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3 52 Jean Bourgeois-Pichat
found, and in this again human phenomena differ from phenomena of the
world of matter. The electron in the Stone Age is no different from the one in
the Atomic Age, whereas the family of Neanderthal man is very far removed
from the American family of the present day. But there has been no break in
the continuity between the two: one has merged gradually into the other, and
there has never been the least hesitation at any moment in using the same word
to describe them. Here we have the world of animate matter in process of
evolution. These assertions are no doubt too cut and dried and perhaps, one of
these days, it will be proved that inanimate matter, too, shares in a similar
evolution. The electron of the primary age will then appear different from the
one of today.
4. Demographic events set going phenomena of various kinds, and particularly
biological phenomena at all levels - cellular, organic, individual, but also social
phenomena. These last provide the occasion for group manifestations. On the
occasion of a birth, a marriage, a death, or of someone’s departure or return,
the groups to which the individual belongs make their presence manifest and
this manifestation forms part of a cultural system. These groups may either
approve or disapprove of the event, may rejoice about it or bewail it - in a
word, they judge it according to their own moral code.
Finally, because every demographic event is lived, in the first place, in an
individual consciousness, it sets in motion the individual’s whole psychological
apparatus.
These three combinations of phenomena - biological, socio-cultural and
psychological - possess different evolutionary speeds. Biological phenomena
vary but slowly and a demographic event such as death, for instance, once
detached from environmental influences, does not change much in the flow of
time. All research has demonstrated that while the age-expectancy limit has
increased, this process has been extremely slow. Such data as we possess which,
unfortunately, do not take us farther back than the last two centuries, indicate
no variation in this respect.
Socio-cultural phenomena are also very slow-moving, but they nevertheless
have far greater evolutionary possibilities than biological phenomena; for where-
as the available research data show the latter to be static, they offer us many
examples of changes occurring in the former.
Psychological phenomena are obviously the ones which change the quickest,
and it frequently happens that biology and the socio-cultural system are no
longer adapted to the psychology of the individual, thus producing various kinds
of tension. Birth control provides an excellent example of such conflict. It is
decided upon in the privacy of the individual consciences, but more often than
not it comes up against the survival of socio-cultural systems oriented towards
uncontrolled fertility and biological urges which it is not yet known how to curb.
5- This evolutionary possibility in phenomena which demographic events set
going - a relatively important one if compared with that of inanimate phenom-
ena - is not without having a certain influence on the characteristics of demo-