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The Delusion of ProgressAuthor(s): John Hodgdon Bradley Jr.Source: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 30, No. 5 (May, 1930), pp. 450-457Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/14839 .

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THE DELUSION OF PROGRESS By Dr. JOHN HODGDON BRADLEY, JR.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

I FACTS concerning the nature of the

physical world grow many and fast in the jungle of modern science. There are a few trails, some known to lead only to more bewildering depths, others that seem to reach the edge of the tangle and the light. The scientist can not be sure of what he sees at the end of an outbound trail because he is a dweller of the thickets and his sight is poor. More than once, while peering out, new facts have sprouted around him before he had focused clearly on the far horizons. He can not be sure that what he saw was not a dream of his own fabrication. And yet, despite his misgivings, he has seen strange things at the ends of several trails. So consistent with each other were the things he saw, he believes that perhaps he has really had a glimpse of the larger world outside.

Among other things, the scientist thinks he has seen a turning in the long lane of infinity. He thinks he, has seen certain boundaries to the universe of space and time. And he detects a definite order of movement in the vast pro- cession of forms and events which gath- ered behind the fog-banks of the past and has been slowly marching toward the mist-veiled future. The concept of evolution has grown in nearly every branch of natural science, and with it the belief that evolution, whether of an atom, a man, a planet or a star, travels along definite lines. That these lines are not straight but decidedly curved, and in some cases nearly circular, is one of the most inclusive and significant generalizations in the modern conception of t-whe material world.

The cyclical recurrence of certain natural phenomena has long been apparent. Day and night, summer and winter, the phases of the moon are the most obvious and consequently were the earliest cyclical phenomena to be observed. Such relatively simple cycles must have been in the mind of Tacitus when he said, "In all things there is a kind of law of cycles." With the discovery and the perfecting of the telescope, more obscure celestial cycles, such as the revolutions of the; planets around the sun, were observed. Finally, with the growth of modern science, the concept of cycles was expanded to include not only the revolutions of objects in space but also their evolutions in time. If modern art liked curves as well as straight lines and angles, it might depict on: its canvas the views of modern science concerning the dynamic universe. In the picture would be countless circles, ellipses, spirals and arcs, the larger embracing the smaller, a separate line for each phenomenon. Along its proper curve, the modern equivalent of destiny, each entity travels its plotted course.

The history of astronomy illustrates the growth of the concept of cycles. Copernicus, by proving that the planets move about the sun in subeircular orbits, opened the road for subsequent investi- gations into the vagaries of celestial bodies. To-day there is a growing belief that such bodies not only travel along curves but also evolve in cycles. Stars, for example, fall into color groups which grade imperceptibly from red, through yellow to bluish white, apparently in the order of increasing temperature. Many astronomers believe that stars originate

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THE DELUSION OF PROGRESS 451

from gigantic whirls of highly attenui- ated gas. Under the strange pull of gravity the gas particles are drawn together, temperature increases with an increase of friction, and the young star glows red. With continued contraction sufficient heat is generated to impart a yellow tinge to the maturing star. Eventually adulthood is reached and the star shines blue-white in the intensity of its heat. A decline follows wherein contraction continues but heat is dissipated. The star reverses the order of its color changes, returns through yellow to red, and completes the cycle of its evolution. According to' the theory, every star in the firmament lies in some stage of this cycle. The old red star is far denser and smaller than the young red star, so that the evolution does not proceed in a perfect circle. It does, however, lead the star in old age to a condition which appears to be similar in many ways to the condition of its youth.

II Certain modern views in the science of

chemistry support this concept of stellar evolution. Although the dominating belief of the nineteenth century was that all matter is composed of rigid units, there were philosophical chemists who thought that the apparent stolidity of the chemical elements was merely the result of imperfect observation and ex- periment. Mendeleef had brilliantly demonstrated the relationship of the elements in his "periodic law," by means of which he was able to prophesy the existence of three unknown elements which were later discovered. This in- timacy of relationship argued a common origin for the fundamental building- blocks of the material world.

With the discovery of radioactivity and later of radium, the instability of an element was actually observed. When the evolution of helium from lead was discovered, science finally had demon-

strable proof of the transmutation of one element into another. Subsequent study of the heavyweights of the physical world, thorium and uranium, proved that those elements suffer a progressive disintegration resulting in more than thirty different substances that vary widely in their properties and are dis- tinctly different from their parents. It was learned that two new kinds of lead existed, one derived from the decay of thorium, the other from the decay of uranium, each differing from the other and from normal lead in atomic weight and specific gravity. Thus the doctrine of evolution among the very units of matter began to seep into the science of chemistry even as parallel beliefs re- garding plants and animals had already entered and possessed the science of biology.

It is too early to know just how far the disintegrative evolution of the heavy, complex radioactive elements is true of the lighter, simpler elements. It is clear, however, that the stability of any substance is relative to the temperature, pressure and chemical conditions under which it exists. The spectroscope shows a distinct correlation between the color and the chemical make-up of stars so that there appears to be a parallelism between the evolution of a star and the evolution of the materials of which it is constituted. The hottest stars seem to be composed of the simplest, lightest and most stable elements, chiefly hydrogen and helium, whereas the cooler stars contain more of the complex, heavier and less stable elements. Despite the multi- plicity of factors and the probability that other solar systems have quite different combinations of materials from our own, it seems likely that on any cooling star there must be a consequent evolution of the elements.

A clock that is not wound up runs down. Cooling stars are clocks that are running down, and unless rewound they



452 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

are destined to pass into dark dead bodies of which there are probably many in the universe. The fact that they are running down is sufficient proof that they were once wound up. A more graphic proof is the phenomenon of the novae, insignificant stars that suddenly flash into great brilliance and after a short time fade out to their former dim- ness. Whatever may cause the sudden flaring of these "new stars," they show to the telescope a rapid stellar evolution from cool to hot to cool. To the spectroscope they show a parallel evolution of their chemical elements from complex to simple to complex.

Some scientists believe that the phenomenon of novae presents a rapid epitome of the basic cycle of evolution in the whole stellar universe. Stars evolve from relatively cool diffuse nebu- lae to white-hot stars, then return to relatively cool compact stars and finally to cold dead stars and planets. This cycle from cool to hot to cold is paral- leled by a chemical evolution from complex to simple to very complex. Modern science has not accepted this view without reservations, but it is converging along several roads to a belief in an evolutionary movement of matter through space and time, a movement in a rude cycle which returns materials after wide variation to conditions of their past.

III 3Man's chief interests are rooted in the

earth, and we do not have to leave the surface of our own planet to see a variety of evolutionary cycles. Many of the processes by which the earth has been molded have curved through time with untiring repetition. Whatever our guess as to the pregeological stages of earth history, we have a tangible record of later events in the rocks. Locked within them are several hundred million years of history. Part of their story has

already been recovered, and it is a story of cycles.

The oldest rocks undoubtedly con- gealed from a liquid not unlike the lavas that pour from the mouths of active vol- canoes. We have no record of these oldest rocks because they are buried beneath younger formations, but we do have rocks of the same genre formed at a later date. These are the igneous rocks of many places and ages, the most primitive of all rock types. Nearly all the ninety-odd chemical elements known on earth have been found in this kind of rock. The elements combine in intricate unions to form a large number of rock varieties. Only a few of the elements occur in any great quantity. Oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium constitute nearly all the earth 's substance. The last seven are usually combined with oxygen in a chemical partnership called an oxide, a few of which are among the most abundant substances in rocks. Most of the oxides are basic, but the commonest one, silicon dioxide, is acid. The result is that the basic oxides of alumina, iron, lime, magnesia, soda and potash combine with the acid silica to form a variety of silicate compounds. A few of these, as in the case of the oxides, predominate. The common oxides and silicates assume many different mineral forms, but here again only a few predominate. So it is that when an igneous rock freezes from its parent liquid, a selective process works, first on the chemical elements, then on their oxides and silicates and finally on the minerals. The result is that certain chemical combinations in certain mineral forms become of prime importance.

Rocks so constituted are the parents of all other rocks. Exposed at the surface of the earth, they suffer the attack of the physical instruments of destruction, an army in whose ranks march such re- doubtable warriors as frost, wind, mov-




ing ice and running water. With these come the insidious gentlemen of the secret service, the chemical instruments of decay, weakening the rocks from within by solution, hydration, carbona- tion and oxidation so that they may be more easily blasted from without. No rock can forever withstand such an attack. The forces of geologic destruction do not know defeat.

The products resulting from the dis- ruption of the igneous rocks are scattered far and wide. Some find rest on the surface of the land as loose earth and gravel, a mantle for the bony framework of the continents. Some are carried as mud, sand and gravel to lakes and ocean basins. Here they are dropped, usually in layers. During transportation the mineral and rock particles are re- arranged according to weight and size so that the resulting deposits are in many cases well sorted, the heavy materials separated from the light and the coarse from the fine. Such rock waste, whether of land or sea, may later be compacted and cemented into a new rock type, the sedimentary rocks so widely exhibited at the surface of the earth.

The chemical processes involved in the making of sedimentary rocks are as significant as the physical. The complex silicates of the mother rocks are rather generally reduced to simpler compounds. The oxides and silicates of aluminum become deposits of clay and silt; much of the calcium and magnesium contrib- utes to the formation of limestone and dolomite; the iron oxides become iron deposits or are scattered widely as coloring pigments in a variety of rocks; the sodium and potassium oxides are for the most part dissolved and held in sea- water. The silicon dioxide, in the form of the mineral quartz, is the most resis- tant constituent of the parent igneous rocks. It survives chemically unchanged in sand and gravel deposits.

Nature is not content with forming

simple sedimentary rocks from complex igneous rocks. She tires of simplicity. She may pour hot lavas over the uncon- solidated clays and gravels of the mantle, causing the particles to weld together and new compounds to develop. She may cause hot liquid rock to squeeze between the sheets of sedimentary formations, baking and partially recrystalliz- ing them. She may buckle the surface rocks and profoundly alter the form of all rocks involved. Thus do the metamorphic rocks arise from the alteration of preexisting formations. Intensity of the metamorphic process destroys the characteristic simplicity of sedimentary rocks. Complex silicates grow from the impurities in limestones and dolomites. The grains of sand in sandstones are firmly fused. Shale rocks are converted into aggregates of highly complex silicates.

Metamorphism is fundamentally a process of crystallization and very similar to the process whereby the igneous rocks were originally born from a mother liquid. When sedimentary rocks are subjected to great heat and pressure they are often sufficiently altered as to resemble igneous rocks. Thus the cycle of rock evolution is completed; after many changes the materials of the earth 's crust have returned to their original condition. Not once but in- numerable times has this round of events been enacted in earth history.

IV Not only the substance of the earth

but also the- expressions on her face pass through repeated cycles of change. The concept of erosion cycles is perhaps the greatest contribution of American physi- ographers to earth science. It has long been known that rivers change the ap- pearance of the lands, but not until comparatively recently has science recog- nized the orderly cycle of change result-



454 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

ing from the long-continued activity of rivers in any given locality.

Streams, like men, pass through stages of infancy, youth, maturity and old age. In infancy a stream is short and steep, and flows in an infant valley, a gully or a ravine. The valley grows longer, wider and deeper with gaining age until youth is reached. The divides between youthful valleys are broad, but the valleys themselves are relatively narrow. The streams flow vigorously, in many cases with waterfalls and rapids. Much of their work lies before them. The country they drain is also youthful because it is destined to be profoundly altered before the streams grow old. With maturity the young streams become longer, their gradients more gen- tle, their valleys wider. Tributaries increase in size and number to form a branching pattern over the land. The country is reduced from the smooth up- land of youth to a group of irregular hills and ridges. With time the gradients of the streams approach nearer and nearer the horizontal, until the water flows in sluggish meanders through low, wide valleys separated by low divides. The streams and the land have grown old.

Like the march of a man from infancy to senility, rivers and the lands they drain do not return to the exact condition of their youth. Although the cycle is not perfect, the old age of a river- carved terrain is remarkably reminiscent of youth. Both are relatively flat and smooth; both are characterized by few main streams and many undrained lakes and marshes. Death never follows old age in the erosion cycle because, before rivers have reduced their lands to sea- level so that marine water can creep in and drown the country, they lose their power to cut away any more material, and turn instead to building up the region which for so long they have labored to destroy. Seldom, in fact, is a region

allowed to advance unhesitatingly from infancy to old age, because earth movements continually change the gradients of rivers, steepening and rejuvenating some, flattening and prematurely aging others. Although the cycle is seldom completed, although some parts are repeated and others are eliminated, the tendency to a rotatory sequence of change is present in the rivers and their lands to-day just as it has always been present since the earth possessed an atmosphere to furnish the necessary rain and running water.

V Not only the substance of the earth

and the expression on her face but also the deep-seated changes in her body which control the major events of her history seem to adhere to a cyclical pattern. Even the casual observer of earth features can see that many formations now crumpled and broken were once flat and continuous. Measurements on the rocks of the Alps show a shortening of more than one hundred miles in the earth's eircumference. In many other places the circumference has been con- siderably shortened so that the implica- tion is that the diameter must have like- wise been shortened. Such evidence points to a progressive shrinkage of the globe through time. For many years the accepted explanation of this shrinkage was cooling and consequent contraction of the materials constituting the deep interior of the earth. But cooling no longer seems an adequate cause for such a great contraction as is now known to have occurred. Besides, it is not certain that the earth has been cooling. In- creasing knowledge of radioactivity has led some scientists to believe that perhaps the earth has actually gained more heat through the disintegration of un- stable elements than she has lost through radiation. In the face of modern knowl-




edge the scientist must look to the tre- mendous pressures in the deep interior as the prime cause of shrinkage. Under these pressures materials may well un- dergo progressive molecular rearrange- ments which result in new compounds of greater density and less volume. Thus as age has crept upon her the earth has grown heavier and smaller.

But she does not yield easily to the stresses within her. The study of earth- quake waves has shown that the body of the globe is in a state of elastic rigidity, and resists the forces which are ever struggling to decrease her volume. So unrelenting and powerful, however, are the forces of concentration that they periodically overcome the inherent strength of the earth and throw the surface into wrinkles. The yielding of surface formations has proceeded through time in a sort of vicious cycle, epochs of resistance alternating with epochs of surrender. The recognition of this cycle is the basis for the division of re- corded time into the geological eras. Each era is set off by a world-wide weakening and yielding of the crust to the stresses of shrinkage. Smaller time divisions are demarked in similar fashion by less intense and less wide-spread con- vulsions.

The forces of erosion, by leveling lands and filling ocean troughs, have forever striven to reduce the irregularities of the earth's surface to flatness. Earth movements have periodically thwarted erosion by crumpling and elevating rocks in weak zones. Earth history has been a long struggle between these two con- tenders, the pendulum of success swing- ing now toward one, now toward the other. Since the earth yields only periodically to the stresses of shrinkage, there are long intervals when erosion can quietly pursue its destructive work. Slowly the rains and the rivers, the winds and the glaciers, remove the rocks from high places and deposit them in the

depressions; slowly the spreading seas creep over the lands. If the process were allowed to proceed to its logical finish, the earth would become nearly a perfect sphere and a universal ocean would swallow all the lands. But always before this happens, surface irregularities are renewed by earth movements, if only to be destroyed again by the erosion that always follows. Thus has earth history turned through the eons over a cycle monotonous in its repetition.

VI In the world of the living with its

myriad creatures and their myriad func- tions, one process dominates and corre- lates all. That process is nutrition. Eating, growing, reproducing and dying are all that life offers to most plants and animals, and these are merely the means, the results and the failure of nutrition. In the so-called "circulation of matter" we see the most pervasive cycle in ani- mate nature. This cycle may be long and involve many organisms, or it may be short and involve only a few. Long or short, a nutritive cycle of some sort embraces every living creature. Not even death can remove an organism from its fated curve.

Only a few of the many chemical elements in the earth are needed for proto- plasm, the basic substance of all living tissue. These chosen materials are forever moving through the bodies of plants and animals. Most plants can take them directly from the soil and the atmosphere, but most animals must steal them from the vegetable kingdom. So it is that plants eat soil and air, animals eat plants, higher animals eat lower animals, whereupon perhaps death intervenes to reverse the order of events. Scavenging lower animals may eat the bodies of the higher animals and regain some of the substance once stolen from their kind. They in turn may die and return the



456 i THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

materials to the dead world of soil and atmosphere whence first they sprang. However long and varied the cycle may be, dust returns to dust and life to life.

Every individual plant and animal passes through a smaller cycle of development during its lifetime. The seed of a tree falls to the ground and begins to germinate. It absorbs moisture, swells and bursts. It sends out roots to anchor itself firmly in the soil and then lifts stem and leaves to the air and the light. Until this stage the young tree lives on the food provided by its parent just as the embryonic mammal lives through its prenatal development.

Soon the plant begins to manufacture its own food with the aid of sunlight, air, soil and the green coloring matter of its stem and leaves. It grows rapidly and passes through seedling and sapling stages until adulthood is reached. These stages are comparable to infancy and adolescence in animals. Both plant and animal are mature when reproduction begins. In the tree reproduction results from the ability to accumulate a reserve of food above its individual needs, so that some of the buds produce flowers instead of leaves. These flowers contain reproductive spores which develop male and female sex cells. Wind or insects effect the fertilization of the female cell, which begins to grow at once until it becomes a seed capsule containing all the essentials for a new tree. Finally the seed, containing food for the hazardous first days of the new life, drops to the ground where it begins its independent existence. Although the cycle is not perfect because return is made to a different seed, the sequence of conditions is a perfect cycle. The offspring seed and all successive stages are identical with the parent seed and its successive stages of development. In some such way has life in all its forms rolled through the ages.

There is abundant indication that the cycle through which the lives of individual organisms are conducted stretches beyond the individual to include the race. Haeckel and Hyatt called attention to the fact that the changes undergone by plants and animals during their early lives are brief summaries of the evolutionary history of the race to which the individual belonas. This idea of recapitulation of biologic history is one of the great generalizations in the science of paleontology.

The racial history of almost any creature has been a vastly longer and more intricate chain of evolving stages than is the life history of even the most compli- cated individual. Naturally all the events of millions of years can not be summarized during the brief span of one lifetime. Even in the best examples of recapitulation, only a few of the outstanding events are reenacted. In many creatures the racial history is distorted because of the speed with which it must be told in the rapidly growing individual. In six days the oyster presents a resume of its several million years of racial history. Many stages are neces- sarily omitted. Then, too, some creatures have been so altered by recent adaptations that their life histories do not give true pictures of the lives of their remote ancestors.

On the whole, however, and in a broad way, developing plants and ani- nals summarize the outstanding events in their evolution. The common frog comes from a fertilized egg which divides and grows into a gill-breathing tadpole. Later the tadpole grows hind legs and fore legs, absorbs his tail and his gills and becomes a mature lung-breathing amphibian. Since these are the rather well-known stages in the evolution of the frog from fish-like ancestors, it is apparent that every living frog, in




the words of Huxley, climbs his ancestral tree.

If the early life of an organism tells the main events in its climb out of the past, does not the later life prophesy the destiny of the race? Are maturity, senility and death the inevitable denoue- ment for race as well as individual? The paleontologist, who knows some of the secrets of the past, must answer in the affirmative. He sees in the fossil record the rise and fall of races, and he knows that races too have their stages of youth, maturity, old age and death. The only difference is that the racial cycle may be very long, and the individual cycle is usually very short.

The desire to get somewhere is deeply rooted in the human heart, and progress is a word often on the lips of civilized man. But it is a word of numberless

meanings because it refers to changes which may seem desirable to some but not to others. The concept of progress is underlain by that other concept of des- tination. Man wants ends for his strig- gles, hopes and fears, where he fancies he will find peace. But these are anthro- pomorphic concepts born of desire. Nature has an entirely different point of view and nature is still the ultimate ruler of her children. In all things which even remotely touch the lives of men she is infinite and timeless. She has imposed a cyclical pattern upon the universe, whereunder all things are charged to go forever, but never to arrive. It avails man little to fret. He had much better travel his curve in the spirit of little children on a merry-go-round, who enjoy the ride though it takes them no- where.

