Abstract
DR. WADDINGTON, as I understand him, has merely defined the good as that which tends to promote the ultimate course of evolution1. On what other basis can a man of science, or any adult for that matter, state that “the direction of evolution is good simply because it is good” ? (The Dean of St. Paul's, in the same issue of NATURE, put his finger on this; what is defined cannot thereafter be deduced.) Dr. Waddington admits as much by his diffident, and somewhat belated, statement that his meaning of good is “not unrelated to the conventional meaning”2. One may well ask what all the fuss is about; a definition is beyond argument. Dr. Waddington is fully entitled to take a word in common use and define it, for his own purpose, as he pleases. Most sciences contain examples of such licence, and it can usually, although not always, be said that the definition “is not unrelated to the conventional meaning of the word”. One only wonders, first, why Dr. Waddington required eight columns for his definition and, secondly, what it has to do with ethics.
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References
NATURE, 148, 270 (1941).
NATURE, 148, 342 (1941).
NATURE, 148, 411 (1941).
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CHILDS, E. The Relations between Science and Ethics. Nature 148, 533 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148533b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148533b0
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