ABSTRACT
Our aim has been to put a lot of well-known facts into a new focus, or a not-so-new focus if our claim to be in the Darwinian tradition is correct. Social science heretofore has tended to be obsessed with dialect differences, and has even denied that the dialects are linked into one language. For humans alone among all the species on earth are able to organize themselves consciously against their own extinction. We are our own conservationists as well as our own veterinarians. Humans can be made to live in battery-farm conditions, and to observers either prison life or city life or Hong Kong life or the rat race or what have you are merely disguised versions of the miserable chickens' circumstance. The Renaissance was a time of splendid and delicate contortion that we now admire and praise as the beginning of personality, of perspective, of a devotion to the protection an individual must have from the maelstrom of community.
