B. THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF A PRIORI
ANSWERS

(I) THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF STATISTICS

WHAT were the Western Civilization's expectations of life in
A.D. 1950 or 1952? On first thoughts a student of History, taking
an observation in either of those years, might be inclined to rate the
West's current expectations low, considering the well-known prodigality
of Nature. The Western Civilization, after all, was one out of no more
than twenty-one representatives of its species—or, at most, no more
than thirty if the number were to be assessed at the highest possible
figure by including four arrested civilizations and five abortive civiliza-
tions in the count. Was it rational to expect to see the twenty-first, or
even the thirtieth, civilization on trial succeed in avoiding the failure
that had been the history of all other civilizations up to date ? Success
would mean either finding some hitherto untravelled way for a civiliza-
tion to go on living and growing in saecula saecufarum, or else creating a
mutation that would generate a new species of society. Considering the
number of failures that had been the price of each dearly bought success
in the past history of the evolution of Life on Earth, it might appear
improbable that, in the history of a species still so young as the civiliza-
tions were, any representative of the third generation would have been
cast for the part of Fortunatus. Yet, if a twentieth-century inquirer's
first thoughts did incline towards this pessimistic conclusion, his second
thoughts were likely to enter the caveat that so momentous a question
could not be disposed of so easily.

The thesis that, m the evolution of Life, it required many more than
twenty or twenty-nine failures to pay for one success was, after all, an
inference from empirical evidence; and the particular evidence from
which this particular inference was drawn was the experience of Life,
not at the human, but at a pre-human, level. The dicta that thirty issues
of a species was a very small number, and that a species that could not
yet muster more than thirty representatives was a very young species,
might be justifiable in the mouths of naturalists studying spiders or
beetles or perhaps some far more primitive manifestation of Life than
these. It might be true that, when Nature had been engaged on the evolu-
tion of rudimentary organisms, she had been apt to coin hundreds and
thousands and millions of specimens of a type in order to give herself
the off-chance of making, at the millionth or the million-millionth strike
of the die, a lucky hit that would produce either an execution of her
design that was a close enough approximation to it to be worthy of being
perpetuated or alternatively an adumbration of some novel and superior
design which would render the type now on trial obsolete and therefore
superfluous. At this relatively low level of Nature's creative activity, ex-
perience might indeed suggest that the twentieth or thirtieth representa-
tive of a type would have little chance of turning out to be the successful