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Religion, Practice and Science of Non-Violence
to disuse they have become too weak in his case. Instead of having physical combat wherein all the above mechanisms come into working condition, man developed weapons which he could throw on his enemy from greater and greater distancessling-shots, spears, arrows, bullets, bombs from aeroplanes and guided missiles etc. The result of this has been disastrous. While few people would be willing to strangle, stab or burn children or, for that matter, adults, with their own hands, the same people as air-crews are prepared to drop bombs. Appeasement signals being out of the picture, the outcome is that the rivals instead of being defeated, are indiscriminately destroyed. The proper business of intra-species aggression at a biological level of subduing and not killing the enemy has thus been ruptured.
And yet, in spite of the above disadvantages, man has survived and may still survive. We know that the physical make up of man is inferior to that of most other animals: his body is not particularly well adapted for escape, self-defence, or hunting; he is not, for example, exceptionally fleet on foot, and would be left behind in a race with a hare; he has no protective body armour like the tortoise; he has no wings to give him an advantage in spying out and pouncing upon his prey; his muscular strength, teeth and nails are incomparably inferior to those of carnivores. But in spite of these disadvantages, man has not only survived but also subdued all other animals and enormously increased in number as well.
We shall see how this could happen.
About half a mlllion years ago, Asia and Europe were visited by periods of intense cold--the Ice Ages-that lasted for thousands of years. By that time there were in existence several species of elephants ancestral to modern Indian and African elephants. To meet the rigours of the Ice Age, some elephants now termed mammoth developed a shaggy coat of hair. During these Ice Ages, there were already several species of man, contemporary with the mammoth. But they did not inherit shaggy coats and did not develop such to meet the crisis. Instead of undergoing the slow physical changes which eventually enabled the mammoths to endure the cold, they found out how to control fire and to make coats out of skins. And so they were able to face the cold as successfully as the mammoths. When the last Ice Age passed, the mammoth became extinct because it could not endure the
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