Biological control: the principles of biological control

Abstract

Probably ninety-nine out of every hundred people, when they think of the contributions of science to human welfare, recall the physical, chemical and mechanical inventions which produced the industrial revolution and are now engaged in the mechanisation of the world, and in the evolution of its new master, the centaur of the new civilisation—that half-man, half-automobile, envisaged by that brilliant recent writer, Woodruff, in Plato’s American Republic. We are not accustomed to think of biological inventions; by which we mean, with Haldane, “the establishment of a new relationship between man and other animals or plants, or between different human beings, provided that such relationship is one which comes primarily under the domain of biology, rather than physics, psychology, or ethics.” The application of biology to the solution of human problems has as yet hardly begun. Haldane has shown that the number of great biological inventions can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and most of these were made before the dawn of history.