CHAPTER XXXIV 



MAN AND THE BIOLOGICAL WORLD 



We began our account with the idea that we could best present man as a 

 part of the organic world by a sequence of viewpoints : the individual as a 

 functioning machine, as a unit in a hereditary sequence of generations, 

 as the product of continued change and adaptation through geological 

 ages, and as a member of an interdependent society bound by social and 

 economic ties. It has not always been possible or desirable to adhere 

 strictly to such a scheme. The individual plays all these roles at once. An 

 appreciation of the functioning machine, for example, must take into 

 account the operations it must perform in competition or cooperation 

 with other forms of life and the conditions imposed upon it by a germ 

 plasm that bears the imprint of countless and ever-changing adaptations 

 to past environments. 



We have considered man's position in this world of life as one of the 

 million or so kinds of existing organisms that represent the current stage 

 of evolutionary development. This is in no sense to deny or ignore the 

 many attainments that set man apart from other organisms, but to 

 emphasize that his peculiarly human culture does not cancel his kinship 

 with other living things, nor truly free him from the laws that govern 

 their existence. 



It might be well, in view of the foregoing statement, to review man's 

 place in the organic world. His kinship with other organisms can be too 

 strongly stressed as well as too much ignored. He is at once an animal, a 

 vertebrate, a mammal, a primate, a member of the family Hominidae, of 

 the genus Homo, and of the species Homo sapiens. As an organism he 

 shares a complex of important and fundamental characteristics with all 

 other forms of life. As an animal he fails to share in the peculiar features 

 of the less closely related plants, but he does show in common with all 

 animals other qualities not found in plants. It is the same for each suc- 

 ceeding taxonomic category, until as Homo sapiens (the sole living species 

 of the genus) he exhibits qualities peculiarly his own. Because of these 

 qualities he has been able to develop speech, conscious thought, and the 

 evolving cultures of modern man. When we recognize man as an organism, 

 an animal, a vertebrate, or a mammal, we are focusing attention on those 



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