Evolution Restated
708 THE COMMONWEAL May 5, 1926 EVOLUTION RESTATED E have long since grown accustomed to reading, especially in popular statements and small manuals, that the descent of man from an animal...
...That again is a statement that may be accepted in a broad sense...
...Of course that was one of Darwin's great arguments...
...Prehistoric archaeology has shown that in the course of the ages, man has undergone great changes in physical type, and that ancient man differed from modern races—the more so, the more ancient the races...
...Attention is then called to the fact, which needs no labored proof, that man can and has changed the forms of domestic animals and of plants in a marked manner...
...Moreover, as his interments amply demonstrate, this man had a firm belief in an after life...
...But it should be borne in mind that there are exceptions...
...From this point the question of man is taken up, and the statement proceeds: "Man is part of the animal world...
...In all respects his anatomical structure conforms to that of the rest of the animal world...
...The Neanderthal race which recent discoveries have shown to have been much more widely distributed than was once imagined, whether it became extinguished by other races or otherwise, was not only physically man and nothing else, but had the hands of a skilful craftsman...
...From this it is argued that in the course of long ages nature will "produce more fundamental changes...
...Hence the emphasis on the changes in man's form is perhaps a little stressed...
...Further, it should be added that with the exception of some much debated fragments of which we cannot speak here, man has always, from the earliest days of which we know anything, been man, and clearly recognizable as such...
...It is issued "in view of the dogmatic objections raised against the theory of evolution," and commences with the statement that geology shows that plants and animals known in early ages by their fossil remains prove that the forms uhave not remained the same for any length of time...
...The statement sums up the matter: "Local types of man have developed on every continent, and their existence proves that changes in the heritable characteristics of racial groups are effected in the course of time...
...First, alterations in domestic fauna and flora are created by the mind of man, in accordance with a will which desires them...
...We must conclude that the bodily form of man as well as that of animals and plants has changed, and is still changing...
...The same influences that control their development after birth, control him, and he responds in a like manner to the environment in which he is placed...
...not in the course of centuries, but in long periods...
...The brachiopods or lamp shells—creatures with bivalve shells, such as clams, which are not, however, brachiopods, possess—have been known from very early times, and of these several have come down to us unchanged from the era of the Cambrian Sea—a remote epoch in geological time...
...The Ordovician period is not much nearer to us, and yet, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us, most of the invertebrate classes were represented at that early epoch by "forms which do not differ from their existing representatives in any important respect...
...When we get beyond the first race we come to skeletal remains, so little differing from those of the man of today as to lead us to suppose that if he were to reappear dressed as we are, his appearance would not cause any great surprise...
...That is, at least, our surmise/ From whatever material, man has succeeded in producing forms so far unlike as the Pekinese and the St...
...The only criticism to be made is that man, "nature's insurgent child," as he has been called, is constantly interfering with what we imagine to be the processes of nature, and more especially with "natural selection," so far as that may be taken as a process of nature...
...There are today, living in the Dordogne in France, men whose crania so closely resemble those of the inhabitants of the prehistoric burial places in that same spot, as to lead to the suggestion that they are their lineal descendants...
...708 THE COMMONWEAL May 5, 1926 EVOLUTION RESTATED E have long since grown accustomed to reading, especially in popular statements and small manuals, that the descent of man from an animal ancestry is one of those things about which no manner of doubt can be entertained...
...It is a pleasure, therefore, to read so temperate a statement of the real position of scientific opinion as that recently issued by the council of the American Anthropological Association and published in the columns of our contemporary, Science...
...If design is obvious in the case of humanly ordered changes, the action of nature is inexplicable without the hypothesis of some kind of design...
...and in connection with it there are two important points which are often left out of consideration...
...Still, as a general statement the first part of the memorandum may be accepted with reasonable assurance...
...As a general theory that change is the rule, this may at once be accepted...
...Bernard, yet all are dogs and all are of the species known as canis domesticus...
...His prenatal life closely parallels that of the higher mammals...
...Then, in the second place, there is the further fact that these man-caused changes are only stable so long as man keeps his hand upon them...
...The domestic dog, for example, seems to have been derived on the one hand from the wolf, and on the other, from the jackal...
...That introduces into the question the important principle of design...
...But these varieties are only preserved as such by careful segregation/for if care is not taken the breed at once degenerates, and mongrels are the result...
...Where that agency would say to the feeble and unfit, "you must die," man, under the influence of Christianity at any rate, retorts, "you shall live," and uses every fragment of medical science to carry out his purpose...
...The rapid-fire authors are content to leave us without the slightest suggestion that the proof for their assertions is still very fragmentary...
Vol. 3 • May 1926 • No. 26
