually do, as they are relatively extremely cheap ...Will it not make some difference to the world that five hundred million people are awakening to the significance of natural science and all that that implies?

From Nature 14 February 1953.