Family (biology)

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the characters of a family are additional to those of the order to which it belongs, all those of a genus additional to those of its family, and all those of a species additional to those of its genus. ”

“ It is not only conceivable that the habit of association may have been developed by different means in different species, but it is also conceivable that, in some cases, several forms of family relation may have assisted equally, and in other cases have united, even if not in equal measure, in producing the result. The association of parent with offspring, for instance, is in most cases impossible without some degree of association between the offspring. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The family, offspring of the instincts that preside over the preservation of the species, exists, temporarily at least, among birds and mammals, not to go lower. It coexists with the feeling of maternal love, and in certain cases of paternal love, raised to the highest degree. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When he gets this vision, he will desire to make his family tree as full as possible, to include his collaterals, to note every trait which he can find on record, to preserve the photographs and measurements of his own contemporaries, and to take pleasure in feeling that the history of his family is a contribution to human knowledge, as well as to the pride of the family. ”

“ It is in the simpler forms of human association, then, that we may see most conspicuously the workings of instinct. The family especially shows most clearly the influence of instinctive elements, and here it may be remarked that the family must be regarded as in many ways the most typical of all the forms of human association, illustrating in the clearest manner possible the simpler biological and psychological factors at work in human social life generally. The family as an institution evidently rests upon two great primary instincts, the sexual instinct and the parental instinct. ”

“ Family, in zoological classification, a group of species more comprehensive than a genus and less so than an order, a family usually containing a number of genera, while an order contains so many families. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And in countries where certain colors distinguish certain families, and are hereditary, so to say, it is convenient and pleasant to recognize a coat-of-arms, or a livery, and to know that the representative of a great and famous family is passing by. ”

“ The beginning of society, it has been said a thousand times, is the family, a natural association of kindred by blood, composed of father, mother and their descendants. In this family, the father is absolute master of his wife, his children and the goods of the little community; at his death his eldest son succeeds him; and in course of time this association of kindred, by natural increase and by adoption, develops into the clan, gens, or γένος. ”

“ The family has adumbrations and foreshadowings among the lower animal, but in general it may be said that while mammals lower than man are gregarious, in man have become established those peculiar relationships which constitute what we know as the family ”

“ According to the same principle heredity is the basis of the family and of domestic life; The child inherits the natural qualities of the parents. There is, therefore, some similarity of nature between parent and child which is the ground of parental and filial affection. Parent and child are bound together by. innumerable ties which grow out of a common nature. They can give and receive affection; they can know and understand the same truths ”

“ In brief, the elementary family unit carries on all of the individual biological tasks of foraging, righting, home-building, and the like, and it also discharges the racial task of multiplying, quite as instinctively as it provides for its own maintenance. ”

“ The prime cause of marriage and the family is purely biological; it is the powerful instinct of reproduction, the condition of the duration of species, and the origin of which is necessarily contemporaneous with that of primal organisms, of protoplasmic monads, multiplying themselves by unconscious scissiparity. By a slow specialisation of organs and functions, in obedience to the laws of evolutionary selection, various animal types have been created ”

“ And then to this pleasurable care of offspring, increasing in duration as the family develops, has to be added an entirely new factor—the reciprocal pleasurable care of parents by offspring: a factor which, feeble where the family is rudimentary and gaining strength as the family develops, serves in another way to lessen the sacrifice of the individual to the maintenance of the species, and begins, contrariwise, to make the maintenance of the species conduce to the more prolonged life, as well as to the higher life, of the individual. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Further on in the process of development we note the love of offspring, and, as a consequence of that love, the growth of the family sense, which rarely is maintained beyond the time when the young can shift for themselves. Among the species of the higher groups—certain insects, the greater part of the birds, and the nobler of the mammals—the instinct of the family is extended until it includes the tribe, or perhaps goes yet further and leads to a certain kindliness to all the individuals of the race. ”

“ In the human species the influence of the mother preponderates quite as often as that of the father, although in many families most of the children may take after either parent. There is nevertheless hardly any large family in which all the children take after the same parent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The members of the same family on earth are said to be closely related; and they are so naturally. But this is simply a flesh and blood relationship—often nothing more; and as such, we should expect it to cease when the body dies. For members of the same family are often quite different in character. ”

“ In this point of view, not only the ass and horse, but man, monkies, quadrupeds, and all animals, may be looked upon as making but one family; but ought we, therefore, to conclude, that in this great and numerous family, which the Almighty has conceived and created from nothing, there are smaller families projected by nature and produced by time? some of which are composed only of two individuals, as the horse and the ass; others of several individuals, as the weazle, the pole-cat, the ferret, &c. and also that in vegetables there are families of ten, twenty, thirty plants, &c. ”

“ But with our half-human forefathers it is not difficult to see how infancy extending over several years must have tended gradually to strengthen the relations of the children to the mother, and eventually to both parents, and thus give rise to the permanent organization of the family. When this step was accomplished we may say that the Creation of Man had been achieved. For through the organization of the family has arisen that of the clan or tribe, which has formed, as it were, the cellular tissue out of which the most complex human society has come to be constructed. ”

“ A family is the primary social organization for the elementary purpose of breeding the species, nurturing and training the young. This is its physiological basis. But its duties cannot be discharged on the physiological plane alone. This elementary physiological function is lifted to a spiritual level by the aim of character and the motive of love. Families cannot be measured by their size ”

“ In the first place, we ought to investigate its dependency upon the preceding links of the particular chain of life, variety being often merely types or approximations of former parentage; thence the variation of the family, as well as of the individual, must be embraced by our experiments. ”

“ The head of a family gives rise to offspring suffering from different and differently seated disorders of evolution, that cause various morbid predispositions, the variety of which is, however, not so great but that we can find analogies in the manifestation capable of giving a family resemblance to them. ”