The Universal KinshipMoore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Philosophy
The Universal Kinship
Moore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Evolution; Human beings; Sociology
belonging to each great group sustain to each other the relations of
a common kinship. Englishmen look like each other, act like each
other, and speak the same language. So do Frenchmen and Swedes and
Chinese. Every people is peculiar. This is not the result of
accident or agreement, but the result of law. Mongolians do not all
have short heads, yellow faces, slanting eyes, and prominent malars
because they have agreed to have them, but as a result of a common
pedigree. Similarity of structure implies commonalty of origin, and
commonalty of origin means consanguinity.
And this is true whether you contemplate the featural resemblances
of brothers and sisters of the same human parent, or those more
fundamental characteristics which distinguish species, orders, and
sub-kingdoms. All animals are composed of protoplasm, which is a
compound of clay, because all animals are descended from the same
first parents, protoplasmic organisms evolved out of the elemental
ooze. All vertebrates have nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of
ventrally branching limbs, because the original ancestors of the
vertebrates had nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally
branching limbs. Insects individually evolve from worms because
worms are their phylogenetic fathers and mothers. Man has hands and
a vertical spine, and walks on his hind-limbs, not because he was
fashioned in the image of a god, but because his ancestors lived
among the trees. The habit of using the posterior limbs for
locomotion, and the anterior for prehension, and the resulting
perpendicular, are peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors
wholly on account of the incentives to such structure and posture
afforded by aboreal life. These peculiarities would not likely have
been acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking their food from a
perfectly level and treeless plain. If there had been no forests on
the earth, therefore, there would have been no incentive to the
perpendicular, and the ‘human form divine’ would have been
inconceivably different from what it is to-day. And if fishes had
had three serial pairs of limbs instead of two, and their posterity
had inherited them, as they certainly would have had the foresight
to do if they had had the opportunity, the highest animals on the
earth to-day, the ‘paragons of creation,’ would probably be
two-handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two-handed bipeds. And
much more efficient and ideal individuals they would have been in
every way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial plantigrades
who, by their talent to talk, have become the masters of the
universe, and, by their imaginations, ‘divine.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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