Direction: Read the passage and answer the question. Everyone likes to throw the blame for sense of defeat on someone else; and for sometime scientists have been a favorite scapegoat. I want to look…

Direction: Read the passage and answer the question.

Everyone likes to throw the blame for sense of defeat on someone else; and for sometime scientists have been a favorite scapegoat. I want to look at their responsibility, and for that matter at everybody’s rather more closely. They do have a special responsibility; do not let us argue that out of existence; but it is a complicated one, and it is not the whole responsibility. For example, science obviously is not responsible for the readiness of people, who do not take their private quarrels beyond the stage of insult, to carry their public quarrels to the point of war. Many animals fight for their needs, and some for their mere greeds to the point of death. Bucks fight for females, and the birds fight for their territories. The fighting habits of man are odd because he displays them only in groups. But they were not supplied by scientists. On the contrary science has helped to end several kinds of group murder, such as witch-hunting and the taboos in the early nineteenth century against disinfecting hospitals.

For the author people’s private and public quarrels are