12 MAN THE ANIMAL 



between man and the other mammals is at bottom quantitative 

 in character rather than qualitative. In each respect man is dif- 

 ferent from his other milk-giving congeners by virtue of being 

 only "more so," rather than by being completely alien in kind. 

 Thus most mammals other than man stand up on their hind 

 legs occasionally and for short periods for one reason or another. 

 And, conversely, as one of America's most distinguished anthro- 

 pologists Dr. Ales Hrdlicka has shown in great detail and 

 wealth of example, human infants not infrequently show a 

 strong predilection for walking on all fours, indicating that it 

 was only a little while ago and not yet protoplasmically for- 

 gotten that this was the regular way of locomotion. All that 

 man has done evolutionally in this regard is to acquire the 

 habit of spending more and more of his time upright, with 

 the important consequences already discussed. Again all mam- 

 mals have a brain similar in kind to man's, only just not so big 

 or so rich in nerve cells. Finally all mammals, as well as many 

 animals lower in the evolutionary scale, have ways of com- 

 municating with one another and with the group to which they 

 belong. Our cat Minnie is capable of telling us, in a regrettably 

 raucous and unmusical voice, that she is hungry and that we 

 must do something about it at once; and of vocally making it 

 known to her kittens that they are ranging dangerously far 

 from base and must rush to cover at once. Man's powers of 

 communication have merely been perfected beyond those of 

 his closest zoological relatives to the stage of articulate speech. 

 So, in sum, it is seen that even in the highest of his biological 

 achievements man still remains a mammal au fond. However 

 snobbish about the matter he may, and in fact does, tend to be 

 there is no escaping from the insistent reality of his family con- 

 nections. His vain efforts to do so, more particularly under the 

 subtle stimulation of religion and theology, have resulted only 

 in inspiring the great and true humanists like Lucian, Rabelais, 

 Swift, and Voltaire to their highest flights of wit and humor. 

 It lies beyond the range of my biological competence to say 

 whether man is formed "in the image of God," but there is 



