Vestigiality

“ Still more certain is this conclusion when we consider the vast and orderly succession made known to us by geology, and which must have been regulated by fixed laws, only a few of which are as yet known to us.
Beyond these general considerations, we have others of a more special character, based on paleontological facts, which show how imperfect are our attempts, as yet, to reach the true causes of the introduction of genera and species.
One is the remarkable fixity of the leading types of living beings in geological time. ”

“ All the bones of the skeleton are solid, thick, and indicate a powerful people.
In the valley of the Vézère within a distance of seven or eight miles there have been found eight settlements of this race. I will not detain you to enumerate these or describe them separately. Suffice it to say that, while the remains are all undoubtedly of the same race, the associated animal and archæological remains indicate clearly that they are not of the same age, but rather those of successive periods of development; thus the eight settlements give, as it were, an epitomized history of the race. ”

“ For the early beginnings of man we can only grope among the relics of his progress which he has left for the speculation of his more intelligent descendants, in the shape of the rude implements and dwellings which he used in the childhood of the race.
From time to time actual remains of early man are found buried among the uppermost strata, and from them we can make some guesses at his age. Virtually three links have been found in the chain of human ancestry. ”

“ In other words, the young folk present not only an individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity proper, but with their social predecessors also. The elements of organic continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the inheritance—a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the term heritage, material or immaterial alike. ”

“ Whosoever, therefore, sees in the homology of organic forms conclusive evidence of descent from a common ancestor, cannot, without grave inconsistency, reject the doctrine of the bestial origin of man. He may still, it is true, exclude the [Pg 52] human mind or soul from the evolutionary account of origins, but, if homology is, in any sense, a sound argument for common descent, the evolutionary origin of the human body is a foregone conclusion, and none of the anatomical “differences in degree” will avail to spare us the humiliation of sharing with the ape a common family-tree. ”

“ Most of every man's heredity is hidden in the mist and darkness of the past. He inherits more or less directly through an infinite number of ancestors, reaching back to primitive man and even to the animals from which he came. The remote ancestry is, of course, usually not so important as that immediately behind him. Still, plainly, his form and structure and the details of his whole machine, including the marvelously delicate mechanism of the brain and nervous system, are heritages of the very ancient past. Neither are the processes of inheritance well understood nor subject to much control. ”

“ The question has often been asked, if man has descended from an ape ancestor why is it that no traces of this ancestral form have been found in a fossil state? If man has gone through such an extended course of development, why has he left no remains? ”

“ Ever since the beginning of the world, from sire to son, all living creatures were handing on the inexhaustible heritage, the everlasting malady that has devastated the ancestors of the men of to-day, has eaten to the very bone old fossil forms which we dig up at the present moment. ”

“ Turning to the influence of heredity, we recognized that by it are determined all the most fundamental features of each race and type of man, and that often the individual reverts to the traits of the one or the other of his parents, or of his remote ancestors, in such manner that one trait may belong to one ancestor, another to another. ”

“ The rudimentary organ or appendage is represented in the animal of to-day as a legitimate heritage derived from its ancestor. It is, in short, a family feature, to which the animal is the "rightful heir," but which has fallen through the operation of natural laws and conditions into disuse and desuetude, and has accordingly suffered with the career of living nature "down the ringing grooves of change." ”

“ The vestigial structures must be interpreted as we interpret the buttons on the back of a man's coat. They are useless reminiscences of an age in which they were useful. When their witness to the past is supported by so many converging lines of evidence it becomes irresistible. ”

“ But since the totemic tribal organization perpetuates the idea of a succession of generations, the human ancestor necessarily comes to assume the place of the animal ancestor. This change is vividly represented by the totem poles of the Indians of northwestern America. These totem poles we have already described. The head of the animal whose representation has become the coat of arms here surmounts a series of faces of human ancestors. ”

“ If now, instead of seeking for evidences of man's ancestry within the human body, in survivals of ancient anatomical structures, we seek for them within the crust of the earth, we find ourselves confronted with evidences of a great antiquity of the human race, partly in implements of human manufacture, partly in ancient or fossilized bones of primitive man. ”

“ As Nature takes the human embryo through repetitions of its discarded forms—fish, reptile, mammal, and vertebrate—before bringing it to birth, so whoever introduced, let us say, the word heredity in the nineteenth century went through the instinctive process of deriving from the Latin ‘hereditare’ an imaginary French word, ‘heredité’, and converting the latter into heredity. ”

“ Had you dug up your ancestor, you would have found him alive, and yourselves also as you passed from this world, should have been buried, as bananas are, for the space of four days, after which you should have been dug up, not rotten, but ripe. ”

“ The evolutionist and the naturalist say that the facts imply that all men have descended from a common ancestor, that each individual inherits, from his parents, every organ and part of his body, that “like begets like.” They maintain that the law of heredity has produced the uniformity of size, form, features, organs and parts, which we discover among [34] all men, all over the world. ”

“ There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades. That evolution is strange, and to me unaccountable and unnatural. ”

“ The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a fever—until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows bustling and piping in the garden, and knew that outside his windows the world was white with dawn. ”

“ On the other hand, the special tracing of the human pedigree, the closer definition of the animal forms known to us, which either actually belong to the ancestors of man, or at least stand in very close blood relationship to them, will always remain a more or less approximate hypothesis of descent, all the more in danger of deviating from the real pedigree the nearer it endeavours to approach it by searching for the individual ancestral forms. ”

“ And seeing how few are the human remains yet found in these ancient layers, it is not strange that many hesitate to follow those who already extend the principles of the Darwinian hypothesis to man, and find our very own brethren in the anthropoid apes—brethren sprung from a common ancestry, but immeasurably outstripped by us in the long, long course of a development begun in a previous geological era. ”

“ It will be noted that when we hear the specialists in anatomy and biology, their expressions on the subject of man's ancestry are, as a rule, characterized by a strong dissent from the development theory, while the belief in a development of man from an ape-like ancestor, uttered with a note of cocksureness, is found mainly among amateurs in these sciences. ”

“ Are not all the creatures that inhabit the earth the lineal descendants of creatures of past periods, or may not the whole be parts of one continual succession, under the operation of an eternal law of development? No, answers geology, species are immutable, except within narrow limits, and do not pass into each other, in tracing them toward their origin. ”

“ Still, however, there is no authentic or satisfactory instance of human remains being found, except in deposits obviously of very modern date; a tolerably strong proof that the creation of our own species is a comparatively recent event, and one posterior (generally speaking) to all the great natural transactions chronicled by geology. ”

“ It is now realised that the causes of Variation must be understood and the laws of Heredity discovered before the problem of development can be fully solved. It is by the observation of what takes place at the earth's surface to-day, or that has taken place recently,that geologists have found the clue by means of which they can unravel the origin and history of the rocks which make up the crust. ”

“ I hope to show, on a substantial basis of facts, that we can draw most important conclusions as to our genealogical tree from the actual and easily-demonstrable series of embryonic changes. We shall then be in a position to form a general idea of the wealth of animal forms which have figured in the direct line of our ancestry in the lengthy history of organic life. ”

“ Every one knows in a general way what is meant by the doctrine of descent—that it is the theory which maintains that the forms of life, animals and plants, which we see on our earth to-day, have not been the same from all time, but have been developed, by a process of transformation, from others of an earlier age, and are in fact descended from ancestors specifically different. ”

“ By the multiplying of slight modifications in the course of thousands of generations, and by the handing down of the newly-acquired peculiarities by inheritance, a greater and greater divergence from the original standard is supposed to be effected, until what may be called a new species, or, in a greater lapse of time, a new genus, will be the result. ”

“ Did not he himself differ from his parents only in consequence of similar accidents, or even as the effect of larvated heredity, in which he had for a time believed? For every genealogical tree has roots which extend as far back into humanity as the first man; one cannot proceed from a single ancestor; one may always resemble a still older, unknown ancestor. ”

“ Were it possible to restore, by the evidence of fossils, all the ranks of the great processions that have descended from the common ancestor, there would nowhere occur a greater difference than between offspring and parents; and the appearance of Kinds existing in nature, which is so striking in a museum or zoological garden, would entirely vanish. ”

“ In seeking for the origins of our local history the first thing we have to do is to look about and see whether we cannot find a few scratchings on the soil, a few old bones, pots, earth-works or stone-works which will tell us something of that far-off time, and of men and women whose ways were very unlike ours, but from whom, with an intermixture of races, we are descended. ”

“ In the chapter on geological succession I attempted to show, on the principle of each group having generally diverged much in character during the long-continued process of modification, how it is that the more ancient forms of life often present characters in some slight degree intermediate between existing groups. A few old and intermediate parent-forms having occasionally transmitted to the present day descendants but little modified, will give to us our so-called osculant or aberrant groups. ”

“ If a spirit of false pride leads genealogists to hold aloof from these experiments, they will make slow progress. The interpretation of genealogy in the light of modern research in heredity through the experimental breeding of plants and animals is full of hope; without such light, it will be discouragingly slow work. ”

“ In that primeval transition of the ethnologist in which geology draws to a close, and archæology has its beginning, amid all the rudeness of palæolithic art, we may still recognise the rational lord of creation, the being endowed, not with physical but moral supremacy; in whom intelligence and accumulated experience were to prove more than a match for all the brute force of those gigantic mammalia so familiar to us now in fossil disclosures of the drift-gravels and cave-earth. ”

“ Amid this repetition on a grand scale of similar adaptations, which is altogether comparable to what we know as having occurred over and over again in human history, the paleontologist as a historian must keep constantly before him the second great idea of homogeny, of real ancestral kinship, of direct blood descent and hereditary relationship. ”

“ He concludes that the existence of these wide-spread signs of affinity and the associated signs of divergence, disprove the theory that the structural characters existing in the human frame have had their origin in the influence of inheritance and “natural selection.” ”