Re: Gould on Engels on evolution

[zodiac@xxxxxxxxxxxx (zodiac)]

So that others without access to big libraries may also read the
Engels' article, I transcribed it for your perusal. Happy readings...

Ken.

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     THE PART PLAYED BY LABOUR IN THE TRANSITION FROM APE TO MAN

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                                   by
                            FREDERICK ENGELS
                                  1876


Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert.
And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with
the material that it converts into wealth.  But it is even infinitely
more than this.  It is the prime basic condition for all human
existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say
that labour created man himself.

Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not yet
definitely determinable, of that period of the earth's history known to
geologists as the Tertiary period, most likely towards the end of it, a
particularly highly-developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere
in the tropical zone -- probably on a great continent that has now sunk
to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. [NOTE: In the 1870s, when this was
written, British zoogeographer Philip Lutley Sclater put forth the
theory that a continent (he called "Lemuria") existed which reached
from modern Madagascar to India and Sumatra -- and this continent has
since submerged beneath the Indian Ocean.] Darwin has given us an
approximate description of these ancestors of ours.  They were
completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and
they lived in bands in the trees.

First, owing to their way of living which meant that the hands had
different functions than the feet when climbing, these apes began to
lose the habit of using their hands to walk and adopted a more and more
erect posture.  This was the decisive step in the transition from ape
to man.

All extant anthropoid apes can stand erect and move about on their feet
alone, but only in case of urgent need and in a very clumsy way.  Their
natural gait is in a half-erect posture and includes the use of the
hands.  The majority rest the knuckles of the fist on the ground and,
with legs drawn up, swing the body through their long arms, much as a
cripple moves on crutches.  In general, all the transition stages from
walking on all fours to walking on two legs are still to be observed
among the apes today.  The latter gait, however, has never become more
than a makeshift for any of them.

It stands to reason that if erect gait among our hairy ancestors became
first the rule and then, in time, a necessity, other diverse functions
must, in the meantime, have devolved upon the hands.  Already among the
apes there is some difference in the way the hands and the feet are
employed.  In climbing, as mentioned above, the hands and feet have
different uses.  The hands are used mainly for gathering and holding
food in the same way as the fore paws of the lower mammals are used.
Many apes use their hands to build themselves nests in the trees or
even to construct roofs between the branches to protect themselves
against the weather, as the chimpanzee, for example, does.  With their
hands they grasp sticks to defend themselves against enemies, or
bombard their enemies with fruits and stones.  In captivity they use
their hands for a number of simple operations copied from human beings.
It is in this that one sees the great gulf between the undeveloped hand
of even the most man- like apes and the human hand that has been highly
perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labour.  The number and
general arrangement of the bones and muscles are the same in both
hands, but the hand of the lowest savage can perform hundreds of
operations that no simian hand can imitate-no simian hand has ever
fashioned even the crudest stone knife.

The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt
their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape
to man could have been only very simple ones.  The lowest savages, even
those in whom regression to a more animal-like condition with a
simultaneous physical degeneration can be assumed, are nevertheless far
superior to these transitional beings.  Before the first flint could be
fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably
elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us
appears insignificant.  But the decisive step had been taken, the hand
had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the
greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from
generation to generation.

Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product
of labour.  Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations,
through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods
of time, bones that had undergone special development and the
ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more
complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of
perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael,
the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.

But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an
integral, highly complex organism.  And what benefited the hand,
benefited also the whole body it served; and this in two ways.

In the first place, the body benefited from the law of correlation of
growth, as Darwin called it.  This law states that the specialised
forms of separate parts of an organic being are always bound up with
certain forms of other parts that apparently have no connection with
them. Thus all animals that have red blood cells without cell nuclei,
and in which the head is attached to the first vertebra by means of a
double articulation (condyles), also without exception possess lacteal
glands for suckling their young.  Similarly, cloven hoofs in mammals
are regularly associated with the possession of a multiple stomach for
rumination.  Changes in certain forms involve changes in the form of
other parts of the body, although we cannot explain the connection.
Perfectly white cats with blue eyes are always, or almost always, deaf.
The gradually increasing perfection of the human hand, and the
commensurate adaptation of the feet for erect gait, have undoubtedly,
by virtue of such correlation, reacted on other parts of the organism.
However, this action has not as yet been sufficiently investigated for
us to be able to do more here than to state the fact in general terms.

Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of the
development of the hand on the rest of the organism.  It has already
been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously
impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all
animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors.  Mastery over nature
began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man's
horizon at every new advance.  He was continually discovering new,
hitherto unknown properties in natural objects.  On the other hand, the
development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of
society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint
activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to
each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where
they had something to say to each other.  Necessity created the organ;
the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by
modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the
organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound
after another.

Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of
language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one.
The little that even the most highly-developed animals need to
communicate to each other does not require articulate speech.  In its
natural state, no animal feels handicapped by its inability to speak or
to understand human speech.  It is quite different when it has been
tamed by man.  The dog and the horse, by association with man, have
developed such a good ear for articulate speech that they easily learn
to understand any language within their range of concept.  Moreover
they have acquired the capacity for feelings such as affection for man,
gratitude, etc., which were previously foreign to them.  Anyone who has
had much to do with such animals will hardly be able to escape the
conviction that in many cases they now feel their inability to speak as
a defect, although, unfortunately, it is one that can no longer be
remedied because their vocal organs are too specialised in a definite
direction.  However, where vocal organs exist, within certain limits
even this inability disappears.  The buccal organs of birds are as
different from those of man as they can be, yet birds are the only
animals that can learn to speak; and it is the bird with the most
hideous voice, the parrot, that speaks best of all.  Let no one object
that the parrot does not understand what it says.  It is true that for
the sheer pleasure of talking and associating with human beings, the
parrot will chatter for hours at a stretch, continually repeating its
whole vocabulary.  But within the limits of its range of concepts it
can also learn to understand what it is saying.  Teach a parrot swear
words in such a way that it gets an idea of their meaning (one of the
great amusements of sailors returning from the tropics); tease it and
you will soon discover that it knows how to use its swear words just as
correctly as a Berlin costermonger.  The same is true of begging for
titbits.

First labour, after it and then with it speech -- these were the two
most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the
ape gradually changed into that of man, which'for all its similarity is
far larger and more perfect.  Hand in hand with the development of the
brain went the development of its most immediate instruments -- the
senses. Just as the gradual development of speech is inevitably
accompanied by a corresponding refinement of the organ of hearing, so
the development of the brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement
of all the senses.  The eagle sees much farther than man, but the human
eye discerns considerably more in things than does the eye of the
eagle.  The dog has a far keener sense of smell than man, but it does
not distinguish a hundredth part of the odours that for man are
definite signs denoting different things.  And the sense of touch,
which the ape hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, has been
developed only side by side with the development of the human hand
itself, through the medium of labour.

The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and
its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power
of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an
ever-renewed impulse to further development.  This development did not
reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the ape, but
on the whole made further powerful progress, its degree and direction
varying among different peoples and at different times, and here and
there even being interrupted by local or temporary regression.  This
further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand,
and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new
element which came into play with the appearance of fully- fledged man,
namely, society.

Hundreds of thousands of years -- of no greater significance in the
history of the earth than one second in the life of man* [Engels note:
A leading authority in this respect, Sir William Thomson, has
calculated that little more than a hundred million years could have
elapsed since the time when the earth had cooled sufficiently for
plants and animals to be able to live on it.] -- certainly elapsed
before human society arose out of a troupe of tree-climbing monkeys.
Yet it did finally appear.  And what do we find once more as the
characteristic difference between the troupe of monkeys and human
society?  Labour.  The ape herd was satisfied to browse over the
feeding area determined for it by geographical conditions or the
resistance of neighbouring herds; it undertook migrations and struggles
to win new feeding grounds, but it was incapable of extracting from
them more than they offered in their natural state, except that it
unconsciously fertilised the soil with its own excrement.  As soon as
all possible feeding grounds were occupied, there could be no further
increase in the ape population; the number of animals could at best
remain stationary.  But all animals waste a great deal of food, and, in
addition, destroy in the germ the next generation of the food supply.
Unlike the hunter, the wolf does not spare the doe which would provide
it with the young the next year; the goats in Greece, that eat away the
young bushes before they grow to maturity, have eaten bare all the
mountains of the country.  This "predatory economy" of animals plays an
important part in the gradual transformation of species by forcing them
to adapt themselves to other than the usual food, thanks to which their
blood acquires a different chemical composition and the whole physical
constitution gradually alters, while species that have remained
unadapted die out.  There is no doubt that this predatory economy
contributed powerfully to the transition of our ancestors from ape to
man. In a race of apes that far surpassed all others in intelligence
and adaptability, this predatory economy must have led to a continual
increase in the number of plants used for food and the consumption of
more and more edible parts of food plants.  In short, food became more
and more varied, as did also the substances entering the body with it,
substances that were the chemical premises for the transition to man.
But all that was not yet labour in the proper sense of the word.
Labour begins with the making of tools.  And what are the most ancient
tools that we find -- the most ancient judging by the heirlooms of
prehistoric man that have been discovered, and by the mode of life of
the earliest historical peoples and of the rawest of contemporary
savages?  They are hunting and fishing implements, the former at the
same time serving as weapons.  But hunting and fishing presuppose the
transition from an exclusively vegetable diet to the concomitant use of
meat, and this is another important step in the process of transition
from ape to man.  A meat diet contained in an almost ready state the
most essential ingredients required by the organism for its metabolism.
 By shortening the time required for digestion, it also shortened the
other vegetative bodily processes that correspond to those of plant
life, and thus gained further time, material and desire for the active
manifestation of animal life proper.  And the farther man in the making
moved from the vegetable kingdom the higher he rose above the animal.
Just as becoming accustomed to a vegetable diet side by side with meat
converted wild cats and dogs into the servants of man, so also
adaptation to a meat diet, side by side with a vegetable diet, greatly
contributed towards giving bodily strength and independence to man in
the making.  The meat diet, however, had its greatest effect on the
brain, which now received a far richer flow of the materials necessary
for its nourishment and development, and which, therefore, could
develop more rapidly and perfectly from generation to generation.  With
all due respect to the vegetarians man did not come into existence
without a meat diet, and if the latter, among all peoples known to us,
has led to cannibalism at some time or other (the forefathers of the
Berliners, the Weletabians or Wilzians, used to eat their parents as
late as the tenth century), that is of no consequence to us today.

The meat diet led to two new advances of decisive importancethe
harnessing of fire and the domestication of animals.  The first still
further shortened the digestive process, as it provided the mouth with
food already, as it were, half- digested; the second made meat more
copious by opening up a new, more regular source of supply in addition
to hunting, and moreover provided, in milk and its products, a new
article of food at least as valuable as meat in its composition.  Thus
both these advances were, in themselves, new means for the emancipation
of man.  It would lead us too far afield to dwell here in detail on
their indirect effects notwithstanding the great importance they have
had for the development of man and society.

Just as man learned to consume everything edible, he also learned to
live in any climate.  He spread over the whole of the habitable world,
being the only animal fully able to do so of its own accord.  The other
animals that have become accustomed to all climates -- domestic animals
and vermin -- did not become so independently, but only in the wake of
man.  And the transition from the uniformly hot climate of the original
home of man to colder regions, where the year was divided into summer
and winter, created new requirements -- shelter and clothing as
protection against cold and damp, and hence new spheres of labour, new
forms of activity, which further and further separated man from the
animal.

By the combined functioning of hand, speech organs and brain, not only
in each individual but also in society, men became capable of executing
more and more complicated operations, and were able to set themselves,
and achieve, higher and higher aims.  The work of each generation
itself became different, more perfect and more diversified.
Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came
spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation.  Along with
trade and industry, art and science finally appeared.  Tribes developed
into nations and states.  Law and politics arose, and with them that
fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind -- religion.  In
the face of all these images, which appeared in the first place to be
products of the mind and seemed to dominate human societies, the more
modest productions of the working hand retreated into the background,
the more so since the mind that planned the labour was able, at a very
early stage in the development of society (for example, already in the
primitive family), to have the labour that had been planned carried out
by other hands than its own.  All merit for the swift advance of
civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity
of the brain.  Men became accustomed to explain their actions as
arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are
reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time
there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the
fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men's minds.  It still
rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural
scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear
idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence
they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour.

Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by
their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as
man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and
change those who made them.  In nature nothing takes place in
isolation.  Everything affects and is affected by every other thing,
and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is
forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a
clear insight into the simplest things.  We have seen how goats have
prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece; on the island of St.
Helena, goats and pigs brought by the first arrivals have succeeded in
exterminating its old vegetation almost completely, and so have
prepared the ground for the spreading of plants brought by later
sailors and colonists.  But animals exert a lasting effect on their
environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are
concerned, accidentally.  The further removed men are from animals,
however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of
premeditated, planned action directed towards definite preconceived
ends.  The animal destroys the vegetation of a locality without
realising what it is doing.  Man destroys it in order to sow field
crops on the soil thus released, or to plant trees or vines which he
knows will yield many times the amount planted.  He transfers useful
plants and domestic animals from one country to another and thus
changes the flora and fauna of whole continents.  More than this.
Through artificial breeding both plants and animals are so changed by
the hand of man that they become unrecognisable.  The wild plants from
which our grain varieties originated are still being sought in vain.
There is still some dispute about the wild animals from which our very
different breeds of dogs or our equally numerous breeds of horses are
descended.

It goes without saying that it would not occur to us to dispute the
ability of animals to act in a planned, premeditated fashion.  On the
contrary, a planned mode of action exists in embryo wherever
protoplasm, living albumen, exists and reacts, that is, carries out
definite, even if extremely simple, movements as a result of definite
external stimuli.  Such reaction takes place even where there is yet no
cell at all, far less a nerve cell.  There is something of the planned
action in the way insect-eating plants capture their prey, although
they do it quite unconsciously.  In animals the capacity for conscious,
planned action is proportional to the development of the nervous
system, and among mammals it attains a fairly high level.  While
fox-hunting in England one can daily observe how unerringly the fox
makes use of its excellent knowledge of the locality in order to elude
its pursuers, and how well it knows and turns to account all favourable
features of the ground that cause the scent to be lost.  Among our
domestic animals, more highly developed thanks to association with man,
one can constantly observe acts of cunning on exactly the same level as
those of children.  For, just as the development history of the human
embryo in the mother's womb is only an abbreviated repetition of the
history, extending over millions of years, of the bodily development of
our animal ancestors, starting from the worm, so the mental development
of the human child is only a still more abbreviated repetition of the
intellectual development of these same ancestors, at least of the later
ones.  But all the planned action of all animals has never succeeded in
impressing the stamp of their will upon the earth.  That was left for
man.

In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about
changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve
his ends, masters it.  This is the final, essential distinction between
man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about
this distinction.*

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature.  For each such victory nature takes its revenge
on us.  Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the
results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite
different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.
The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere,
destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by
removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs
of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of
those countries.  When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine
forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern
slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the
roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less
inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of
water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them
to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy
seasons.  Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that
with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading
scrofula.  Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule
over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone
standing outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain,
belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of
it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other
creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better
understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more
immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the
traditional course of nature.  In particular, after the mighty advances
made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than
ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more
remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production
activities.  But the more this progresses the more will men not only
feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible
will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind
and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose after the
decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest
elaboration in Christianity.

It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little
of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions in
the field of production, but it has been still more difficult in regard
to the more remote social effects of these actions.  We mentioned the
potato and the resulting spread of scrofula.  But what is scrofula
compared to the effects which the reduction of the workers to a potato
diet had on the living conditions of the popular masses in whole
countries, or compared to the famine the potato blight brought to
Ireland in 1847, which consigned to the grave a million Irishmen,
nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the
emigration overseas of two million more?  When the Arabs learned to
distil spirits, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were
creating one of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the
aborigines of the then still undiscovered American continent.  And when
afterwards Columbus discovered this America, he did not know that by
doing so he was giving a new lease of life to slavery, which in Europe
had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro
slave trade.  The men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
laboured to create the steam-engine had no idea that they were
preparing the instrument which more than any other was to revolutionise
social relations throughout the world.  Especially in Europe, by
concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessing the
huge majority, this instrument was destined at first to give social and
political domination to the bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a
class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which can end only
in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class
antagonisms. But in this sphere too, by long and often cruel experience
and by collecting and analysing historical material, we are gradually
learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social
effects of our production activity, and so are afforded an opportunity
to control and regulate these effects as well.

This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge.
It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of
production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary
social order.

All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at
achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labour.
The further consequences, which appear only later and become effective
through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected.
The original common ownership of land corresponded, on the one hand, to
a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was
restricted in general to what lay immediately available, and
presupposed, on the other hand, a certain superfluity of land that
would allow some latitude for correcting the possible bad results of
this primeval type of economy.  When this surplus land was exhausted,
common ownership also declined.  All higher forms of production,
however, led to the division of the population into different classes
and thereby to the antagonism of ruling and oppressed classes.  Thus
the interests of the ruling class became the driving factor of
production, since production was no longer restricted to providing the
barest means of subsistence for the oppressed people.  This has been
put into effect most completely in the capitalist mode of production
prevailing today in Western Europe.  The individual capitalists, who
dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only
with the most immediate useful effect of their actions.  Indeed, even
this useful effect -- inasmuch as it is a question of the usefulness of
the article that is produced or exchanged -- retreats far into the
background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be made on
selling.

Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in
the main examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of
production and exchange that are actually intended.  This fully
corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical
expression.  As individual capitalists are engaged in production and
exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most
immediate results must first be taken into account.  As long as the
individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased
commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not
concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its
purchasers.  The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same
actions.  What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down
forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes
sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable
coffee trees-what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall
afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil,
leaving behind only bare rock!  In relation to nature, as to society,
the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about
the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed
that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out
to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character; that
the harmony of supply and demand is transformed into the very reverse
opposite, as shown by the course of each ten years' industrial cycle --
even Germany has had a little preliminary experience of it in the
"crash"; that private ownership based on one's own labour must of
necessity develop into the expropriation of the workers, while all
wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of non-workers;
that

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