The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
Certain experiments made on sea-anemones, actinæ animals a little
more highly organized than hydra, demand repetition under careful
observation.[A] The observer placed on one of the tentacles of a
sea-anemone a bit of paper which had been dipped in beef-juice. It
was seized and carried to the mouth and here discarded. This
tentacle after one or two experiments refused to have anything more
to do with it. But other tentacles could be successively cheated.
The nerve-cells governing each tentacle appear to have been able to
learn by experience, but each group in the diffuse nervous system
had to learn separately. The dawn of this much of intelligence far
down in the animal kingdom would not be surprising, for the
selection and grasping of food has always involved higher mental
power than most of the actions of these lowest animals. Memory goes
far down in the animal kingdom. Perhaps, as Professor Haeckel has
urged, it is an ultimate mental property of protoplasm. And the
memory of past experience would continually tend to modify habit or
instinct.
[Footnote A: These experiments have been continued with most
interesting and valuable results by Dr. G.H. Parker, of Harvard
University.]
It is unsafe, therefore, to say just where intelligence begins. At a
certain point we find dim traces of it; below that we have failed to
find them. But that they will not be found, we dare not affirm. In
the highest insects instinct predominates, but marks of intelligence
are fairly abundant. Ants and wasps modify their habits to suit
emergencies which instinct alone could hardly cope with. Bees learn
to use grafting wax instead of propolis to stop the chinks in their
hives, and soon cease to store up honey in a warm climate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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