4 MAN THE ANIMAL 



human branch had started on its independent way what was 

 left of the main stem split in two, one limb eventually producing 

 the orang-utan as we know it, and the other limb being the com- 

 bined gorilla-chimpanzee branch, which not long after split 

 in two, to lead finally to the gorillas and the chimpanzee as they 

 now exist. 



Linnaeus recognized that man was the unique mammal, and 

 listed six respects in which he could be so regarded. These were 

 respectively theological, moral, natural, physiological, dietetic, 

 and pathologic. For the most part these differentials alleged by 

 Linnaeus to separate man from other mammals are not regarded 

 now as seriously as they were in a more naively credulous age. 

 To put forward as generic diagnostic attributes that man is cre- 

 ated in the image of God and has an immortal soul, or that he 

 has a rational mind so that he may praise his Creator, strikes us 

 today as verging upon the metempirical. And to say that man 

 is physiologically a most perfect and stupendous mechanism is 

 perhaps all right if one feels moved to that kind of language, 

 but after all much the same thing might be said of a gorilla, or 

 a tiger, or an elephant, and hence does not mean a great deal 

 as a differential characteristic. But if Linnaeus's grandiloquently 

 pious characterizations of man are now a bit outmoded, his 

 ringing nosce te if sum is the perfect slogan for a growing science 

 of Human Biology. For it states as completely as it does con- 

 cisely the objective of that science. 



Nowadays the disposition is to focus attention upon less 

 grandiose points in respect of which man is different from other 

 mammals. There are a good many of these, but four are of 

 very great significance, especially in their implications and con- 

 sequences. These are: 



1. Man's habitually upright posture. 



2. His big brain, which is larger both in absolute dimensions 

 and relative to his body weight than that of any other 

 animal. 



3. His capacity for articulate speech. 



4. His longer life span. 



