January, 1928 



EVOLUTION 



Page Thkee 



Man and Nature 



By Alexander Goldenweiser 



Alexander Goldenweiser 



SOME two generations ago Huxley startled the world 

 by his little masterpiece, "Man's Place in Nature." 

 What was heresy then, has since become a commonplace, 

 except, perhaps, in Tennessee. 



Now, Huxley as a 

 biologist was pri- 

 marily interested in 

 the relation between 

 man physical and 

 the higher animals, 

 especially the an- 

 thropoid apes. We 

 need not accept this 

 limitation. Our 

 topic then will be 

 man's place in na- 

 ture viewed from 

 the standpoints of 

 physics, chemistry, 

 biology and psy- 

 chology. 



Man, first of all, 

 is a thing, a physi- 

 cal object subject to 

 physical world and 

 laws that control it. 

 Man has weight, 

 volume, size. His body has a certain temperature. It 

 expands in heat, contracts from cold. The muscles of 

 the body exert certain pulls on the bones, the bones 

 themselves articulate with each other like the parts of a 

 machine. When a man falls from a rock into a precipice, 

 he falls like a stone falls in strict conformity to the law 

 of falling bodies. Whatever else man may be, then, he 

 is first a physical object. 



But beyond this man is also a chemical composite, a 

 highly complex one. Not only are the different com- 

 ponents of the body- — the blood, bones, glands, bile, 

 urine — expressible in chemical forms, but the function- 

 ing of the organism consists largely of chemical proc- 

 esses, such as breathing, digestion, vision, cell metabo- 

 lism. The body of man is like a huge laboratory in which 

 chemical substances are constantly being formed and 

 destroyed. So, man is a chemical composite. 



But man is more than this: he is a living organism. 

 Like plants and animals, he has life. In common with 

 plants, he is composed of living cells, he originates from 

 a cell, he grows transforming organic and inorganic sub- 

 stances into constituent parts of his own body, he ages 

 and he dies. In many ways, man is like a plant. 



Beyond this, he is even more like an animal. He is 

 born from the parent organism after a protracted em- 

 bryonic period spent inside the maternal body, as is 

 the case with many animals. Like all animals, he has 

 the power of spontaneous motion. Like all animals, he 

 has certain instincts — more complicated native disposi- 

 tions than are the reflexes or tropisms of plants — which 



guide him in the quest fur food or sex and in avoiding 

 dangers. Like all higher animals, man has sense organs 

 which facilitate his orientation in the world about him. 

 Like all vertebrates he has a spinal column around which 

 his skeleton is built. And, like all higher animals, he 

 has a nervous system and brain which make his reactions 

 to external and internal stimuli much more accurate and 

 effective and versatile than they could otherwise be. 

 Man, moreover, is a mammal; he brings live offspring 

 into the world, as do tigers, lions, elephants, whales, 

 horses, dogs and pigs. The young are fed at the mother's 

 breasts as among all the mammals. 



Man, finally, is like a monkey and especially like an 

 anthropoid ape. His skeleton, the formation of his skull 

 and of the external sense organs on the head, are more 

 like those of monkeys and apes than they are like those 

 of other animals. The monkeys and apes, moreover, ap- 

 proximate man in their psychological faculties; they 

 have hands with which they can manipulate things with 

 great agility. The anthropoid apes, moreover — the 

 gorilla, orang-utang, chimpanzee, gibbon — have a rela- 

 tively large brain; not as large or heavy as that of man, 

 either absolutely or relatively to the size and weight 

 of the body, but larger and heavier than the brain of 

 most other animals with some exceptions which we need 

 not here consider. 



Man, then, is like a physical object, like a chemical 

 composite, like a plant, like an animal, like a vertebrate, 

 a mammal, a monkey, an anthropoid. Anyone who 

 would examine nature with an open mind and discover 

 man in nature so like many other things and creatures, 

 would conclude that man belongs to nature, that he is 

 part of nature, made of the same stuff and possessing 

 the same properties. This man would be right. He 

 would, moreover, express not a theory but a fact, the 

 fact that Man and Nature are. basically one. 



But there may be other facts which this man, observ- 

 ing and judging as he did, may have overlooked. In the 

 succeeding articles of this series — "Episodes from the 

 History of Evolution": — 



I. How Darwin and Wallace discovered Evolution 



II. The Spencer-Weissmann Controversy 



III. Huxley and the English Bishops 



IV. Ernst Haeckel reconstructs the History of Man 

 V. Haeckel gets into Difficulties 



VI. Osborn traces the Ancestry of the Horse 

 VII. De Vries supplements Darwin 

 VIII. Morgan brings Evolution Up-To-Date 

 IX. Are Acquired Characters Inherited 

 X. Were Our Ancestors Pygmies 

 XL Evolution and Race 

 XII. The Facts of Evolution 



I shall consider in greater detail on what facts is based 

 the scientific conviction that man is part of nature as 

 well as on what facts is based the equally scientific con- 

 viction that man stands unique in nature. 

 (Dr. GoUeniveiser's second article will appear in next issue) 



