(Automatic transcript - may present inaccuracies)

>> Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We welcome you here again with a great deal of pleasure. It's only 25 minutes past 8, but in order that the chairman of the evening and the speaker of the evening may have the full hour, I shall make my brief introductory remarks before then so that the chairman can start at 8:30. The Chairman is Dr. Lester J. Evans whom I will speak of in just a moment. The topic this evening--and tell me if we go on the air, will you? Because I'm not supposed to be talking on the air. The topic for the evening is ecology as you know it and among the doctors there's been a good deal of discussion as to what the word means. I confess, I've looked it up in the dictionary twice so that I'd be partially informed. One doctor tonight said he thought it was some microbe that if you drank it, it'd hurt your health. So I don't know what it is but you'll learn before the evening goes on. Now the Chairman of the evening is Dr. Lester J. Evans who is the executive associate of the Commonwealth Fund. Dr. Evans is a graduate of the famous medical school of Washington in Saint Louis. He was formally medical director of the Child Health Demonstration in North Dakota. He's been with the Commonwealth Fund since 1928 and he is a member of many distinguished organizations. He is interested particularly in medical education, rural medicine and the rural hospital. And Dr. Evans will take over in about two minutes.

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>> Good evening ladies and gentlemen. In cooperation with the New York Academy of Medicine, your city station brings you the second of the 1955-56 series of lectures to the laity. The lectures, now on their 21st season, are presented by the academy free of charge at the academies auditorium from which we are now broadcasting. The talks are intended to acquaint the laymen with significant developments in medicine and to offer insight into the various processes by which these developments are achieved. This season's theme is "Medicine and Anthropology". Our speaker tonight is Dr. Marston Bates, Professor of Zoology at the University of Michigan and his subject tonight, the "Ecology of Health". To introduce the evening speaker and program here now is the presiding chairman, Dr. Lester J. Evans.

>> Dr. Keyes, ladies and gentlemen, and guests of the Academy of Medicine, there are many ways in which I might introduce our speaker this evening. I've thought of several. I shall sample a few. And I might start with the subject of the evening ecology and health. But I had already given that up and you've heard Dr. Karl say that he too was unable to define ecology. I won't even attempt to define health. I then turn to the volume American man of science and I read through a long list of citations about Dr. Bates. I found such things as he's the chairman of the Department of Zoology, the University of Michigan. He's a graduate of Florida, the University of Florida, received his masters degree at Harvard, PhD from Harvard in biology. He served as an entomologist for the United Fruit Company, was a research assistant in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, staff member of the Rockefeller Foundation. But as I went on with that lists, I found it interesting, moderately exciting but still it didn't tell me what I wanted to know. I then turn into the dust jacket of his last book "The Prevalence of Man.". And there I found statements like this. That he started his work on a problem with the mosquito and work for the Rockefeller Foundation in Albania while on leave from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He left Harvard to join the staff of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation. And then he spent four years in Albania, one in Egypt and eight in Columbia studying yellow fever and malaria. After this exciting life, it is noted that he now returned to academic life, the University of Michigan. Also, it says that he's primarily interested in finding out how various biological and social sciences as cultivated in the university fit together to get a better understanding of the human animal. Well, as I read back to the blur that sounded as if we're getting nearer to what I was hoping to find, then as I turned to the front of the book and looked at the titles of his recent books, they really become quite exciting. His first book was "The Natural History of Mosquitoes". His next book "The Nature of Natural History", his next "Where winter never comes" and, finally, "The Prevalence of People". Those titles almost sound as though he were writing the natural history of a biologist. Then, looking at this last book and still worried about the title of the evening, ecology and health, I run across this short paragraph. In discussing health, Dr. Bates refers to the code of health and said, "The code of health had its detractors, among them was Plato, who thought that perpetual care for health was just another disease." He argued in the republic that no one has time to be sick all his life on the pretense of attending to his health. I hope now that if this has raised any questions in your minds, the speaker of the evening will clear them up for us. It takes--It gives me great pleasure now to introduce Dr. Marston Bates, professor of zoology, University of Michigan. Dr. Bates.

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>> Thank you, Dr. Evans. I would perfectly honestly say that we had no arrangement for [inaudible] and he said that I could keep all royalty that came as a consequence. He's worried about the book. Like the Chairman and the President of the academy, I am puzzled about the meaning of the ecology of health. It sound like an elegant title, marvelous thing to give a talk about, but the problem is, what do you say? Like the president, I turn to the dictionary. The problem there, I think is fairly simple, ecology my dictionary said is biology dealing with the mutual relation between organisms and their environment. Turn to health, state of well--of being hale or sound in body, mind, or soul. Now putting this together, I take it that the ecology of health means that we should tonight be concerned with the environmental conditions that are favorable to a state of well-being in man in body, mind, and soul. When I went through this dictionary operation, I didn't quite naturally uphold of what I've got into. Dr. Galdston asked me if I would talk about this sometime ago and I said, "Yes." Obviously without thinking the matter through. This is easy to understand because the two words by themselves are, seemed to me, harmless enough. During these last few years particularly since I become a professor, I found myself using the word ecology very frequently. I still like to think of myself as a naturalist rather than as an ecologist. But I've got quite years to using these Greek root words and I talk about ecology all of the time and I never flinch when I do so. And health, I feel quite familiar with that word too because of all those years that I worked for the Rockefeller Foundation on the International Health Division. I naturally was practicing talking about health a good part in the time. I never understood what the word meant but of course lack of understanding of meaning never prevents people from talking. If it did, I suppose, we would all become trackless. You know, ecology of health, then, are easy and familiar words and the difficulty comes when we put them together. I think I'll feel safer if I deal with them separately for a while. Ecology is a biological science that is concerned with individuals with populations and with communities and with the interactions of these with each other and with the environment. As I said, I've got used to these Greek word--root words but I still find myself happier if I translate ecology into calling it skin-out biology. That, it seems to me, one can logically--if one can logically divide up biology at all, one or the more obvious places to do it is at the skin. And then, the study of functions of organisms and the study of the behavior of hearts and systems that this skin makes a convenient boundary line. You can tell when you're there at any rate. And that the skin-in aspects of biology, the parts of it that are concerned with the innards, are left then to physiology. And this--[inaudible] out aspects of biology where the whole organism is functioning the context is more properly called ecology. Now this is sometimes is broken up, and it's really why ecology is a new science. I think this is very dubious. The word itself isn't very old. It was invented by a German Haeckel in 1870. But it's really, I think, just another word for the very old science of natural history which essentially, let's say, was dealing with the whole organism, its life and its behavior. So we can translate the ecology of health into the natural history of health in that health setting. It's very curios when you think of it in terms of ecology or natural history. We were quite accustomed now through thinking and talking about the natural history or the ecology of disease. And this thing is much more natural than talking about the ecology or the natural history of health. I--Mostly, I think, part of myself is working in the ecology or the natural history of disease and the relationship there is quite clear. As a matter of fact, I think that the study of a disease situation, the study of epidemiology, most particularly, has contributed a great deal to the development of the biological science that we call ecology. This is particularly the case where people have studied the various disease situations which involved vector relationships in which the pathogen is transmitted through mosquito, flea, snail, something of this sort. In the case of yellow fever for instance, which I was working on much of my time with the Rockefeller Foundation. In the study of jungle yellow fever, we very rapidly found ourselves involved with the rainforest community. And in the end, we're studying--taking off from the yellow fever virus, found ourselves studying the structure of the forest, glaring in the climates within the forest. And in the end, the explanation of the epidemiology of the disease turned out to depend upon the habits of mosquitoes and monkeys and the climate that kept them chained more or less to the top of the forest and the conditions that lead men more or less accidentally and incidentally to break into this sign--to break into the cycle. Now in the same way, or in a comparable sort of way, the study of malaria which of course has been one of the, perhaps, the most important of the human infectious diseases has lead to a great deal of knowledge of ecology. That people in all parts of the world have been studying the environmental relations in ponds, streams, and lakes where the mosquitoes were breeding in order to gain a better understanding of the disease itself. I've been particularly struck recently in reading a new book that has come out on sleeping sickness in Africa in which it's apparent that the distribution of the disease depends in part upon the distribution of different kinds of vegetation in Africa. And that the tsetse fly that is the transmitter of the disease then is--its distribution is explicable in terms of the distribution of the vegetation. So here again, we have the study of a disease situation leading to perfectly classical studies of ecology. If we move over from these vector transmitted diseases and look even at the purely human contingents or things like measles or small pox, mumps so on, we find that the study of the epidemiology of these disease situations involve factors that have the same sort of thing that the biologically collagen is pre-occupied with. Things like population densities, movements of population, climatic variations, things of that sort. And of course all of these infectious diseases involve parasitic relationships. And biologists are naturally familiar enough with the problems of parasitism. Now disease covers many things besides infection, mental illnesses, hereditary diseases, dietary deficiencies, things of that sort. And the understanding of many of these sorts of diseases depends more on parts of biology like physiology, genetic psychology and so forth and it does upon ecology. But still, even so, in all of these disease situations, I think we have a feeling that we have something that we can get hold of that we can deal with. We have an entity that we can define that we can study the environmental relationships of--as ecologist. With the ecology of disease, we can be perfectly happy. Now, let me turn to the ecology of health, as I had to do with trying to prepare this lecture, I find myself at a new rate and I quite knew a sort of a situation. I've shifted and I find myself looking at the landscape from an entirely new and different point of view. I suppose new is a very misleading word too in this context. I know in reading over things, preparing for this lecture, I found an article which Dr. Galdston, the Executive Secretary here wrote some time ago in which he pointed out that insofar as medicine was becoming pre-occupied with health rather than disease, it was really going back to one of its first tradition to a theme that can be found in the Hippocratic writings. In other words, as always, the Greeks started it. And in many time--in modern time, great many critics of medicine whom I have heard talking on the subject have said that it is too pre-occupied with disease, that it should become more pre-occupied with normal states with health. And I think without any question, there's been an increasing shift of trend in medicine toward this pre-occupation with the positive side with health rather than with the negative aspect of disease. But, of course, here we are still facing the problem what do we mean by health. In spite of the dictionary or perhaps with--even with the dictionary, one still neglect without any feeling of what it mean, being hale and sound in body, mind and soul. It's a very difficult concept, I think, to really define. I think we often think about health as--in a negative sort of way, simply the absence of disease. This is unsatisfactory because there are quite clearly many degrees of health beyond the mere absence of positive--of demonstrable disease. We think of it also as in terms of additive things, of increased vigor, of going and working out on the gym and goodness knows what, of getting on into a positive favorable state. The word, in fact, indicates, I think, in our mind a sort of an optimum condition, something that is the best. And now, I think it is very generally true that optimum states are difficult to define. And this is true perhaps swiftly because the optimum, the best is really a meaningless word except in relation to some end. In the case of health for instance, or the optimum, the extreme of health, again, might be different depending on the criteria in that you are using, on the end that you had in view, on whether the value that you held was maximum happiness, maximum productivity, maximum length of life. The sorts of different positive values that one might have might well lead to putting a different emphasis upon different aspects of health. I think also when we get involved with health, it turns out that there's something little bit difference depending on whether we're thinking of the health of the individual, of the health of the community or the health of mankind as a whole. I suppose the people who study semantics would call health a poor word, an expression that I rather like which if I understand semantics, which maybe a question, means that the word is like good, bad, hot, cold and so forth is meaningless except when referenced to some particular scale or standard. But along this line, I found an idea which I think was first proposed by Dr. Jay E. Perkins [assumed spelling] and which was developed considerably by John Gordon who is the professor of Epidemiology at Harvard, the idea that so long as there is any life, there is some degree of health. So that you end up with death as a sort of an absolute zero for health and then with a no fixed upper limit, it would be like the thermometer scale which you can go on gradually into increasing like high degrees of health. I'm talking here about human health. I think quite rightly, this is under medical auspices. Medicine is concerned with man primarily. And so I'm being anthropocentric and not trying to take some cosmic point of view like which man is reduced to proper insignificance as a sort of transient affliction of this minor planet. But the title that I have been given is general, "The Ecology of Health". And I think it might be interesting to try to take for a moment a general ecological point of view toward this problem. I think we tend to consider health as the normal, the natural state of things and disease as a departure from the norm. Yet, I think, looking at it from the point of view animal ecology, it becomes quite clear that health particularly, the upper ranges of health the things that we are striving for and thinking about when we talk about it with men, are definitely and quite clearly unnatural. Disease, as I remark earlier, is an aspect of parasitism. And parasitism is a perfectly normal, natural occurrence in nature. Disease is perfectly natural. The whole system of nature is geared to a sort of complex system of checks and balances whereby the different populations, the different kinds of animals and plants live at the expense of each other in all sorts of food relationships and parasitism and result in disease is simply one aspect of these series of food relationships. Thomas Malthus stated the problem long ago in those famous propositions of his in the essay on population which I think very ethically come to be called the Dismal Theorem of Malthus. As he made the statement, it seemed to him that man and all other organisms tended to reproduce up to the limit of their means of existence which led inevitably to famine, war, disease, all of the things that Malthus in his book lumped as the positive check on population of vice and misery. Now, we would use somewhat different phraseology today. We would say that the potential reproductive rate of organism is checked by the environmental resistance. Vice and misery are clearly enough unhealthy from any point of view by any definition. But environmental resistance, this thing in our modern jargon when you encountered it, is also I think unhealthy. In the biotic community, man is achieving his increasing health at the expense of the health of other organisms. From any cosmic point of view, frankly, he has all the right to do that. Greater health for man means less health from small pox virus or the malaria parasite. I don't supposed that anyone is going to organize a society for the prevention of cruelty in parasites but goodness knows great many people are pre-occupied with other aspects of the problem that is touched on here. I am thinking particularly all people who quite articulately argued that it's bad to try to control disease particularly in many parts of the world that are already overcrowded because in the controlling of infectious disease, we're simply providing tender or other sorts of misery or famine particularly. And that consequently, the control of a disease is not leading to anything that we can call progress. There's a fallacy here I think. And I think the fallacy is in regarding man as inevitably chained by the checks and balances of the natural system, as inevitably the heart of the medical system. I think we might call it the ecological fallacy or perhaps it would be better to call it the ecological dilemma. I think the dilemma arises from the fact that in one sense man is clearly and obviously and inevitably a part of nature and yet, at the same time, is the most unnatural phenomenon. Man's uniqueness, I think, is--all is resolvable into the concept that the anthropologist cover with this word culture. Culture is a very peculiar human characteristic. You can if you look hard enough find analogs in culture in nature. You can find traces of culture like phenomena among other organisms of behavior that's modified by learning and transmitted by a sort of teaching process. But with man, these cultural modifications of behavior are so overwhelmingly important that they're making a quite new kind of thing in nature.

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What some philosopher would call an emergent. I think because of this, one can't take biologically confident and simply extend it to cover one more specie, Homo sapiens, can call it human ecology and feel if you are dealing with the same sort of thing that would have end up if you can deal with it in the same sort of way. When you've move the man and when you start talking about human ecology, you are dealing with, I think, it's quite new and it's quite different sort of science. The lectures in these series are on, in general, medicine and anthropology. And as I look over the title, it's quite clear that they would be largely concerned with the relation between culture and the problems of health so that I have opt to try to avoid going too far into culture here. I take it that my function would be to try to give a biological perspective to this rather than to talk too much about culture in itself. But it's impossible to discuss any aspect of human behavior without getting involved in culture so that I shall have to take on a sort of an anthropological complexion at times. Now, culture, I think, must be regarded in itself as a natural phenomenon in the sense that it must be scattered in some natural way with man's pre-human ancestors, but developing in accordance with natural laws. It's natural in the sense that I think there is no need to call on special, supernatural intervention to explain its origin or development. It--However it started, it's like the problem of discussing the origin of culture is little like discussing the origin of life. I don't think anyone really has any very clear idea about how it might have got started. Granting that it got started, then you are able to study the process of evolution of change. And this is what we have mostly been pre-occupied. When cultural evolution started, once the culture started changing, it clearly became--started to operate on a quite different way from the biological evolution that had preceded it. The transmission of cultural traits does not depend on the germplasm and its continuity but depends upon tradition. Culture is based not in genes and chromosomes, but in the development of symbolic language. This difference, among other things, leads to a quite great difference in rate of change between cultural and biological phenomenon. To the extent that cultural traits differ in their genesis, transmission and mode of change from biological traits, they are unnatural in the sense that they are purely and characteristically human. Man, I think, to go back to our dilemma again, is a part of nature and that we cannot regard his activities as a consequence of any special supernatural suspension of natural law. But he is a part from nature to the extent that his activities as the bearer of culture are quite peculiar. The ecological dilemma then is that then is both natural and unnatural depending on the meaning given to natural. And the ecological fallacy were consist in ignoring this basic divergence. This whole business of the relation between biological and cultural evolution is, I think, a fascinating phenomenon. It's a thing that we are only beginning to understand. Quite a few of my contemporary belief that biological evolution has more or less stopped with the advent of man and his culture, that somehow we have disrupted the system of nature enough so that the things are pretty much, by--from the point of view of biological evolution, at a stand still. Others however, I think consider that man and--is referring drastically with nature in clearing and giving new plans, chances to take over has accelerated the process of biological evolution in our weaves, in our pest animals, things of this sort. So you can have two quite different points of view. Another point of view that is held is that in man himself, the development of culture has led to the suspension of natural selection. And that this is bad that--now all of the people who talk about the dangers coming from medicine because it is enabling us to perpetuate in the population, many sorts of genetic defects that would, in the natural course of events, be eliminated. And the ardent proponents of this idea consider that natural selection then must be replaced by some sort of an artificial selection what they would call a eugenics program. My feeling here is that we simply don't know enough about the laws of culture or biology that are governing these phenomena to make an intelligent decision. The generosity of the human race because of the suspension of natural selection is not one of the things that currently worries me. I am, however, willing to admit that the problem is somewhat urgent and certainly fascinating. Its understanding is going to require cooperative effort of biologist, of physicians, and of anthropologist, and other social sciences--scientist which certainly, I think, it adds to its fascinations. But to get back to our take off point, the fact that health is unnatural event doesn't bother you in the least. All of medicine, all of science, I don't know if I can say all human activities are unnatural. Certainly, a great many of them are. All of them, science and medicine now, which I rather restrict myself too, are products of culture. Perhaps, we better use the word artificial as opposed to natural in this sense. But we're committed to our [inaudible]. And I think there's no use about worrying or wishing we were back in the good old days in a naturally, healthy conditions of the early stone age. The problem of the meaning of health, however, I think carries over from nature to man in various sorts of ways and one of the ways is in the meaning of the categories that are dealt with. That is the problem of health for whether the health of the individual versus the health of the community versus the health of the species versus the health of the whole interweaving complex of nature. Of course, when we talk about health in this biological ecological sense, we still face this problem of the optimum of the best and the problem of best for what. And now when in nature, I think, we look for what is the value that this optimum is related to. We almost always end by being finding it difficult to find any other value than one of survival and reproduction. The whole natural system seems to be arranged as far as we can examine it with survival and reproduction as the goal. Well, now the primary goal seems to be for the continuity for the survival and reproduction of the life process itself. Species arise, flourish, become extinct. But insofar as the species has become extinct, it is replaced by other species which presumably are better adaptive to the conditions or improvements in the problem of maintaining the life process. The good of the species, in other words, is subordinate to the good of the life process as a whole. The individual, in this grand scheme of nature, doesn't seem to amount to anything at all. Each individual, of course, is a bundle of adaptations for survival. But as nature is arranged, most individuals must die before they could reproduce so that most individual never achieve the aim for which they seem to striving. Life for rabbit would rapidly become impossible if all rabbits survived to reproduce. Rabbit reproduction is being what it is. And majority of individuals, among rabbits, among all populations in nature, are thus doomed to death in order--before reproduction in order that the species itself can survive. When we move from biological ecology to human ecology, we've changed the perspective. But, I think, it's still interesting to ponder the meaning of this category, the meaning of health in relation to the individual and to the community and to the species. We're now dealing with one species, but we still have many groupings. Beyond the individual, of course, to family, the community, the village, the city, the nation and we have mankind as a whole. One's first impulse is to think that the same hierarchy of value should apply here. If the good of the individual should be subordinate to the back of the community, the good of the community is subordinate to the back of the species and that the welfare of the species then is the only valid overriding goal. I find myself facing anything of this sort with great repellent because it seems to me that the genius of men turns on his concern and value for the individual after all the ends so part of good many millions of years ago, the problem of the complete subordination of the individual to society. And there's no point, you know, repeating this experiment. I think our problem is to find ways of maintaining the welfare of the species and the welfare of the community without sacrificing the individual. Our problem in reaching the optimum, our highest value I think is to find ways in which the meanings of health for the individual, for the community and for mankind, as a whole, can explicitly be made to coincide. This of course is not an easy problem because the interest of the individual often seemed to be at variance with those of the community and the interest of the community at variance with those of mankind as a whole. It's a rate published at practicing public health man has to face this problem of the meaning of individual liberty, of the points at which it should be restricted almost everyday. It's the problem that we reach more or less balance solutions of. The solutions vary, I think, in different context. The problem was, I think, particularly vividly underlined from the one time summer before last when I was in the south pacific. On the inter-island trading ship that picked us up on the little [inaudible] that we were living on and had dropped us out of its route at the central governing station for this part of the Pacific. The ship that brought us there, so irregularly, then spent the night in the port. And the next day, I was asked to sit in on a session of the officials of the government of the island. And it was a very interesting experience that I still remember vividly. The chief justice of the island was obviously quite irritated at the health officer over the events involved in the ship bringing us there. He--They--The chief justice was very pre-occupied with the whole problem, the meaning of democracy, how you were going to bring American ideal to these people in the Pacific. He said to the health officer, "Now, here I am working at this thing, then you come along, the ship comes in, you let the American scientist and the ship's officers ashore and you keep, obviously, showing a racial or national or some kind of a discrimination and you keep all of the deck passengers and the crew on board of the ship and won't let them off." The health officer, however, was not going to be well [inaudible] by this at all. He pointed out that he'd gone to a great deal of ethic to remove venereal disease from this particular island. And that if he let people miscellaneously enter the island, even us, ashore to spoil his program which was really a vital importance toward the health of the community that was his responsibility. I don't know, health and democracy, health and freedom of the individual were clearly here in our position. The staff meeting quite naturally didn't settle it. I suppose there isn't any rule of thumb by which conflict between the individual interest and the community interest will be settled. If there is a rule of thumb, I'm sure it's not that the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the community. That maybe at the way of nature but it seems to me that it doesn't necessarily then have to be the way of men. On the hand of course, it equally clears the rule of thumb can't be that the good of the community must be sacrificed to the individual no matter what the status of the individual may be. In that way, we are headed towards the tales of augment misery for all. I think the Pacific Island incident was particularly pointed for me because somewhat earlier, I've got involved with a rather different discussion against the background of a whole problem of colonialism and public health practices in relation to colonialism. This earlier case talking about the critical colonialism, he has pointed out to me that the ideal of new public health people would be to have the whole population in jail. Then you could be sure they have the right diet, got the right jobs, at the right time were properly isolated when they were contagious and all of that sort of thing. This thought that the ideal will be to have the whole population in jail under complete control sometimes seems rather quietly were close to the mark. I think it becomes particularly apparent when we are pre-occupied to exclusively with physical health. And when health is dealt with, there's a sort of a commodity in intercultural context. And it becomes the logic of utilitarianism, the logic of the "Brave New World" that Aldous Huxley wrote about and it seems so often to be taken shape under our very notions. Of course, we have, in many places and at various times, achieve what seemed to be reasonable solutions to these problems with the conflict of interest between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The problems really here seemed almost trivial when we compare them with the problems of conflict of interest between the health of the community and the health of mankind as a whole. Realize when I'm talking about we merely have to substitute in contemporary times why the word community a particular kind of community, the national state and to look at the apparent discrepancy from the world [inaudible] between the needs and desires or health of a particular state and the health of the human specie to looked at it as a whole or as a collection of individuals, each individual human terribly and rightfully important to himself. Again, in preparation for this lecture, I found myself reading a discussion of the problems of health in the military context. The particular article that I was reading was a glowing account of success. And I was reminded again of the point about jail made by my anti-colonial friend. I got the thinking that if it can't get the whole population in jail, the next best thing perhaps is to get as large [inaudible] part of it into the army. Then you cannot only look after their physical health, you can think here sometimes successfully with their psychology, their morale, and their education. And the armed forces of every modern nation are splendid examples of what can be at [inaudible] with the proper application of health techniques. Hans Zinsser wrote a delightful book called "Rats, Lice, and History" in which he dealt with the problem of health and many--he touched on many subjects with among others, the interrelations between health and history, the problems of war and disease. And this has a chapter then, which we call the unimportance of generals. He made the point that practically all of the historic wars have been decided not by military strategy but by which pathogen happen to get the upper hand and which army got its epidemic first. For now, the advances of medical science have changed this. And I think now the military strategist can deal with the problems of military strategy while the medical service has the pathogen well under control. What still remain when we looked at this problem of health in the context of the armed forces, health in the armed forces, a queer contradiction it seems to me. Because the maintenance of health, in this case, is where the further is of what seems to me the greatest and most dangerous of all of the human disease is war. I don't think I've strayed from my topic, the ecology of healthy in man. Health, after all, is life and its complete absence in Gordon's definition is death. War and health are completely contradictory. It's interesting to look at this absolute zero of health and, I think, death for a moment. We started out to classify the causes of death. We can build many--view them in many sorts of ways. One my favorite is to make first split between what I would call ecological death and physiological death, considering physiological death to be the running down of the time clock that seems to be dealt into every kind of an organism, when the organization finally, apparently because of factors inherent in the nature of the organization breaks down. Ecological death, in contrast, would be death caused by factors external to the organism, whether if these factors are predation, being killed by a crocodile or a lion or parasitism, getting measles or yellow fever or starvation or accidents or any of various ways in which one can classify the ecological agent that cause death in organism. If we try to apply this system to man, we find that in addition to any general system of categories that we've setup, we come across this most extraordinary, special category by itself, this category of man killing each other. It's very common as we all know and very widespread phenomenon in man and it goes back as far as we can see into the human history and prehistory. And yet biologically, it's a very odd business indeed. I'm trying to find analogies and precursors of these. I have had almost no success. Certainly, many animals kill and eat each other if you crowd them in cages. And possibly overcrowding in nature may lead to cannibalism of this sort in some cases but it's very difficult to get evidence. Some invertebrates lay so many eggs and have so many young that they seem to get starting life for the young eating each other, this is rather like having an extra supply of yolk, something at that sort. And of course, you've got the case of the spiders and the mantis that are so well known where the female eats the male but they only eats them after she's fertilized when he's no use anymore anyway. And then, there are of course the cases of animals that fight among each other over a female and in some cases, this may lead to death. But I think it's extremely rare. All of these, it is in other words, very difficult to find analogies or precursors to this habit of man. It's war like. This is sometimes compared with predation. But I think there's no comparison here at all because predation is one species living on another species, a lion eating gazelle or, what have you, is not, the members of one specie killing the members of the same specie. In fact, the only biological analogy I can find at all is something that the ecologist call territory. And territory isn't very interesting and very widespread sort of a thing. It's--The bird that you hear singing in the spring isn't just sort of exuding joy according to contemporary theory. He is proclaiming his ownership of a territory which is take out and when he gets his mate, the pair of them then are established in this area and any other bird with the same kind that tries to get in this area is chased off. And you find the same sort of behavior in many mammals, many birds, many reptiles, many fish which the ownership and the limitation of territories leads to squabbling within the species. All of the primates that have been studied in the field show this sort of territorial behavior. And I have no doubt whatever with what our pre-human ancestors were territorial in just the way that the living great apes and the various living monkeys are territorial. And you can then start to visualize how this with man, this sort of squabbling over territory, this drawing out of the intruder or the tribe wolves or various monkeys, things of that sort defends the territory court of tribe and not simply for the individual might lead to actual combat and with man becoming ever clever in using tools through death. Konrad Lorenz has suggested that in biological evolution in general, with the evolution of arm ones, of claws, of teeth, of anything that might enable one member of species to kill another, a member of the same species that is along with the evolution of the armed ones has evolved a behavioral evolution lead to inhibition which prevent the youth of this armed one for the purpose of killing a member of the same specie. And if this logic is correct, then we can explain this peculiar human habit by when cultural evolution took over. The cultural evolution of the armaments in this case would be spears, bows and arrows, rifles, canon, and what have you, not being accompanied by corresponding development of cultural inhibition. I get a certain amount of [inaudible] looking at it this way because cultural evolution has the characteristic sometime of being able to take place quite rapidly. And if then, this is, I think, is a predominantly cultural phenomenon in man, the probability of cultural evolution taking over and of our actuate finding solutions to the problems of developing inhibition becomes vastly more likely than if the behavior represented from a busy biological trait. If we try to look at the meaning of this widespread territoriality in nature, we come across some rather interesting relationships. It seems to serve, in general, among the species showing territoriality as a mechanism of spacing the population. The territory of your family of song birds or your pack of wolves is in general somewhat larger than the actual need of that pair or pack would be. There are insects in excessive of birds needs in the birds territory and the birds then by guarding this and thus spacing the population serve as a sort of a method of insuring that Malthus's preposition are not true and that this species does not live up to the limit of its food supply. I think that if we go back to the Malthusian propositions that probably there are many mechanisms that are either close between the populations and its food supply and that this territoriality is simply one of the examples to this with mechanism. I can't go into the whole matter here predominantly because I don't understand it. But it's obviously a fascinating and interesting subject for further study. In the case of [inaudible] and birds, the individuals who failed to establish territories are then apparently the ones that are most apt to be the victims of predation, the ones most apt to be picked up by a passing car or a passing [inaudible] something at this sort. Because the fellows who have territory, who are well established know their hiding places are well adjusted and they're able to fit in to their environment. So that even though the territorial squabbling does not lead directly to death, it leads indirectly to the operation of this predation mechanism to the control of the population. And this connection has long bothered me in places like Kruger Park or in Olive, Africa before people were running around the black woods so much, what keeps the lion populations under control. It's perfectly obvious that the lions aren't living up to the limit of the food supply. Otherwise, the last gazelle would've long since disappeared down some lion gullet. But every time I encounter a mammalogist, I put this question to him, "What is the limit on population of lions?" And I haven't found one giving the answer yet. But it seems to me, it would be an extremely interesting problem to study. But now with Stone Age man, with this territorial mechanism developing there, we can imagine how different group conflict would develop, how with the development of ever more efficient tools it would become--people could readily get into the habit of conking the intruder, that damn foreigner on the head and possibly, apparently, since he--being a foreigner [inaudible] a man after all because it didn't belong to your tribe. He was just something outside. If you kill him, you might as well eat him. That's interesting that there's considerable evidence of cannibalism goes way back of the Peking man, all of the long bones were split open apparently to get at the marrow, only man that would do this so that murder is obviously an ancient human past time of murder, your cannibal [inaudible]. I worried for a while of letting this prevalence of people about the whole problem of nomenclature, or this curious thing. Suicide, homicide, these sorts of words don't work very well because they've already got definite meaning yet we all have special words essentially for this business of man killing himself. I asked a Greek friend about it, wondering what would happen if we transferred from the Latin root to the Greek root. He said that he thought a very good word would be [inaudible] when he asked about the man from a kill. And it was a sufficiently horrible sounding word so that I rather liked it from the dark of it and I'm trying to promote it. Now, it doesn't bother me particularly, ecology, meaning this is an ecological word. Ecology as a science is very notable for its jargon. Any ecologist can take a quite simple idea and express it in big words and they can think completely unintelligible, so that I have no problems whatsoever about adding to the jargon. My favorite definition of ecology, I should've viewed this perhaps when trying to explain what the subject was at the beginning, is the ecology is that science in which a spade is called a [inaudible]. And actually, a case has been found in the literature of a [inaudible] being used of being up for some. Now, if you look at anthropotomy, you find it takes endlessly diverse forms. People killing each other for private reasons, for public reasons with the same killing society without it, even killing himself because they find life intolerable. And all of these forms take--present problems in relation to the ecology of health, even though they are trivial when compared with this great health problem of modern war. There's a theory that modern war is a consequence of the so called population problem. Of course, I'm worried enough about the population, about the growth of people and I'm also worried about the threat of war, but I don't see any relation between the two. If you go back to the primitive people, the effect of this constant attritional war is easy to see that it might lead to a control of the population. Particularly, the sort of case where the young man has to go out and get the head of an enemy before he could settle down with wife and raise a family, the relationship with this to population check is fairly obvious. But when we move over to modern war, we find that the most rapid growth of human populations occurred during a period of many enlarged wars. And that their--if they are a check on population growth, they certainly are not a very practical one. And I failed to see any connection between density of population and war likeness from the most peaceful people or among the most densely crowded people. And you have the case of Hitler, this Lebensraum, shouting for the need for space and at the same time, urging these German people on into ever more reckless reproduction. So that relationship is one that I do not see. Even though I regard war and the population [inaudible] to come and consider war, probably the most--be the most urgent of our health problems, population is certainly also something that should be talked about. All through nature, there's a rather close relationship between reproduction rate and hazards of existence. So, that the birthrate of elephants is in accord to be hazards elephants, the birth rate of oysters with the hazards of oysters. And, in human existence, as cultural factors have taken over, and as it would develop like medicine, public health, technology and so forth, is sometimes seen as all the reproduction rate of man. It got out of accord with the hazards of human existence. So, the hazards had been reduced when the reproduction rate haven't. Actually in western civilization, the birthrate has gone down as the death rate has gone down all over the considerable length. The--So that here perhaps cultural evolution can be regarded as taking over and to actually come out with a balance picture. The problem I think is most urgent when we look at the ways in which we now can introduce swiftly changes of mortally pattern into non western peoples. And here where the population is already dense when it comes across the question, can these countries afford to make the swift change in mortality without being equally conscious of the problems of reproduction. I think it's the problem certainly that once are being talked about. Now, in regard to this population problem as a whole, technologies seem very confident that the world can easily support a very much larger number of humans that are presently living on it and I believe them. Apparently, we can use nuclear energy, we can learn to live in Algo suite and we can breathe up to the point of where there's standing room only. The problem that worries me here is not so much of the--that of the resources as that of the organization involved in this rapidly multiplying population. With the tight organization, with the totalitarian organization, the resources of the world can be manipulated, population control, people crowded together again indefinitely as long as they are well pleased. We approach again this ideal of having the whole population in jail of Huxley's "Brave New World". But now here is where I think we come across the great dilemma because health is concerned not only with the welfare of man's body but also with the welfare of his mind and soul. And even if we can provide for his body under these conditions, can we provide with man--mind and his soul. There are signs already, I think, that we are failing here. No one will dispute our progress in controlling the ills of the body and promoting physical health. We're far from many ideal for the dead weight of pain, illness and physical misery is demonstrably less in year to year. It's difficult to say as much from mind--man's minds and soul. Of course, hard as it is to set a goal for man's physical health, it is far harder to define a goal for mental health. We're faced again with the problem of defining the optimum and the optimum will vary in terms of the values [inaudible]. Surely hard but there's a relation between physical health and mental health. And in reducing the sheer volume of physical misery, we have to reduce the mental misery. I doubt under the universal agreement, I think some would maintain that we have become sicker in mind as we have become healthy in body. And a case certainly can be made out with statistics on increasing psychosis and crime and delinquency and various sorts of social ill. I suppose, when over all appraisal, we'd have to decide somehow whether the deviant cases, the victims of our progress outweighed the mass would gain in security and enjoyed later in health and happiness. I think we've gained rather than loss. But statistics don't happen as they're hard to combine. I do think however, that the danger here is very real. Man's destiny, again, I want to repeat is not to repeat again the social experiment of the enemies. It's not built that way. But a respectable portion of the world's population seems already committed to an ant-like integration of the individual into society and this maybe necessary with increasing numbers. Just to be sure, it's supposed to be a temporary phase with government presently withering away to leave men free. I'm no expert in the national history of government, but it hardly seems to me like that that any government will ever wither away without someone first having taken an [inaudible]. In fact, the growing populations of the world and this ever increasing complexity of tech nation, technology, seems to require for the support of the population that we have ever more complex organization, ever stronger and more central government. The population and resource situation of the world today makes competing nationalism to mechanistic and makes the need for continuing the development forms of world organization [inaudible] and this appears to be a consequence with the course of cultural evolution inevitable whether we like it or not unless of course we stop cultural evolution by blowing ourselves up. I think, even here, I have not strayed from my topic of the ecology of health. Rather in dealing with these things, I've stopped to look at some of the great issues of health, those that concern the welfare of mankind as a whole. But what out of all of this happens to individual? How in the phase of the growing complexity of the human situation can we maintain or increase his individuality, his freedom, his integrity? I firmly believe that the greatness of man depends on the events, that our destiny lies in hoping but this obviously is not easy. The needs of a man--The needs of mankind, then the needs of state often seemed to transcend the needs of the individual. Fundamentally, the health of mankind and the health of the state depend on the health of the individual, their health in mind, in soul, as well as in body. But this fundamental union is overlaid by up tales of diversity and by and apparent conflict of interest. I think then, in the long run that the great problem with the ecology of health is defined with unity to explain them and somehow to implement so that we can keep this precious heritage of our individuality and yet live together peaceably in communities of nation and in a community of the world of mankind as a whole. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you Dr. Bates. The meeting is now open for questions. Dr. Bates will answer them I'm sure. And all the questions which have been written out on the slips you have are being collected. We can have a few questions from the floor. All right. Here's one. Come on here and click on the edge of this or something.

[ Inaudible Remark ]

[ Pause ]

Here's the question. Will medical science in the foreseeable future eradicate such diseases, venereal, malaria, and that produced by the toxic fly in Africa? That's the first part of question. Second part is, will the white man ever be able concur the tropics, might as live there in great numbers?

>> For the first question, I think it would be clearly presumptuous for me in front of the distinguished congregation of positions to make any of medical prediction. Can I--

>> Can I pass the book on a strictly medical question?

>> You pass the book I think probably--

>> You, you know, this--You should answer this Mr. Chairman.

>> No, no. If you go on with the questions now which if you want--

>> As for the tropics, of course, and I'll be glad to amplify that, it's--of course, and I think that the tropic could be ideal place for man, white man or any other colored man to live without all these nonsense with living in places like New York or something we could get away from, but the--no, seriously, the great problem in the health in the tropics has been the contagious diseases of course. And that these, as we are now, this has been what is held up progress of the tropics I think. Just as before the industrial revolution progress in the north, it was held up by the lack of anyway of combating the climate, you had to invent the par and have ways of heating and have windows and so forth before you could live. And in the land of Queen of England, I think our ancestors were running around the blue paint for so long. And not because they were unintelligent or--but because you just couldn't, until you have proper invention, live in a possible climate like in the North. And then confidently, that now what the great has in the tropics has been the disease situation and that then in, being able deal with it, we are removing an environmental hazard in the same sense with heating. We're like removing environmental hazard in the north.

>> There's another question. Don't you think that cultures started with man's continuous efforts to overcome his environmental resistance?

[ Inaudible Remark ]

>> Probably good way so it's not--it sounds nice. Other new relationships, I suppose, is important.

>> Here's another question. Please discuss the statement of death being the absence of health.

>> Well, it makes health of course a little bit synonymous I suppose with--in one sense, with life, doesn't it? Look, there is a--oh, sorry. They--I like the idea. It was that one that hadn't occurred to me. Well, I started reading, preparing this paper but I found it very attractive that it gave you a positive value then. Even the job, as long as the heart was bleating at all, there was some help there that these gave you basement and absolute zero and then you could build up into a very--ever larger degrees. I don't know but I've said everything I can think of about it already though. I don't know how I could--Department of Fuller Explanation would take a little bit more thinking about.

>> I think you asked for this next one, Dr. Bates. What about the natural history of your so intelligent terms?

>> Well that's jargon. Oh, it's because I'm using jargon tonight? I guess I was. Of course, it's a habit for me. Also, when you talk in an academy of medicine, you're supposed to use big words [inaudible].

[ Laughter ]

>> Quite a group of questions here more or less of the same nature. It's the development of the power of reason [inaudible] if so destroy fear, the basis of self preservation, could general health be improved?

>> That's really a psychological psychiatric side of the questions, isn't it?. I would think that certainly anything that can remove fear or diminish fear has a positive value in health would [inaudible] thing to say.

[ Pause ]

>> I'm having a little difficulty with some of the--provided in here.

>> Just like my undergraduates.

[ Laughter ]

>> A number of illness, as we see it in our culture, the understood as a biological disturbance or genetic effect or is it a function of our particular cultural organization.

>> Dr. Galdston. How--you know, I always think because somebody knows about it than I do. They--Well, of course this--all of these--the mental I want to say in good way, one's mental illness is cultural, extension cultural conflicts I think were almost all of it. But then again, it obviously has a biological base. It's a--again, we can't split there. These things are unit, the interrelatedness of things. So that it--I don't know. I mean it say that it is and it has insofar just biologically. It, certainly, has some genetic basis in some cases but it, certainly, also in other cases doesn't [inaudible] through all of these things. This logic--I feel you ought to be answering these questions not me. Yeah, I said I definitely don't--

>> I think that's probably harder to involve. They are also is the extent to which mental illness is another expression of organism environment relation.

>> Yeah. And the--Another problem here I think [inaudible] philosophically likely, I suppose, there's any difference between the organism and the environment. That is, in one sense, we tend to separate. Here we are here, [inaudible] you and all individuals in an environment. But yet, I've been greatly impressed by the modern psychologist in their studies of perception to show how much the environment is the function on the way we perceive them and on the way it affects this other, even this apparently cleared distinction between the individual and the environment that's getting blur and when you think about it enough. And everything becomes a time, every time we're--if you're left with a unit, so you're left with the problem dealing with it, you got to hack it up into pieces again somehow. So you go back and have an environment and a culture and there's biology and a man, all of those.

>> If it is a valid question in the orbit of ecology, when and under what circumstances or surroundings a catastrophe such as an ice age did man begin to think?

[ Laughter ]

>> I have a favorite theory about that that I got from Sherry Wiseman [assumed spelling] that thinking or symbolic thought or that--on the development of man's brain as a whole is a consequence of culture. That when we first started pre-human, [inaudible] like things started using tool, the highly selective value that put upon the ability to use the tool. So that instead of the more usual way of thinking is it with the development of cerebrum or the brain system that man then was able to use tools. This is just turning it upside down and saying when he started to use tool, this led to the development of this great over elaboration mental processes that we are afflicted with after.

>> Well here are two questions that I'd like to read together and they call it some what well, it's the development of the power of reason could still destroy fear, the basis of self preservation, could general health be improved? And that is being listening to patiently, sympathetically and understandingly conducive to the alleviation of certain level ill and [inaudible] able to deal with the interrelationship of people?

>> Sure it always helped. I mean, it always help to have somebody listen patiently--what's the word?

>> Patiently sympathetically--

>> Sympathetically and so forth understanding--

>> Come and alleviates almost anything. That's what wives are for isn't it?

[ Laughter ]

>> What was the other one?

[ Inaudible Remark ]

>> Yes.

>> Are there any questions? I think we've covered all the questions here. Don't mix up a little if I missed any but the fact that we haven't answered that much I think is its just part of the fact that this is a reflection. Since I didn't know what I was talking about anyway, I don't see why I should be able to answer your questions about that. We got--oh, my good ness. Here are some more. Here is this question. What do you mean by a current change in the natural selection in humans?

>> Well, this whole business with natural selection would be that the--these ordinary thoughts of the unfit are being eliminated. That when it has a genetic basis as for instances in--or classical case would be diabetes which does have a certain genetic basis, when I have done this, it means that this is very bad that the--all the diabetics are being looked after from the point of view of natural selection because it means that diabetes will become more prevalent in the population. Actually, this, of course, makes it absurd. The seriousness of it is when you look at the problems which means probably most are the extreme problems of mental illness where there apparent is a hereditary component. Basically, you're [inaudible] eugenics for this business. But the argument is often made that medicine is giving [inaudible]. And this is all very well but that the question we got to keep on making more and more crutch to keep up with the increasing spread then of these things that would have been eliminated by natural selection. And this I think is a fallacy and that were not biological because we don't have to follow biological law. We're following cultural law. It certainly involved the value of medicine. I would suspect that Dr. Bates has more to say about eugenics. He closed his last book, I believe, with a chapter in eugenics. Is that correct or--

>> Yeah, well, there was a chapter in there which I was, contrary to most biologists, feel strongly relieved. I think I can say most or great many, the need for eugenics. I don't know, but I have no strong opinion but it seems to me there's so many other problems like war is what worries me the most, things like, you know, you're sitting around worrying about eugenics. We got more serious one to concentrate on. More urgent ones.

>> Yeah, just a few minutes more. What part does good nutrition play in health?

>> Well, you got to eat and--

[ Laughter ]

Obviously, very basic.

>> Isn't cooperation just as prevalent among animals as conflict?

>> Well, this is matter of level. I mean after all, the fox is cooperating with the rabbit and eating. I mean because rabbit populations are adjusted. You see, they have an excess of rabbits and something has to happen to the rabbit so that you can look at the fox-rabbit relation not as a competitive one but as a cooperative one. You can, and I think, it's just as valid that you can see--actually look through, you can think about your body as tissues trying to get at war with one another or something like that but yet we know the thing is obviously a working cooperating system. And I think the biotic community similarly is, when not messed up too much, a working integrated system much more roughly integrated not as precisely as the organ on the body but at least just the same, probably, analogy there.

>> Is it possible, genes change gradually through culture?

>> No, not as far as we know and so--

>> Well, the smaller change and the fifth generation is hardly discernible when compared as a ratio to the total number of generation.

>> This is the--oh, remember there's no answer. I mean if the thing takes 100,000 years to observe, obviously we can't observe it. So that--I mean but insofar as the evidence is, there's nothing that would indicate that culture could affect in a Lamarckian, in a direct sort of a way. Genes, it can affect them by favoring certain ones, again, by the selecting process. For instance--So I think natural selection is still going on reading these automobiles statistically, publishing much later with 35,000 years killed in automobile accidents. Well, if there's some selection there, say, toward killing more alcoholics or and the bad thing of course, or maybe the brainier your people are surviving, we would still have selection going on there.

>> We have time for another question.

>> Chairman says we have time for one more question. Like a long one. If North America should adopt your book solution of going back to the small farm, don't you take into consideration the fact that our total population, will accordingly have to be reduced creating 1850 level? We can't go back. We have to learn to live with our technological engineer with nature instead of against it, against her. I don't think I ever really suggested [inaudible]. I can't [inaudible]. But the--what was this? It sounded nice and loaded down here somewhere.

[ Laughter ]

Its [inaudible] but we can't go back with--Well, we've, you know, we've got to learn to live with ourselves what we've got, yes. But the--it still seems to me really and these are very serious problem with our growing and then with even us, here in the United States. It is how we can continue to value with the individual, how we can continue to maintain and not all become more and more subordinate in this endlessly developing cars and machinery that we have to have. We've got to have them obviously but that--and somehow to keep this goals in month and then to somehow not get into this ant-like subordination. It just--I don't mind. It's a cliche and people always talked about individualism for finding things and so forth but I believe it and I think it's important to preserve it.

>> Thank you Dr. Bates.

[ Applause ]

I'm now turning the meeting back to Dr. Keyes.

>> Ladies and gentlemen, you'll notice that on January 4th, Dr. Northrop, Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law at Yale University will discuss the topic cultural mentalities and medical science. We'd be happy to see you all here. Thank you all.

[ Applause ]