Science Quote by Arthur Keith

A scientist calling civilization "anti evolutionary" is a deliberate provocation: it flips the usual Victorian brag that modern life is nature perfected. Arthur Keith is writing from a moment when Darwin had become cultural common sense and "evolution" was being drafted as a moral permission slip for hierarchy, empire, and eugenics. His move is to warn that the story people tell themselves about progress may be biologically backward.

The mechanics of the sentence matter. He doesn’t just indict "civilization"; he brackets it with "Universalism and Christianity", treating moral systems as technologies that rewire selection. The subtext is that compassion, egalitarian ideals, and care for the weak aren’t neutral values; they function like a brake on the harsh sorting processes imagined to have shaped "earlier stages of man's ascent". That phrase, "ascent", gives away the era’s ladder-thinking: evolution as a climb, with winners on top. Once you accept that metaphor, anything that interferes with competition can be cast as sabotage.

Keith’s intent isn’t merely descriptive; it’s argumentative. He’s staking a claim in early 20th-century debates over degeneration, social welfare, and national efficiency: if modern societies protect people who would otherwise die or fail to reproduce, then civilization becomes a kind of counter-nature. The rhetorical trick is to smuggle a political anxiety (about declining fitness, changing demographics, moral "softness") into a seemingly objective statement about "laws and conditions". It’s science-flavored fatalism: if ethics resist selection, then ethics are suspect.