The question at once arises: “How has this change come to pass?” In the
case of the strange arrangement on man’s forearms I have shown that the
Pan-Selectionist thought he detected there one of his particular kinds
of vestige. He cannot find any such here. I can conceive a biologist
making play with Heredity, Variation and Selection in the case of an
ape, monkey, or lemur whose hairs are long and thick and functionally
very active. _There_ he might make use of the well-known “argument from
ignorance,” and maintain that we cannot be sure that such and such
factors might not have survival-value, but I defy the most hardy among
the Pan-Selectionist High Command to put in that plea in connection
with the fine short hairs of man which even require a lens for their
detection; they have little value as a protection of the skin from
friction; their arrangement has none. And if some leader did attempt
this task I doubt if the most docile Prussian would not rebel against
the statement that the withdrawal in question was “according to plan.”
My purpose, however, in this book being to build up and not to pull
down, I must perforce show a reasonable and better explanation of a
remarkable little fact.
Passive Habits.
The habits of man concerned in the _modus operandi_ of this change are
passive, and two in number; that of sitting with his back against some
supporting object, and of lying in sleep with his head more or less
raised on a pillow or its equivalent. In contrast with man, lemurs
and apes inhabit trees during their many hours of rest, and I doubt
if the number of hours thus spent by these and other wild animals
to that spent in active exercise is less than three to one, so that
their attitudes of rest would, if calculated to do so, contribute much
towards any change occurring in the patterns of hair. But, seeing
that the ape-fashion is similar to that of the lemur, and that this
normal arrangement is calculated only to be confirmed by the action of
gravity and the dripping of rain, and that they do not greatly indulge
themselves, if at all, in their equivalent for man’s armchairs, nothing
else would be expected in the hairy covering of their backs than what
we find.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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