CHAPTER VIII

ADAPTATION

SUMNER closes a manuscript essay on "Evolution and the Mores" as follows:

"In short, as we go upwards from the arts to the mores and from the mores to the philosophies and ethics, we leave behind us the arena on which natural selection produces progressive evolution out of the close competition of forms some of which are more fit to survive than others, and we come into an arena which has no boundaries and no effective competition. The conflicts are freer and freer and the results of the conflicts less and less decisive. The folkways seem to me like a great restless sea of clouds, in which the parts are forever rolling, changing, and jostling, as temperature, wind-currents, and electric discharges vary. We may confidently believe that there is not a cloud shape which does not correspond exactly to the play of forces which makes it, and we may be well convinced that no change of form takes place from time to time behind which there is not a change in conditions and forces, but we also know that the cloud shapes do not change in a series of any definable character and that they do not run forward in time towards some ultimate shape, but they change and change, rise and fall, ebb and flow, without any sequence and purpose. If they

conform to the conditions and forces from moment to moment, that is the end of their existence. So it is with the folkways and the attendant philosophy and ethics. They conform to the interests which arise in the existing conjuncture, and that is all the sense they have.”

In this quotation the presence of "progressive evolution" is denied in all the mores with the exception of those surrounding the industrial organization and so representing material control over nature. In speaking of progress Sumner usually began by admitting its presence in the arts of life and then went on to question its existence in the more derived societal forms. Because he did not find it there, he denied that there was evolution in the mores. Though he used to warn us that evolution included retrogression, and to illustrate pointedly by summoning us to witness that it was "the same force that made the stone go down and the balloon go up," he meant by evolution something more than adaptation.1

It would be a notable performance if we could prove that societal evolution is progressive, or that it is not progressive; but that is not the question we have set before us. All we have undertaken to study out, in the present in

1 See Note at end of this volume.

1

stance, is whether there is any evolution at all in the mores, irrespective of its general trend. Darwinian evolution is neither progress nor retrogression; it is both, as Sumner said. It is, in its final phase, adaptation to environment. But if we seek for adaptation in the folkways, we have Sumner's word for it that they are "subject to a strain of improvement towards better adaptation of means to ends, as long as the adaptation is so imperfect that pain is produced." For our present purpose something like this is all we should care to prove. That there may be some "end" or "purpose" is, for the present at least, a matter of indifference; and as a philosophical concept it will remain so. It would seem, from what has gone before, that if improvement is admitted for the arts, processes, and systems of material culture, and if there is, as Sumner says, a "strain toward consistency, "2 in the mores, then there must inevitably result an improvement all along the line. This would be particularly evident if, as has been asserted above,

1 "Folkways," § 5.

There is, says Sumner ("Folkways," § 5), a strain in the mores "of consistency with each other, because they all answer their several purposes with less friction and antagonism when they coöperate and support each other." Examples follow.

the maintenance-mores are basic. Thus all that is said about the secondary societal forms consisting with the primary, since the latter represent direct reactions on environment, belongs to the topic of adaptation in the mores.

There is no course of reasoning, apart from copious illustration, which can demonstrate adaptation. And so our treatment, while it cannot pretend to fulness, least of all to exhaustiveness, must be made up largely of cases regarded as comprehensive and typical, it then being left to the reader to confirm or reject, from his own knowledge of other cases, the principles derived from these.

But the conclusion to be reached at the end may be set down at the outset. First, in general, if adaptation is admitted in the folkways, their evolution on Darwinian lines is taken to be thereby admitted. And if adaptation is seen to be the result of the action of evolutionary factors as treated in previous chapters, then the Darwinian formula may be extended to cover life in human society as well as in the organic field. Second, and more particularly, the issue of these chapters on adaptation is: Any settled folkway (any institution, therefore, a fortiori)

is justifiable in the setting of its time, as an adaptation. It will be noted that the folkway is supposed to be a settled one, i.e., a tried and preserved variation; a passing fashion or fad is a variation upon which selection has yet to pass, and neither in organic nor in societal evolution is there any reason to look for adaptation in variations prior to selection.

By way of a broad consideration bearing upon adaptation, to precede our illustrations, it may be said that the progress of knowledge has led to an unconscious revision of opinion concerning the justification of societal forms in their setting of time and place. In former ages of narrower horizons and small knowledge, when outlying races whom our predecessors were coming to know were seen to have mores diverse from those of the observers and often abhorrent to them, this was laid to perversity, depravity, or some other reprehensible quality. Naïve ethnocentrism exerted a sway so undisputed that, as a corollary to their own selfsatisfaction, people believed that if the code of an alien society did not conform to their own, or if their own were not adopted at sight as self-evidently superior, it was because of wilfulness and even wickedness. Many survivals of