sts who accept materialism as the basis for their philosophy of nature could not logically be concerned with such things as obligations, morality, and free will.
But some scientists of this persuasion have overstepped the logic of their position. Certain issues which started out to be merely simple physical accounts of purely biological phenomena, have been extended to cover social and political situations to which they were never intended to apply. One such example is the concept of population theory as it applies to living organisms, including man.
This theory boldly assumes that organisms live in groups, they do not live alone. Plants and animals live together in colonies, flocks, and herds, all of which are mutually dependent upon each other and their environment, in such a way as to ultimately produce a relatively stable "ecosystem." Man, of course, is one of these animals, even though he might be, as G. G. Simpson concedes, "among the higher animals."
Now, if we consider man as a biological organism, and only that, it seems obvious that he does, for the most part, live with other people. But this biological concept of population, as applied to humans, is notoriously vague and unscientific in that it fails to answer the questions of how many other people a person has to live with before he will not be living alone, and how much of the time this has to take place?
This group theory concept is one of the basic assumptions of that point of view known as "life adjustment" education. Under magic clichés uttered by the progressive-minded teacher, the students are well indoctrinated with the slogans of "team efforts," "group projects," or "togetherness." Indeed, this may very well be the starting point for collectivist economic and political theory. In any case, the analysis shows the ambiguity in the position of those scientists who regard themselves as "tough-minded" materialists. Traditional values are ostentatiously booted out the front door while the current shibboleths are illicitly imported through a rear window.
The Inadequacy of Materialism
This leads to a brief consideration of the second horn of our dilemma. The concern is now for those young scientists who have arrived at the conclusion that materialism is inadequate to fully explain nature. And it would not be hard to identify these people. With specific reference to the example above, these would be the John Does who unconsciously feel, or even truly understand, that the concept of "living in a group," when taken in a strictly biological sense, is contradictory to the concept of the distinctiveness of the individual, his independence, his individual initiative, his moral self. For John Doe may recognize this contradiction to be directly tied up with the freedom of any individual to choose one goal rather than another.
Now this ability to make a choice between two distinct alternatives is generally spoken of as "free will." Free will is identified as that which provides man with a feeling of freedom, of giving him a sense of authorship and responsibility, a sense of guilt and ethics, and a sense of knowing that there are norms and standards to be maintained in every human endeavor. This means that the notion of "free will" is opposed to the concept of people existing only as a part of some group. In the collective, the individual no longer counts; his mind must fit in with the group mind; his every thought and action is determined for him in terms of what the group thinks and does. If he deviates from this, he is made to feel ashamed, selfish, and a misfit. And, if this be the "choice" he has, it is clear that, in practice, it amounts to having no choice at all.
A purely materialistic philosophy is, by its very nature, metaphysically contradictory to, and hence unable to cope with, questions regarding the morality of man, and therefore the obligations of scientists to their society. One implication from this fact is that man, the human being, must be considered in terms of his totality. This "totality" we shall call the whole man. The point is that man is more