Taboo and Genetics | Page 5

around the germ-cells, taking over functions a little at a time, until in the higher animals nutrition and other activities and a large part even of the reproductive process itself is carried on by body-cells.
When we think of a man or woman, we think of an individual only one of whose innumerable activities--reproduction--is carried on by germ-cells, and this one only at the very beginning of the life of a new individual. Human societies, needless to remark, are not organized by germplasms, but by brains and hands--composed of body cells. If these brains and hands--if human bodies--did not wear out or become destroyed, we should not need to trouble ourselves so much about the germplasm, whose sole function in human society is to replace them.
Since the individual human bodies and minds which seek after the things to which we mortals attach value--moral worth, esthetic and other pleasure, achievement and the like--do have to be replaced every few years, the germplasms from which new individuals must come have always been and always will be of fundamental importance. It is always the product of the germplasm which concerns us, and we are interested in the germ-cells themselves only in relation to their capacity to produce individuals of value to society.
So let us not go erring about in the philosophical ether, imagining that because the amoeba may not be specialized for anything over and above nutrition and reproduction that these are necessarily the "main business" or "chief ends" of human societies. Better say that although we have become developed and specialized for a million other activities we are still bound by those fundamental necessities. As to "Nature's purposes" about which the older sex literature has had so much to say, the idea is essentially religious rather than scientific. If such "purposes" indeed exist in the universe, man evidently does not feel particularly bound by them. We do not hesitate to put a cornfield where "Nature" had a forest, or to replace a barren hillside by the sea with a city.
Necessities and possibilities, not "purposes" in nature, claim our attention--reproduction being one of those embarrassing necessities, viewed through the eyes of man, the one evaluating animal in the world. Thus in reasoning from biology to social problems, it is fundamental to remember that man as an animal is tremendously differentiated in functions, and that most of the activities we look upon as distinctively human depend upon the body rather than the germ-cells.
It follows that biology is the foundation rather than the house, if we may use so crude a figure. The solidity of the foundation is very important, but it does not dictate the details as to how the superstructure shall be arranged.
Civilization would not be civilization if we had to spend most of our time thinking about the biological basis. If we wish to think of "Nature's" proscriptions or plans as controlling animal life, the anthropomorphism is substantially harmless. But man keeps out of the way of most of such proscriptions, has plans of his own, and has acquired considerable skill in varying his projects without running foul of such biological prohibitions.
It is time to abandon the notion that biology prescribes in detail how we shall run society. True, this foundation has never received a surplus of intelligent consideration. Sometimes human societies have built so foolishly upon it that the result has been collapse. Somebody is always digging around it in quest of evidence of some vanished idyllic state of things which, having had and discarded, we should return to. This little excursion into biology is made in the full consciousness that social mandates are not to be found there. Human projects are the primary material of social science. It is indispensable to check these against biological fact, in order to ascertain which are feasible and which are not. The biological basis may help in explaining old social structures or in planning new ones; but much wild social theory has been born of a failure to appreciate the limitations of such material.
All the so-called higher animals, mammals and others, are divided into two sexes, male and female. Besides the differentiation of germ-cells there are rather obvious differences in the bodies of the two sexes. In common with many other mammals, the human male has a larger and stronger body, on an average, than has the human female. This is true also of the anthropoid apes, the species which most resemble man physically and are commonly supposed to be his nearest blood relatives in the animal kingdom. It has been true of man himself as far back as we have any records.
Such differences are only superficial--the real ones go deeper. We are not so much interested in how they originated in the world as in how they do come about in the individual. At