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The article presents an essay on "Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution," which provides useful perspective for evaluating many apparent promises and threats to humanistic values which have arisen out of the explorations of modern biology. The author discusses the few problems concerning the slow increase in frequency of mutant genes in human populations which must inexorably arise from the most obvious democratic and humane end to the population explosion. He argues that continuing neglect of these trivial problems constitutes a potentially overwhelming threat to mankind.

Monkeys, given the opportunity to look at a picture which excites both interest and fear, choose first to look at it and only later, once their interest has abated, to avoid it.

This chapter was prepared following a series of visits to laboratories and field stations where comparative psychology is under very active investigation. What has been observed, taken with this year's publications in the psychological, ethological, and biological journals, and the chapters of previous Annual Reviews, has given the chapter its form. The advances in the past year in the topics usually allocated most space in this chapter, and that most psychologists think of when they think of comparative psychology at all have not been great. Some might have been advances if they had appeared when the experimental work was completed. Another paper provides a discussion of brain weights in more or less association with the report of some experiments on learning; the relation established is one of simple contiguity in the pages of a paper. Little new appears on hoarding; investigations of bird navigation seem to have reached an impasse, where the only theory that seems adequate to the facts is untenable. [For a popularized summary, see Carthy.] The quasi-monopoly of the experimental study of sex behavior in the male boojum, or rat, held by Beach and his colleagues, has been broken with the appearance of an excellent monograph by Larrson. The general picture is a familiar one: advances have occurred, but at glacial pace; work on familiar variables inches along. A different picture arises, however, if the work of ethologists and zoologists in the field of behavior is examined in its own context rather than according to psychologists' ideas of what should be important. Here the advances in the last year--in the last few years--have been rapid, remarkable, and of direct relevance to psychologists, whether comparative, experimental, social, or clinical. Ethologists, mostly European zoologists, study the behavior of a number of species from an objective (in the Watsonian or Pavlovian sense) point of view that does not exclude an active interest in physiological correlates of behavior. Previous chapters in this Annual Review will have familiarized the reader with some of their work, but they have placed, I think, undue stress on a few sets of investigations and misleadingly emphasized some now obsolete parts of ethological theorizing. What follows is based not only on the current publications of ethologists, but also on visits to their laboratories, and on many and long discussions with them.

A very large body of experimental results have accumulated in the field of operant, or instrumental, conditioning of the rat, the pigeon, and of other experimental animals. The application to human behavior of the laws generated by such research is most often done by the use of theory. An alternative method is to demonstrate that the manipulation of classes of empirically defined variables that produce specific and highly characteristic changes in the behavior of small experimental animals in Skinner boxes produce similar changes in the behavior of college students. This paper reports procedures for the direct application of the variables defining the paradigm for operant conditioning to human behavior and shows that human beings act very much indeed like experimental animals when they are subjected to the same experimental treatments. It suggests that direct application of conditioning principles to some categories of human behavior may be justified. The procedures are simple and they may be followed by anyone, with a minimum of equipment. That it is possible to condition human motor behavior will surprise few who are concerned with behavior theory. Nevertheless, it has not always been clear what behaviors will act as "responses," what events will prove to be "reinforcing stimuli," or exactly what procedures would most readily yield reproducible results. This paper describes methods that have been worded out for easy and rapid operant conditioning of motor behavior in humans, states characteristic findings, and reports sample results. Developed in a series of exploratory experiments in an elementary laboratory course in psychology, the methods may have a wider utility.

Virtually all psychologists accept the premise that human behavior is orderly. The order that they see, however, varies considerably from group to group, and the aspects of behavior in which these orders appear differ as well. The clinician and the personality psychologist observe their fellow men and see need-presses, repressions, and aggressive drives. The experimental psychologist finds his order in the rates at which nonsense syllables are learned, or at which conditioned eyelid reflexes are acquired. If he is physiologically oriented, he is apt to concern himself with muscle twitches and even with the secretion of saliva. It is in terms of such variables that psychologists have set their descriptions of, and their predictions about, the actions of people. All of us, whether psychologists or not, observe people acting. We learn rules of "practical psychology." Some of us, especially the novelists and playwrights, do a remarkably good job of giving plausible accounts of behavior, often in terms that seem pertinent. These writers, however, do not employ the language used by psychologists at either end of the spectrum. They describe ordinary, everyday behavior, and describe it well, but not by using the conceptualizations that psychologists seem to have found useful, nor even terms that can be readily translated into such conceptualizations. The psychologist's efforts tend to be limited in their usefulness to the description and prediction of the behavior of people whose behavior is awry, or of people who are engaged in the strange and unusual activities demanded of them in a laboratory of experimental psychology. Dale Carnegie, practical politicians, and, perhaps, everybody but psychologists, concern themselves with simple, ordinary, everyday behavior. One reason for this situation is, perhaps, the lack of methods of conceptualizing behavior, or of abstracting relevant aspects of behavior for study that are not clinic- or laboratory-bound. This lack of methods is due, perhaps, to a conviction that ordinary behavior is too complex and is determined by too many variables to make possible the discovery of any order except by the application of theory. What I desire to do here is to introduce some concepts, and to describe some experiments derived from them, that suggest that the orderliness of human behavior may be more accessible than has been hitherto assumed. These experiments may accordingly suggest new direction for research on human behavior.

The article focuses on the concept and law of human progress. The concept of human progress is like the idea of an increasing distance between man and the conditions of deficient culture, conditions imagined to be deficient, conditions in which the animal nature of man alone was active. This increasing distance is regularly presented as movement toward improvement and perfection, in any case, however, as an increasing humanization, even when it might appear as a less fortunate fate of mankind. This thought is by no means natural and original to humanity. This view retained its force until deep into the 17th century and beyond. Even such an ingenious philosopher as Giovanni Battista Vico reproduces the germ of this thought, when he attempts to unite with the theory of the Egyptians that an age of gods was followed by an age of heroes and this by the age of man. Cultured man proceeded from crude conditions and crude man from animal conditions, already in the 18th century was a widespread conception, which however, had not yet been victorious over the theological ideas.

The author discusses the influence exerted both by biotechnology and by theoretical biology with its tendency to enlarge man's horizons and deepen his understanding. It discusses man's control of human evolution when they can delineate any such gap between their capacities for prediction and understanding. Meanwhile, a similar issue is raised by the fact that biology, geology, and some sections of astronomy deal with the long-term development of organisms, the earth, and the universe. Moreover, the author does not believe that the problem of man's control of human evolution can be shunted aside in favor of the use of modern biological knowledge in areas which are neutral with respect to human evolution.

The article focuses on the book "The Direction of Human Evolution," by Edwin Grant Conklin. This new edition of Conklin which involves no changes in the body of the work was apparently inspired by the recrudescence of anti-evolutionism.