DARWINISM FOR THE MILLIONS

...Laboring there lor several months is Anatole Braham, an emigr6 physician studying for his American license, in need of the comparatively good wages...

...MR...

...How much more, then, does it horrify —and later absorb—the over-sensitive Braham, the foreign academician for vhnse personal crisis it is at once symbol and genie...

...Fantastic, yet reasonably credible...

...NONE OF THIS, however, contradicts my statement about bolstering devices...

...Reviewed by EDWIN L. EZORSKY MR...

...Morton outdoes himself during those hours...

...In short, Mr...

...Simpson fails to vindicate his conviction that his values are justified by the history of life so well presented in the proceeding pages...

...But his discussion of what values demand our loyalty is only confusing, where it should provide a climax to the book...

...His acquaintances in Mittel-Europa have long thought of Braham as a "Jungle Man," and been titillated by his schoolboy shows of strength and restiveness...

...Morton's case...

...What makes his future even more hopeful—though full of potential tragedy—is that it is in his own human-tailored environment that man faces the greatest risks to survival But he, unlike any other creature, can be aware of his needs and his dangers...

...His skillful handling of data relevant to evolution and his critical appraisal of competing theories of evolution are especially relevant to naturalists...

...Simpson, with the facts which tie already available, ably and devastatingly handles arguments which might lead to non-naturalistic conclusions...

...Such defects are trivial, though...

...Finally, his insistence upon the promotion of knowledge as a virtue is considerably weakened by his failure to handle the social nature of man...

...Recent arrivals, via man's breeding pens, coexist with the most ancient varieties of life, for strangely enough there is evidence that all of the basic tonus of life ever developed still exist...

...They are necessarily too few and weak to be conclusive...

...Morton is a gifted novelist, with a sure feeling for that aspect of his art which in many other writers is smothered by preoccupations: Story...

...Instead, I speak of the perspective which gives ground for believing that man must meet his problems himself because they are his problems and not those of a supernatural deity...

...In short, man's survival depends upon the way in which he uses his intelligence...

...For example, he shows that to use the chief anti-naturalistic theme of a purpose explanation of life involves """trr...

...Simpson's book deserves wide reading...

...We are, of course...

...The account of Herr Trebakker, too, that second refugee from the gods, merits autonomy —in spite of our insight that Trebakker, in fleeing by suicide, not worldly gratification in America, but the possibility of its being suddenly taken from him there as it once was in Berlin, is several steps ahead of Braham...

...The "explanation" (no explanation at all, naturally...

...At twenty-two, working in an adopted English, he won an intercollegiate contest with his first novel, The Hound...

...Crown Publishers...

...To balance metaphor upon metaphor, the one suggesting and inciting the other, is always an intriguing trick...

...3.75 Reviewed by KEITH McGARY GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, Curator of Fossil Mammals and Birds of the American Museum of Natural History, has provided a good handbook for the layman on up-to-date thinking about evolution...

...What concerns us more is that Mr...

...As well as the wife, a mother-figurine, much too sane and poised for Braham's Ideal of tremendous seduction...

...His handling of these materials is the most effective part of his book...

...To be sure, there are gaps...

...He of course considers society a natural thing and socialization as a characteristic of the human species...

...Especially in Mr...

...Simpson uses the same word to discuss biologically separate organisms and to characterize types of personality behavior...

...He is already a master of pure stage technique...

...ready for the metamorphosis...

...his own fury in the face of the fury of her murderous lover—these, prudence once and for all aside, are the clues to a broader truth...

...Of all the creatures, man, whose great adaptability enables him to be at home in virtually any natural environment, has the most favorable odds for survival...

...The way in which the rising pseudo-life in Braham floods over into the machines, the mixtures, the inhuman clatter and fever of that final baking is a little too elaborate, too drunken-rich...

...Edwin L. Esorsky it doing graduate work in literature...

...To give those impressions a Manhattan locus only enhances that effect...

...Some, like that of the first 500,000,000 years "I life, are serious...

...To be sure, the specific values which he espouses (as for example, recognition of the dignity of the person) are above reproach...

...The chief limitation of his argument, is his failure to deal with society and man's personality in an evolutionary framework...

...There may be shifts in emphasis, etching in of detail...

...For such markings of sources and early wanderings, so commonplace now that a "dimension of depth" is exacted of every writer, cannot bolster a novel...

...SIMPSON'S CONCLUSION is that the support for man's values are to be sought in man's peculiar powers of adaptation...

...That Braham's actual break with "himself," his "victory" over the salesgirl and over the cellar, and his retribution all occur within a few feet and intense hours of the stricken Trebakker is an instance of acute dramatic justice—and dramatic art...

...Records of life exist for half that time, suggesting the probability that life arose within half a billion years after the earth began to exist in its present form...

...Personal responsibility, his "highest and most essential" moral standard, becomes an exhortation rather than- a grounded demand...

...In the discussion of specificgrounds for values, Mr...

...What happens in the cellar, and nowhere else, is his story, and he controls it quite well, indeed...

...his uneasy cravings for a virtueless salesgirl...

...This second book is even more of a triumph, in a technical sense...

...But confusion enters by way of the ambiguous use of the word individual...

...I would recommend The Meaning of Evolution to those who wish to bring their thinking abreast with fresh materials from the study of life and to those who have failed to account adequately for what is known about the history of life upon earth!' Keith McGary is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin...

...In this light, it does not behoove man to utter snivelling whimpers over the human predicament or to indulge himself with a pessimism from which no relief can come...

...The facts nl the history of life and the theories which use them are presented in straightforward, readable prose...

...In even trying to offer specific answers, they dull whtever illuminations of a universal -problem we are meant to see in Anatole Braham...

...And he is by now somewhat successful, with all the self-confidence and impetus for selfperfection that implies...

...But the slow friendship of these men, the manner of Joseph's life and death, the inner nature of the old craftsman: this is a poignant chapter in its own right, finding good use for its modest moment...

...He can only insist that they cannot exist separately...

...Responsibility is not conceived of as essentially a social trait, instead it is a characteristic of a biological organism...

...But there never before has been a creature who could discern with clarity the shape of coming events and still be audacious enough to believe that he could do something about them...

...Not that what happens there happens only to Braham, or that other characters, are first and last his foils...

...In a book as compressed and episodic as this, they merely drain off energy...

...By Frederic Morton...

...248 pp...

...THERE IS A LITTLE of Gorki, perhaps, in Mr...

...OCCASIONALLY, like his Anatole, Mr...

...a messenger, bearing the only answer to Braham's dilemma...

...True, it is the death of Joseph, the stoical head baker, which causes Braham to become dominant in fact as in spirit over the ovens...

...no more disturbing than the conventionalities of "cause...

...He is then unable to explain the appearance in the process of evolution of either socialization or of individualization...

...The author has furnished the usual small hints, the flashbacks and rehearsals...

...The outline history of living organistns is fairly completely known by now...

...How much sounder merely to whisper at, to be firmly vague about these subtle matters...

...The cellar feeds us, s literally just underfoot, but we invade it with dismay and astonishment...

...nf-cessity of forgetting much that we now know...

...For "the darkness" is not only the cellar bakery nightworld upon whose oven maws, dumb mortar and sightlessly thrashing machinery the miracle of The Sorcerer's Apprentice is again and again performed...

...In spite of these criticisms, Mr...

...I do not refer to the "long-run" type of thinking which excuses present sufferings and brutalities on the grounds that they really do not count...

...MORTON has more talent than most young writers, especially for summoning what is recessive and impersonal into high dramatic life...

...M.r- Morton has drawn upon his own nemories of a Soho bakery workroom vith strong effect...

...Their cure is simply: economy, restraint...

...He pictures the individual as sort of making society, although he strongly insists that the individual cannot exist apart from society...

...It is difficult to retain any shred of respect for a non-naturalistic interpretation of the record of life after reading this book...

...His review of the present body of man's knowledge relating to the development of animal life touches on all the basic problems in the field...

...Simpson's formulations illustrate pitfalls into which naturalists may fall and serve to underscore the task facing naturalists...

...He will bear watching all the more if he turns from violence and special obsessions to the common order of life...

...To be sure, the process of evolution has never been confronted with such an enigma as today...

...But there is no gap which when filled is likely to alter the basic ideas of evolution: that life arose ; s a function of thoroughly natural processes and without the intervention of .-upernal powers...

...0 * IN A HUMAN WORLD faced with the very genuine possibility of obliteration, what does a survey of the findings of evolution offer in the way of help.' 'Of foremost importance is the opportunity to see man's present condition in an illuminating perspective...

...In the process which has populated the earth with ln( leasing quantities of life, forms of living creatures have developed for almost i very conceivable type of environment...

...Morton's study of the fellow-workers, active and retired, in the cellar and the store above...

...We catch glimmerings of the widening underground stream in the child Anatole, on a family excursion to the theater (that oddly potent, familiar, tragic-sweet object in so many middenheaps . . .), using every frantic resource of voice and arm to keep the Faust story from its unhappy evolution—and, on being shushed and tittered into failure, taking that failure as somehow very personal...

...He acts as if he thinks these two things are the same...

...Braham's sin is unseasonable rebellion: faced with a weeks-long "nightmare," Braham gradually understands that his logic has been defective —his life upstairs, the office and profession and marriage waiting patiently there are the real absurdities...

...but there now appear few grounds for expecting basic changes...

...For approximately 2,000,000,000 years, the earth has been in a humanly recognizable condition...

...One clear meaning for man in the story of evolution is that creatures have survived^whether amoeba or man, who have used^ their powers of adaptation: nothing outside the process intervened either to save or to destroy them...

...The real "below" is his: it refers to his stifled ,'clfhood and the fantastic symbiosis •vith the cellar into which it falls...

...He can couple this knowledge with the additional knowledge of what he can do about his circumstances...

...Faust in a Bakery THE DARKNESS BELOW...

...3.00...

...Creatures no longer able to live in their environment died...

...But something of the Greek dramatists as well...

...They are the earmarks of youth, they hardly touch on intrinsic talent —or the lack of it...

...Rarely is it accomplished with as little shakiness or help from bolstering artifices...

...in terms of a quietly Imperious mother and brief shadow of a father is here...

...His sheer physicalness below: his grim grip on trays, knives, kneading-dough, hot oven-handles...

...But in spite of a footnote in the "Epilogue and Summary" which assures the reader that "there is ethical right to judge ^without consideration of the basis for judgment," Mr...