Word: darlington
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Every invention in the course of history," Darlington says, "from the first right down to the present-day computer, has required a mental effort to exploit it. It has therefore exerted a selective pressure against the less intelligent. This pressure has been responsible for the evolutionary improvement of the human species throughout time." Indeed, evolutionary chance rather than human design accounts, in Darlington's view, for the entire spectrum of human intellectual progress. One example he gives is the celibacy of Roman Catholicism, a medieval practice. By preventing the inbreeding that this ruling class might otherwise have practiced...
...Darlington supplies his own definition of social class as "A group of people who breed together because they work together and work together because they breed together." With this definition in hand, he sorts peoples, nations, cities and even craftsmen into indigenous tribes. "Nothing on earth will make them come to terms with the general body of society," he writes of the Cosa Nostra, whom he classifies as hereditary criminals. "They are a race apart...
Spurious Scale. Darlington's colleagues will certainly quarrel with his view of history, as he himself cheerfully admits. "I represent an extreme minority view," he says. "I'm trying to overcome the idea that heredity doesn't matter, that all behavior is social, that it's the result of education-the whole general humbug." Like controversial Psychologist Arthur Jensen (TIME, April 11), he is astonished at the willingness of educators to assume that all their students arrive in class with approximately equal intellectual endowments. Any test of this, in his opinion, invariably demolishes the assumption. "Some...
...earlier book, Genetics and Man, published in 1964, Darlington argued that races differ in every imaginable way, and that these differences do not form some spurious scale of merit: they simply and eloquently assert evolution's demand that the species come in as many styles, shapes, personalities and characters as possible, so that the survival of the fittest, in an unpredictable environment, will never be in doubt...
...Evolution of Man and Society carries this argument to the next logical conclusion. "We have now learned that intelligence is of many kinds," Darlington writes. "It has to be measured not on one scale but on many." It is in such diversity, in fact, that he places the only hope for human survival-a diversity not just among societies but among the men who compose them...