Morality and evolution
Sir: John Linklater damages his excellent campaign against the permissive society by linking it to unproved and absurd evolutionistic myths (April 27). For example, he appears to consider it a fact that "the cubic capacity of the cranial vault has more than doubled since the dawn of man." I would like Dr Linklater to show me just one skull which bears this out. If his statement were true, thousands would have been found, just as innumerable fossil remains of very ancient fauna have been. In reality, after a century of searching for an 'ape-man' nothing whatever has been found except a few broken fragments which could be anything at all, and, of course, deliberate frauds such as the Piltdown Man.
Again, how can he believe that "the mental age of the average adult is slowly rising with .each succeeding generation?" There are twenty times as many people in Europe today as in classical times, so if Dr Linklater's statement were true there ought to be more than twenty times as many Julius Caesars, Aristotles, Virgils and Archimedeses as existed then. The only improvement is in accumulation of knowledge by mankind as a whole, but even Heath, Nixon and Pompidou rolled up in one would not equal Caesar, nor all the philosophers of today, Aristotle.
Archaeology shows only that at all eras there have been savages and civilised people co-existing. One cannot even say that knowledge has accumulated steadily: it took longer to get Sir Robert Peel back from Rome than it would have taken in Augustus's day.
Dr Linklater calls in evolution-based 'philosophy to combat permissiveness, but the argument can be turned the other way. Marxism is but evolutionism -writ large, and the ridiculous fantasies of a brutal past and a highly-evolved future are much more apt to cloud belief in objective morality than to support it.
G. J. A. Stern 6 Eton Court, London N6
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