Natural selection is a process in the course of which many compete and
contend while only a few survive and mature.
Social selection is a similar knock-down and drag-out struggle in which
peoples, nations, empires and civilizations take part. Many enter the
contest but only a few live to write their story in the long and complex
history of civilizations.
At the outset of such a contest, the European-Asian-African cradle of
the coming western culture contained numerous political
fragments--kingdoms, principalities, cities, city states, inert peasant
masses, migrating tribes--struggling locally and regionally for a place
in the sun, or for additional territory and extended authority. These
struggles reached the military level in local wars, regional wars,
general wars. In the course of this survival struggle, the weakest and
least effective contestants were defeated, dismembered and gobbled up by
their stronger and more efficient opponents.
Local struggles--in the Near and Middle East, in North Africa, in
eastern, central and western Europe--were trial heats in the course of
which many contestants were eliminated, while the survivors continued
the process of city, nation and empire building at higher and broader
levels. It was only after five hundred years of such conflicts that the
outlines of western civilization took definite political form:--a group
of battle-hardened contestants, centered in Europe, heavily armed and
equipped, intent on protecting and enlarging their home territory and
extending their authority over dependencies and colonies in various
parts of the planet.
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