Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

64 Scientism and Values
majority vote of those who concern themselves with such questions
-the educated-this statement would be as indisputably a truth
as any we have.
It is this conviction that I propose to analyze in this section. But
before we turn to our problem let me reiterate that biological evolution
is not in question. It takes an utterly ignorant man or a
hard fundamentalist impervious to evidence to reject the evolutionary
hypothesis. However, we do not know how man developed
his capacity to think and to rear his institutions. And until we
have ans,vers to these questions, there is a break between animal
evolution and the process of human history as we know it. This
break can be bridged only by means of speculations that, were
they offered by a theologian or a religious man, would be hooted
at by genuine scientists and by scientistic scientists.
In order to examine this question in concrete terms I shall use
two illustrations of extrapolations from biological to cultural evolution.
The first illustration I take from a book written for the
general reader by an anthropologist whom I take to have achieved
distinction in his profession, judging by the position he occupies.
Mr. Carleton S. Coon, we are informed by the jacket of his book,
is a professor of anthropology and curator of ethnology at the University
of Pennsylvania. He tells us that:
More than twenty million years ago, long before the first appearance
of man on earth, his remote tree-living ancestors took their first step
in a human direction. Somewhere in the tropical regions of the earth,
probably in Africa, a band of large monkeys lived in a forest. Every
morning at daybreak they awoke, and the males began calling to their
families to follow them to the feeding grounds. There they spent most
of the day, picking fruit, peeling and eating it, and robbing birds'
nests of their eggs and their fledglings. As time went on, however,
the fruit became scarcer, and when the monkeys tried to move to
another part of the forest they found their way blocked. Every way
that they turned they came to the edge of the trees, and all about
.them was grass. They were trapped. As the fruit and fledglings failed
them, they had no choice but to climb down to the ground.
In their frantic search for food they learned to lift up stones to