No such stories are told about the white settlements on this continent,
even before the days of quarantine and scientific medicine. There is no
other adequate explanation of the difference, than that the two races
have evolved to a different degree in their resistance to these
diseases. It is easily seen, then, that man's evolution is going on, at
varying rates of speed, in probably all parts of the human race at the
present time.
We do not mean, of course, to suggest that all the natives who have died
in the New World since the landing of Columbus, have died because the
evolution of their race had not proceeded so far in certain directions
as had that of their conquerors. But the proportion of them who were
eliminated for that reason is certainly very large. In the more remote
parts of South America the process is still going on. Recent press
dispatches have carried the account of the University of Pennsylvania's
Amazon Expedition, under the direction of William C. Farrabee. In a
letter dated March 16, 1916, the leader told of the discovery of the
remains of the tribe of Pikipitanges, a once populous tribe of which a
chief, six women and two boys alone are left. The tribe had been almost
wiped out, Dr. Farabee reported, by an epidemic of _influenza_!
If the aborigines of the New World succumb to the diseases of the
European, it is not less true that the European succumbs to diseases
against which his race has not been selected. The deadliness of yellow
fever to Americans in the tropics, and the relative immunity of Negroes,
is familiar; so too is the frequently fatal result of the African
tropical fevers on the white man, while the natives suffer from them
much less, having been made more resistant by centuries of natural
selection.
This long discussion may now be summarized. We dealt with lethal
selection, that form of natural selection which operates by prematurely
killing off the less fit and leaving the more fit to survive and
reproduce their kind. It is of course understood that the word "fit" in
this connection does not necessarily mean morally or mentally superior,
but merely fit for the particular environment. In a community of
rascals, the greatest rascal might be the fittest to survive. In the
slums of a modern city the Jewish type, stringently selected through
centuries of ghetto life, is particularly fit to survive, although it
may not be the physical ideal of an anthropologist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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