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Intelligence, Power and Personality

THE PROBLEM 0NE of the mysteries of the human race is the fact that civilized man is subject to certain diseases that rarely attack primitive man and never appear in wild and domestic animals. These are various nervous and mental disordecs, exophthalmic goiter, neurocirculatory asthenia Raynauds disease, diabetes, peptic ulcer, essential hypertension, and coronary disease. Each of these diseases is related to the expenditure of energy. It would appear that this fact alone offers a biological cue to the mechanism of the energy characteristics of man and animals. It is well known that only certain organs and tissues control the expenditure of energy in all animals, including man. These are the brain, the heart and the blood, the thyroid gland, the adrenal glands, the celiac ganglia, and the sympathetic system. I pos. tulated that if we were to analyze, measure, and compare the organs of this energy-controlling system in fish, reptiles, birds and mammals and then compare the influence of the heat of the tropics and the cold of the arctic upon the size of these organs-heat and cold and struggle and survival being the most potent of all environmental influences-we should be able to account for the varying intelligence, power, and personality among the different species of animals and the races of man. We should be able to find for man an energy formula distinct from that for wild and domestic animals and, further, an energy formula for civilized man. This became our quest.While Mrs. Crile and I were hunting in Africa in 1927, two phenomena well known to hunters of big game excited our attention. The first was that an antelope, a lion, or any high, powered animal, when shot through the heartin such a way that the circulation of the blood is immediately arrested, may continue to run at top speed for a distance of a hundred or more yards before he falls dead. This fact challenged credulity, for, from my observatiorls in war, I had found that death results instantly from a comparable shot through the heart in man. The second phenomenon was the explosive outburst of speed seen in the long leaps of the impala in escape and the incredibly high and long bound of the lion in attack...