The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its ScopeCrampton, Henry Edward
Science
The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its Scope
Crampton, Henry Edward
Evolution
prove to be obstacles to further progress. We must also recognize that the
character of the environment of a race determines to a large extent the
mode of life of the people; a forest-dwelling Indian of the interior is a
hunter as well as a warrior, while a South Sea Islander is a navigator and
a fisherman.
But the fact remains that the inhabitants of similar countries have
reached markedly different grades of intellectual and cultural life.
Anglo-Saxon dominance must be referred ultimately to Anglo-Saxon heredity
and not to the peculiarities of the land. Although adaptation is no less
necessary for men as individuals and as social groups than it is for all
other living things, I believe that it is to diversity in constitutional
endowments, however these may have arisen, that we must attribute the
superiority of some races over others. The question is not whether a
savage race can or cannot adopt the higher conceptions of a civilized
people; the fact is that they have not actually become civilized by
themselves. Thus, while evolution in mental respects has not resulted in
the loss of plasticity in the case of the brain and the nervous system as
a whole, wherefore the activities of these organs still remain capable of
individual and racial modifications that are impossible in the case of the
skeleton and in the color and shape of the eye, it remains true that races
do differ intellectually, and that their differences are marks of a mental
evolution quite as definite as their physical natural histories of change.
* * * * *
In my own view the strongest and most impressive evidence bearing upon the
great problem before us is provided by the series of transformations by
which the human intellect develops during an individual life. Mind has an
embryology no less significant than that of the skull or of any other
element of the body; and its investigation leads to the evolutionary
interpretation quite as surely as the study of the various grades of adult
psychology constituting the anatomical sequence, which we have reviewed
previously. When in the earlier part of the book we dealt with embryology
in general, we learned how the changes which take place when an organism
develops from an egg demonstrate the actuality of true organic
transformation without the necessity of concluding or inferring that this
process might occur. It is not superfluous to insist again that the
essential fact in evolution is the alteration of one organic
characteristic into another type; must we not recognize at the very outset
that mental transformation is as real as physical development?
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