The human body is certainly not a _mosaic of heterogenetic organs_,
_i.e._ a complex of structures inherited from any and every sort of
animal, whether extant or extinct; for such a vast number and variety
of ancestors could not possibly have coöperated to produce man. Prof.
D. Carazzi, in his Address of Inauguration in the Chair of Zoölogy
and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Padua, Jan. 20, 1906,
excoriated with scathing irony the sham Darwinian science, of which
Dwight complains. “But even in the serious works of pure science,” says
the Italian zoölogist, “we read, for example, that the over-development
of the postauricular muscles sometimes observed in man is an atavistic
reminiscence of the muscles of the helix of the ear of the horse and
the ass. And so far so good, because it gives evidence of great modesty
in recognizing as our ancestors those well-deserving and long-eared
quadrupeds. But this is not all; there appear at times in a woman one
or more anomalous mammary glands below the pectoral ones; and here,
too, they insist on explaining the anomaly as a reversion to type,
that is, as an atavistic reminiscence of the numerous mammary glands
possessed by different lower mammals; the bitch, for example....
“But the supernumerary mammary glands are not a reversion to type;
anomalous mammary glands may appear upon the median line, upon
the deltoid, and even upon the knee, regions far-distant from the
‘milk-line.’ So with regard to the postauricular muscles we must
say that according to the laws of Darwinism the cases of anomalous
development are not interpretable as reversions to type. All these
features are not phylogenetic reminiscences, but anomalies of
development, of such a nature that, if we should wish to make use of
them for establishing the line of human descent, we would have to say
that man descends from the swine, from the solipeds and even from the
cetaceans, returning, namely, to the old conception of lineal descent,
that is, to Buffon’s idea of the concatenation of creatures.” (“Teorie
e critiche nella moderna biologia,” 1906.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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