Epilogue: What Comes of Studying Vertebrates 



Fig. 609. Michelangelo's "Creation 



>f Man 

 York.) 



(Photo by Ewing Galloway, New 



such simple and instinctive activities as building nests and digging 

 burrows. But when primates began to grasp sticks and stones and use 

 them as tools, the start was made toward the automobile, motor ship, 

 and airplane, and the telephone, radio, and television. This modifica- 

 tion of environment is as truly an evolution as the transformation of 

 fins to land legs or legs to wings, but with an important difference. As 

 organs of locomotion, legs replace fins and are genetically derived from 

 fins by a process of alteration. Automobiles to a large extent replace 

 human legs as a means of locomotion, but they are not derived from 

 legs. From the "horseless carriage" to the 1950 automobile, there has 

 been a radical evolution, but there is no "genetic" or physical con- 

 tinuity of any sort between one automobile and another. Construction 

 of an automobile involves use of machines and tools and manual labor, 

 all in accord with a plan represented on a blueprint of a drawing 

 originated by the man who designed the model. The design was the 

 product of prolonged and concentrated "thinking" about possible 

 improvements in the old model. The automobile is derived, not from 

 legs and not from a preexisting automobile, but from the human brain. 

 More precisely, its substance is environmental, but its pattern some- 

 how emerges from cerebral activity. Here another aspect of primate 

 evolution confronts us. 



Many tens of thousands of years ago, animals possessing skeletons 

 essentially like those of modern man made outline drawings of the 

 contemporary mammoth on the stone walls of European caves. It is, 

 of course, purely an assumption that the drawings were made by the 

 possessor of the manlike skeleton, not by the mammoth. Granting 

 the reasonableness of this assumption, the drawings have great sig- 

 nificance. The lines were cut into the stone. The prehensile hand used a 



