Louis Pauwels - The Morning of the Magicians: Secret Societies, Conspiracies, and Vanished Civilizations

During the winter of 1956, Dr. J. Ford Thomson, a psychiatrist at the Education Office at Wolverhampton, received in his consulting room a small boy of seven who was causing great anxiety to his parents and to his teacher.

"He obviously could not have access to any specialist literature on the subject," wrote Dr. Thomson. "And even if he had, would he have been able even to read them? And yet, he knew the right answers to the most complicated problems of astronomy."

Greatly impressed by his study of this case, the doctor decided to investigate the level of intelligence among schoolchildren, and undertook to test five thousand children all over England, with the assistance of the eritish Medical Research Council, the physicists at Harwell and a number of university professors. After eighteen months work, he came to the conclusion that there had been "a sudden rise in the level of intelligence." He went on to say:

Among the last ninety children from seven to nine years of age whom we questioned, twenty-six had an IQ of 140, which is practically that of a genius. I believe that strontium 90, a radioactive substance that penetrates the body, could be responsible for this. This substance did not exist before the first atomic explosion.

Two American scientists, C. Brooke Worth and Robert K. Enders, in an important work entitled The Nature of Living Things, believe that there is proof that the gene groups have been disturbed and that, under the influence of forces that are still mysterious, a new race of men is appearing, endowed with superior intellectual powers. This is, of course, a subject to be approached with caution. The genetician Lewis Terman, however, after thirty years of study of infant prodigies, has reached the following conclusions: Most infant prodigies used in the past to lose their faculties on becoming adult. It would seem today that they tend to become a superior kind of adult, gifted with an intelligence that has nothing in common with that of ordinary human beings. They are thirty times as active as a normal man of talent. Their "success index" is multiplied by twenty-five. Their health is perfect, as well as their sentimental and sexual balance. Finally, they escape the psychosomatic diseases, notably cancer. Is this certain? One thing is certain, and that is that we are now witnessing a progressive acceleration throughout the world of the mental faculties, and this is true also of the physical. The phenomenon is so evident that another American scientist, Dr. Sydney Pressey, of the University of Ohio, has just drawn up a plan for the instruction of precocious children capable, in his opinion, of producing 300,000 superior intelligences a year.

Does this point to a mutation of the human species? Shall we see a new race of beings who resemble us outwardly, but yet are different? This is the formidable problem we must now examine. What is certain is that we are witnessing the birth of a myth: that of the Mutant. That this myth should arise in our technical and scientific civilization must have some significance and dynamic value.

Before tackling this subject, it should be noted that this access of intelligence that has been observed among children carries with it the simple, practical, and reasonable notion of a progressive improvement in the human race brought about by techniques.

Modern sporting techniques have shown that Man possesses physical resources that are far from being exhausted. The experiments now being carried out on the behavior of the human body in interplanetary rockets have proved the existence of formidable powers of resistance. The survivors from the concentration camps have learned to what extremes it is possible to go to preserve life, and have discovered sources of strength in the interaction of psychic and physical forces. Finally, as regards the intelligence, the imminent discovery of mental techniques and chemical products capable of stimulating the memory and reducing to zero the strain of memorizing, opens up some extraordinary perspectives. The principles of science are not inaccessible to a normal intelligence. If schoolchildren and students could be relieved of the enormous effort of memory they have to make, it will become quite possible to teach the structure of the nucleus and the periodical table of the elements to elementary pupils, and to explain the relativity and quantum theories to undergraduates. Moreover, when the principles of science are widely diffused in all countries and there are fifty or a hundred times as many research workers, the multiplication of new ideas, their mutual fecundation, and multiple points of contact will produce the same effect as an increase in the number of geniuses. Even greater, because genius is often unstable and antisocial. It is probable, too, that a new science, the general theory of information, will soon make it possible to express quantitatively the ideas we are now expounding qualitatively. By distributing equitably among men the knowledge mankind already possesses, and by encouraging them to exchange their knowledge so as to produce new combinations, we shall increase the intellectual potential of human society no less rapidly and surely than by multiplying the number of geniuses. This vision must be borne in mind along with the other more fantastic one of the Mutant.

Our friend Charles-Noel Martin, in a sensational communication, has revealed the accumulated effects of atomic explosions. The effects of the radiation generated in the course of the eests increase in geometrical proportion. Thus the human race is in danger of being exposed to unfavorable mutations. Moreover, for the last fifty years radium has been used all over the world without any serious precautions being taken. X-rays and certain radioactive chemical products are exploited in a great many industries. How, and to what extent does this radiation affect modern man? We know nothing about the system of mutations. Could there not also be favorable mutations? Speaking at an atomic conference at Geneva, Sir Ernest Rock Carling, a Home Office pathologist, declared: "It is also to be hoped that, in a limited proportion of cases, these mutations will have a favorable effect and produce a child of genius. At the risk of shocking this distinguished company, I affirm that the mutation that will give us an Aristotle, a Leonardo da Vinci, a Newton, a Pasteur, or an Einstein will largely compensate for the ninety-nine others, which will have much less fortunate effects."

First, a word as to the theory of mutations.

At the end of the last century, A. Weisman and Hugo de Vries instilled new life into the old ideas about evolution. The atom was then fashionable, and its effects were beginning to make themselves felt in physics. They discovered the "atom of heredity," and localized it in the chromosomes. The new science of genetics thus created brought to light again the work done in the second half of the nineteenth century by the Czech monk, Gregor Mendel.

Today it appears to be an established fact that heredity is transformed by the genes. These are strongly protected against their outside environment. It seems, however, that atomic radiations, cosmic rays, and certain violent poisons such as colchicine are able to attack them or cause the number of chromosomes to be doubled. It has been observed that the frequency of the mutations is proportional to the intensity of the radioactivity.

Now, today, the radioactivity in the world is thirty-five times higher than it was at the beginning of the century. Exact examples of selection in bacteria operating through genetic mutation under the action of antibiotics have been furnished in 1943 by Luria and Debruck, and in 1945 by Demerec. These studies show that mutation selection is operating just as Darwin had imagined. The adversaries of the Lamarck-Mitchurine-Lyssenko theory as to the inheritance of acquired characteristics would therefore seem to be right. But can one generalize from bacteria to plants, animals or man? This is no longer doubted.