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PROGRESS SHOWN IN EVOLUTION

power and of purposive action. If we now examine this list further, we find that every one of the improvements enumerated may be thought of as conferring upon the individual or the race increased power of control over environment, increased internal harmony and self-regulative capacity and consequently increased independence as regards the outer world, increased knowledge, and increased intensity and harmony of mental life.

Whether the list is considered in its first state or in its second, there are very few who will not admit that these biological improvements, which have made for survival and success in evolution, are not also improvements when judged by our human standards of value. We, too, strive for control over nature and for greater independence of outer conditions; we value harmony; we prize knowledge and all the products (when balanced) of increased intensity of emotion and will. It is therefore justifiable, since progress is a word which implies progress toward something which we men find of value, to speak of the observed movement of life that we have so far called biological advance as real biological progress.

It may be argued that this is mere reasoning in a circle; that of course, as we are ourselves products of the evolutionary process, we shall find its movement coincide with our ideas of good. This is in reality not so at all. It is not all kinds of evolutionary movement which we find good in this way, but only the one kind that we have defined as balanced advance. There are many other kinds of evolutionary process. There is, for instance, extinction. Whole groups of animals and plants, some of them of remarkable vigour, size, beauty of adaptation, have wholly disappeared from the face of the earth. The trilobites, the ammonites, the wonderful dinosaur group of reptiles—these are but

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