Biological family

“ When individuals, belonging to the same family, but distinct enough to be recognised, or when two well-marked races, or two species, are crossed, the usual result, as stated in the previous chapter, is, that the offspring in the first generation are intermediate between their parents, or resemble one parent in one part and the other parent in another part. ”

“ When naturalists speak of Families among animals, they do not allude to the progeny of a known stock, as we designate, in common parlance, the children or the descendants of known parents by the word family; they understand by Families natural groups of different kinds of animals, having no genetic relations so far as we know, but agreeing with one another closely enough to leave the impression of a more or less remote common parentage. ”

“ The entire family—including the pair A, representing man—is descended also, in accordance with the Darwinian view, from a single family of progenitors, no outside families sharing descent, though all share blood, with that family. ”

“ Of these genera and species of families, those varieties which are found in advanced societies are the most coherent, most definite, most complex. Not to dwell on intermediate types, we see, on contrasting with the primitive kind of family group that highest kind of family group which civilized peoples present, how relatively high is its degree of evolution. ”

“ It does not follow that families should be even nearly numerically equivalent, for a family may contain a few or a multitude of genera and species, or a multitude of genera and few species, or also a multitude of species and few genera. Families comprise groups of forms to which nature delegates the execution of certain duties and offices, and whether specifically numerous or few, we may assume they are sufficient for the object intended. ”

“ They undoubtedly must cooperate in building up the new individual, and the cytoplasm of the new individual is predominantly of maternal origin. It is obvious that all of the more fundamental characters which make up an organism, such, for instance, as make it an animal of a certain order or family, as a human being or a dog or a horse, are common to both parents, and there is no way of measuring how much of this fundamental constitution comes from either parent, since only closely related forms will interbreed. ”

“ Fatherhood may pass through many stages, from a light flitting from one polyandric household to another, on to that form in which the several husbands of the female head of such households must be distinctly related to each other, but, through all the varieties of polyandry, the fixed stake of classification and localization of offspring defines the family outline. ”

“ In a passage from which I have already quoted a clause, Sir Henry Maine, using a metaphor which biology furnishes, says: "All the branches of human society may or may not have been developed from joint families which arose out of an original patriarchal cell; but, wherever the joint family is an institution of an Ayran race, we see it springing from such a cell, and, when it dissolves, we see it dissolving into a number of such cells:" thus implying that, as the cell is the proximate component of the individual organism, so the family is the proximate component of the social organism. ”

“ When we trace the pedigree of a single man or any other individual animal back to a remote pair of ancestors, we connect together in an unbroken chain the successive generations of parents and offspring. If the chain is anywhere broken, so that direct descent can not be traced throughout the series, we can not by direct evidence carry the peculiarities of family traits any further back than the ancestor or pair of ancestors with which we can find an unbroken connection of life with life. ”

“ The ovum transmits to the child by heredity the personal traits of the mother, the sperm-cell those of the father; and this hereditary transmission extends to the finest characteristics of the soul as well as of the body. The modern research as to heredity, which occupies so much space now in biological literature, but was only started by Darwin in 1859, is directed immediately to the visible material processes of impregnation. ”

“ Here let me add that as, in the higher individual organisms, the aggregated cells which form the embryo, and for some time retain their separateness, gradually give place to structures in which the cell-form is greatly masked and almost lost, so in the social organism the family groups and compound family groups, which were the original components eventually lose their distinguishableness, and there arise structures formed of mingled individuals belonging to many different stocks. ”

“ Amongst other interesting facts to which he calls attention, is the great resemblance in position and structure which the stridulating organs of genera belonging to totally distinct families may have to each other, while at the same time the position of these organs may be quite different in genera belonging to one and the same family. ”

“ Naturalists have established Families simply by bringing together a number of animals resembling each other more or less closely, and, taking usually the name of the Genus to which the best known among them belongs, they have given it a patronymic termination to designate the Family, and allowed the matter to rest there, sometimes without even attempting any description corresponding to those by which Genus and Species are commonly defined. ”

“ Let us now turn to another phase of our subject and consider the biological methods of the description and measurement of heredity, as a preliminary to our next chapter in which we shall discuss the bearings of the facts of human heredity upon the possibility of the formation of a permanently improved human breed.
The fact of heredity is one of the most familiar and patent things about organisms. "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" For we may define heredity as the fact of general resemblance between parent and offspring. ”

“ The broad fact, then, here to be noted, is that Nature's modes of treatment inside the family-group and outside the family-group are diametrically opposed to one another; and that the intrusion of either mode into the sphere of the other would be fatal to the species, either immediately or remotely.
Does any one think that the like does not hold of the human species? He can not deny that within the human family, as within any inferior family, it would be fatal to proportion benefit to merit. ”

“ In various other species of animals, and particularly in the human family, a certain nobility of race is observed; numerous qualities, in fact, both of mind and body, are derived by hereditary descent.
I have frequently wondered how it should happen that the offspring, mixed in so many particulars of its structure or constitution, with the stamp of both parents so obviously upon it, in so many parts, should still escape all mixture in the organs of generation; that it should so uniformly prove either male or female, so very rarely an hermaphrodite. ”

“ There is no really great scientist in biology at the present moment who teaches the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics. Modifications of the organism that become matter for heredity have existed for many generations and we cannot tell just how they began. There is no doubt that there is some hereditary influence, for insanity in the same family is likely to keep recurring in successive generations. More than this, affections of certain less important organs are evidently a common trait in certain family strains. ”

“ I hold that a distinct family for Man, as Huxley allows, is all that can possibly be given him zoologically. But at the same time, if my theory is true, that while the animals which surrounded him have been undergoing modification in all parts of their bodies to a generic or even family degree of difference, he has been changing almost wholly in the brain and head—then in geological antiquity the SPECIES man may be as old as many mammalian families, and the origin of the FAMILY man may date back to a period when some of the ORDERS first originated. ”

“ The beginnings of society are to be found in the family life of animals; the most primitive form of this is the temporary, voluntary association of male and female among the higher species; that is, the anthropoids and vertebrates. On this merely temporary association follows, as a higher stage, the lasting family union, which exists among comparatively few animals. ”

“ In such a case, the germ-plasm of the first generation of a species which enters upon sexual reproduction must still be entirely homogeneous; the hereditary substance must, in each individual, consist of many minute units, each of which is exactly like the other, and each of which contains within itself the tendency to transmit, under certain circumstances, the whole of the characters of the parent to a new organism—the offspring. ”

“ But is it less certain that the egg of an eagle developes into an eagle, or that the peculiarities of the father and mother are transmitted to the child, than that a stone falls to the ground when its support is taken away? Again, is it not possible to draw a perfectly distinct and certain conclusion as to the relative quantity of the material basis of heredity, present in the germ-cells of either parent, from the fact that the father and mother possess an equal or nearly equal share in heredity? ”

“ The greater dissimilarity of the successive children of the same family in comparison with twins, which often resemble each other in external appearance, mental disposition, and constitution, in so extraordinary a manner, apparently proves that the state of the parents at the exact period of conception, or the nature of the subsequent embryonic development, has a direct and powerful influence on the character of the offspring. ”

“ Again, the developing human family fulfills, in increasing degrees, those traits which we saw at the outset are traits of the successively higher forms of reproductive arrangements throughout the animal kingdom. ”

“ My present task is not to deal with the whole question of heredity, but only with the single although fundamental question—‘How is it that a single cell of the body can contain within itself all the hereditary tendencies of the whole organism?’ I am here leaving out of account the further question as to the forces and the mechanism by which these tendencies are developed in the building-up of the organism. ”

“ The Origin of the Family in the Human Species.—Two great theories of the origin of the family in the human species have in the past been more or less accepted, and these we must now examine and criticize. First, the traditional theory that the human family life was from the beginning a pure monogamy. Secondly, the so-called evolutionary theory that the human family life arose from confused if not promiscuous sex relations. ”

“ In this manner we can explain the origin of hereditary individual variability as it is known in man and the higher animals, and as it is required for the theory which explains the transformation of species by means of natural selection. ”

“ In human families, however, there are undoubted cases in which one or more characters of the grandparent reappear in the child which were not in any visible way expressed in the parent, and must therefore have been contained in the parent's germ-plasm in a latent state. ”

“ Another truth co-extensive with the organic world, is that of hereditary transmission. It is not, as commonly supposed, that hereditary transmission is exemplified merely in re-appearance of the family peculiarities displayed by immediate or remote progenitors. Nor does the law of hereditary transmission comprehend only such more general facts as that modified plants or animals become the parents of permanent varieties ”

“ If we trace all the permanent hereditary variations from generation to generation back to the quantitative variations of the germ, as I have sought to do, the question naturally occurs as to the source from which these variations arose in the germ itself. ”

“ But are we to conclude that within this vast family which the Creator has called into existence out of nothing, there are other and smaller families, projected as it were by Nature, and brought forth by her in the natural course of events and after a long time, of which some contain but two members, as the ass and the horse, others many members, as the weasel, martin, stoat, ferret, &c., and that on the same principle there are families of vegetables, containing ten, twenty, or thirty plants, as the case may be? ”

“ When we endeavour to explain in detail the facts of the existing distribution of organic beings, we are confronted by several preliminary questions, upon the solution of which will depend our treatment of the phenomena presented to us. Upon the theory of descent which we have adopted, all the different species of a genus, as well as all the genera which compose a family or higher group, have descended from some common ancestor, and must therefore, at some remote epoch, have occupied the same area, from which their descendants have spread to the regions they now inhabit. ”

“ Family groups, consisting of mothers and such few children as can be reared without permanent paternal assistance, are necessarily small and soon dissolve: integration is slight. Within each group the relationships are less definite; since the children are mostly half-brothers or half-sisters, and the paternity is often uncertain. From such primitive families, thus small, incoherent, and indefinite, there arise, in conformity with the law of Evolution, divergent and redivergent types of families—some characterized by a mixed polyandry and polygyny ”

“ From the preceding facts and considerations the important conclusion results that the germ-cells of any individual do not contain the same hereditary tendencies, but are all different, in that no two of them contain exactly the same combinations of hereditary tendencies. ”