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DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED IT |
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Chapter XI: Wallace and the Brain
I. The Darwinian Bias "As evolution came to be the reigning hypothesis among men of science," remarked a contemporary observer, "it was to be anticipated that its central problem, the origin of the human mind, would demand consideration." [1] We have seen in the last chapter that one of the strongest unconscious motivations of the Darwinians was to draw human and animal nature, as well as anatomy, as close to each other as possible in the hope of thereby minimizing the evolutionary gap which mentally, at least, yawned between man and his existing primate relatives. There is no need to read unscrupulous intentions into this situation. It was a natural response to the circumstances of an age of transition. Man, theologically, had for so long been accorded a special and supernatural place in creation that the" evolutionists, in striving to carry their point that he was intimately related to the rest of the world of life, sought to emphasize those characteristics which particularly revealed our humble origins. Today the intellectual climate has so changed that it is possible to find oneself totally misunderstood by cultivated people who assume that any serious examination of Darwinian ideas involves the repudiation of evolution or the principle of natural selection. Before entering further on this subject, therefore, let us examine certain detailed tenets of Darwin's thinking upon man. In subjecting certain of these ideas to critical scrutiny in the light of modern knowledge it is not implied that we are, in any sense, challenging the validity of Darwin's major thesis that man is both related to the existing monkeys and apes and has descended from some early and primitive group within the primate order. In attempting to bolster his scientific position, however, in a time when little in the way of paleontological materials was available, Darwin made use of hypotheses which we would be forced largely to repudiate today. 1. In making use of the living taxonomic ladder he implies marked differences in the inherited mental faculties between the members of the different existing races. [2] This point of view unconsciously reflects the old Scale of Nature and the tacit assumption that the races of today in some manner represent a sequence in time, a series of living fossils, with western European man standing biologically at the head of the procession. 2. Darwin assumed that "when at a remote epoch the progenitors of man were in a transitional state ... natural selection would probably have been greatly aided by the inherited effects of the increased or diminished use of different parts of the body." [3] This Lamarckian effect of habit he extended to such cultural activities as hunting and fishing techniques. [4] 3. He ascribes to the La Naulette jaw, which we discussed in the previous chapter, the "enormous" canines which the workers of this period frequently assumed would be found upon primitive specimens of man. [5] 4. Darwin assumes that in man the "vocal organs have become adapted through the inherited effects of use for the utterance of articulate language." [6] Since language constitutes one of the most striking distinctions between man and the aninla1 world about him, it was almost inevitable that the evolutionary school would seek to reduce its importance as confined to humanity alone. Thus at the very end of the century Haeckel was still insisting that animals were capable of incipient speech, and an enormous amount of poorly rewarded effort has gone into the attempt to teach the existing apes to talk or to formulate and use a few words. Darwin and his followers actually obscured the whole problem by not differentiating clearly between the signal cries of animals and the symbolism of true speech. [7] They tended to slur over a very difficult and complex question at the same time that they were successful in drawing attention to the fact that if man is a part of the rest of nature, language, too, must have evolved in some way. The obscurity and vagueness of the Darwinian approach to language lies in the fact that in spite of a certain use of signal cries of a largely instinctive nature, animals show no tendency to increase their vocabularies or to transform vague emotional cries into specific symbols capable of manipulating the past and future. There is a recognizable gap here which the Darwinists in the first flush of their enthusiasm tried altogether to minimize. It is not necessary to belabor the point except to observe that there were attempts at first to equate living peoples with various levels of linguistic development which, in time, proved unsatisfactory. [8] In the arguments which arose upon the subject of man, his animal relationships, his uniqueness or lack of uniqueness as various writers saw the story, the position of Alfred Russel Wallace came to differ markedly from that of Charles Darwin and most of his followers. The episode is a curious and dramatic one in the history of science -- more particularly because certain of Wallace's observations were more perceptive than most of the writers of his own day -- even though in other particulars he relapsed into a somewhat mystical approach. Moreover, the whole episode has been dramatically re-emphasized in modem times by the revelation of the Piltdown forgery. In pursuing the meaning of this somewhat involved series of events it will do no harm to examine Wallace's first contacts with Darwin. As is well known he arrived independently at the principle of natural selection and shares with Darwin a pre-eminent position in nineteenth- century biology. II. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) If any additional proof were needed that the first half of the "wonderful century" was stirring with half-formulated evolutionary ideas, the life of Wallace would supply such evidence. Born into modest economic circumstances and in his own words "shy, awkward and unused to good society," [9] Wallace had, unlike Darwin, little in the way of educational advantages. Like so many Englishmen of the period, however, he acquired early a taste for nature. While working as a teacher at a private school in Leicester in 1844 he read Humboldt and Malthus, both of whom made a profound impression upon him. Earlier he had read Sir Charles Lyell's Principles, Chambers' Vestiges, and Darwin's Journal of Researches. Wallace was a convinced evolutionist with the same reading background as Darwin before he went to South America with his friend Henry Walter Bates as a beetle and butterfly collector in 1848. He spent four years wandering in the Amazon valley before going on a second collecting expedition to the Far East in 1854. It was here, on the island of Ternate in 1858, that Wallace, while suffering from an attack of fever, conceived the idea of natural selection. Although he once generously compared his own part in the evolutionary story as one week to Darwin's twenty years, the truth was that Wallace had contemplated variation in wild nature for many years; moreover he was fully cognizant of, and sympathetic with, the evolutionary point of view. Somewhat like Darwin earlier, he had been mulling over his observations for some ten years before he was struck by this sudden Hash of insight. It must be recognized, however, that although Wallace conceived his theory independently he had actually been stimulated not alone through perusing Darwin's Journal of Researches but also through direct correspondence with Darwin. Darwin had written to Wallace that he agreed heartily with an earlier (1855) paper expressing evolutionary views and that "they had thought much alike. [10] Correspondence indicates that Darwin had told Wallace he was working on "the species problem." He generously urged Wallace on in his own speculations, but politely declined to divulge his own theory prematurely. There is thus clear documentation which, while establishing Wallace's own claims to originality, indicates at the same time that this very astute and perceptive young naturalist was running hot on Darwin's trail. His curiosity must have been intense and there is every indication that even if the memory of Malthus provided a spark, Wallace, like Darwin, had long pondered "the great work of Lyell." [11] When Wallace sent his theory to Darwin and there occurred that mutual nobility of behavior so justly celebrated in the annals of science -- a tolerance and recognition of their two claims which led to the reading of their preliminary papers jointly before the Linnaean Society in 1858 -- a new world had opened up for man. Even those who loathe the very names of Wallace and Darwin today seek out unquestioningly, when ill, doctors whose whole medical training is postulated upon evolutionary principles, whose medical experiments are based upon the fact that one form of life is related to another. As we examine the skulls of primitive men which reveal the tremendous physical changes man has undergone in the last million years, the thought must inevitably cross our minds that the unfixed but imminent future yawns before us; that our acts may ensure the disappearance of our species from the earth or, on the contrary, that we, like these small-brained, massive-jawed forerunners of ours, may be the bridge to a higher form of life than has yet appeared. "Mother Nature," as Charles Kingsley, a nineteenth-century minister once said, "lets things make themselves." There is a great deal in that remark for the human species to ponder. Scarcely had the two leading exponents of natural selection launched upon their evolutionary careers before they came to differ, and to differ profoundly, upon the subject of human origins. Upon the development of the animal world alone Darwin and Wallace might have continued to agree. Man, however, is an elusive and, even to himself, mysterious subject it was not long before these two great scholars had fallen into disagreement -- though never into dislike of each other. The story is an interesting one-little told, almost forgotten in the dust of years -- but emerging with renewed significance upon the discovery of the Piltdown fraud in 1953. III. Darwin and Human Evolution As we have already had occasion to remark, Darwin, save for a passing sentence, reserved his opinions upon man when he wrote the Origin of Species. Later, in 1871, he published a selection of materials intended to demonstrate man's relationship to the higher animals "especially the anthropomorphous apes." [12] Although he expressed a general caution that "we must not fall into the error of supposing that the early progenitor of the whole Simian stock, including man, was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing ape or monkey; [13] it was inevitable that the dearth of human fossils would focus attention on the existing great apes. These animals were regarded by Darwin as being in an "intermediate condition" between a quadruped and biped. [14] It was not clearly foreseen in Darwin's time that the existing great apes, in many of their characters, reveal divergent specializations which need not necessarily be attributed to the early human forerunners. While it is a subject which we do not have space to pursue here, it may be noted that Darwin's conception of huge canine teeth in man's immediate ancestry has not been borne out by modern paleontological discoveries and, in addition, it seems extremely unlikely that man ever passed through a modern chimpanzee- or gorilla-like postural stage in his achievement of the upright position. [15] The question of the place of origin and the size of the human ancestor left Darwin divided between two possibilities: a large gorilloid type of primate whose homeland was very likely Africa, or some smaller, weaker anthropoid which might have inhabited a large island such as New Guinea or Borneo. In terms of his enthusiasm for "natural selection arising from the competition of tribe with tribe," Darwin, left to himself, might have been inclined toward the first hypothesis, as indeed his projection of huge canine teeth upon Neanderthal man and his suggestion of traces of a sagittal crest among male Australians strongly intimate. There was, however, an obstacle to this approach. One of Darwin's opposition, the Duke of Argyll, in his volume Primeval Man published in 1869, had raised a very legitimate question. He had called attention to the fact that in comparison with many mammals man is physically weak, and, except for his brain, has no really specialized survival mechanisms. How then, contended the Duke, could the human ancestor according to the demands of natural selection "have been modified in the direction of greater weakness without inevitable destruction, until first by the gift of reason and of mental capacities of contrivance, there had been established an adequate preparation for the change?" [16] Now although the Duke of Argyll's challenge was legitimate -- he had raised a question based upon man's generalized physical attributes -- it is clear he had drawn something of a false contrast between intellect and physique, as well as equated the physical frailties of living savages with what fossil evidence now tells us were our more rugged Pleistocene ancestors. There was, in other words, another way of answering the Duke's objection, but Darwin, partly because of his very emphasis upon struggle, could not perceive it. As a consequence, he took refuge in his second hypothesis -- that which conceived of the human forerunner as a less formidable primate. An ancestor like the gorilla, Darwin cautioned, "possessing great size, strength and ferocity" might never have become social. "Hence; he concludes, "it might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature." No sooner had Darwin given vent to this view, however, than it must have occurred to him that he was in danger of giving the Duke of Argyll another opportunity to attack him by means of the "weak creature" of rather un-Darwinian qualities which he had postulated. Darwin had once jokingly termed himself a "master wriggler" and these powers are not unobservable in the way he met the implied threat to his second hypothesis. It was quite conceivable, he contended, that the ancestors of man, "even if far more helpless and defenseless than any existing savages," had inhabited some safe island, or continent like Australia, until they had achieved sufficient intellect to be a match for the more formidable dangers of the major land masses. There is more than a hint of the Golden Age, of lost echoes from the Earthly Paradise, in this conception. Some of his German followers added a final touch by suggesting that it was in Australia that man had learned to speak by listening to the beautiful voices of singing birds. [17] This idyllic vision is quite in contrast with Darwin's usual emphasis on the major continents where, "in the larger country, there will have existed more individuals and more diversified forms, and the competition will have been severer." [18] In a way, such maneuvers are rather characteristic of late Darwinian days before Weismann, Mendel, and the rise of experimental genetics. There was a great deal of theorizing on very little evidence and if one encountered a stiff argument it was easy to add an ancillary hypothesis or make out a special case. Since Darwin was making extensive use of both natural selection and inheritance of habit, there was really no way in which he could lose such an argument as that described above so long as it was not solvable by experiment. Slowly, however, a certain accumulation of paleontological and archaeological information was taking place. It was this fact, even as early as 1864, that had led Wallace to entertain a new conception of human evolution -- an idea overlooked by Darwin -- which was destined to influence profoundly all later thinking on the subject. Before launching into a discussion of this conception it is important to make clear the fact that Wallace's original formulation of his ideas had nothing whatever to do with his religious beliefs. Wallace, in his later years, became interested in spiritualism. So greatly has our thinking shifted away from the religious interests of the nineteenth century that to consider, or express approval of, certain of Wallace's ideas is occasionally to find oneself labeled, along with Wallace, as a "mystic." This is particularly ironic because, anthropologically speaking, Wallace was somewhat in advance of his confreres, and made, undisputed contributions to our common scientific knowledge, although some of these have been absorbed almost without notice. Modest and solitary by nature, Wallace, unlike Darwin and Huxley, left no scientific descendants to speak for him. A later generation has come to think of him as an old man who had outlived his time, a crotchety evolutionist who, in 1913, had refused to be impressed by the fossil skull from Piltdown. [19] IV. Degeneration or Development When the Ice Age began to be investigated, profound changes in thinking about archaeological problems were brought about. We know, of course, that the abandonment of the idea of a universal deluge and of the conception of special creation forced great alterations in religious belief. Less well known, as observed in the chapter upon the missing links, is the fact that the evolutionists themselves were destined to have some of their own preconceptions shattered. So long as the emphasis upon the living scale of relationships had existed, there had been an unconscious tendency to rank the living races upon a succession of evolutionary levels, and to incorporate the existing anthropoids into the system. Thus Haeckel at one time suggested that he had heard "remarkable clicking sounds" in the noises made by apes, and expressed the conviction that these sounds are still present in the language of the Bushmen. [20] Others maintained that the languages of savage nations were extremely simple, "often not rivalling even that of the children of the civilized," [21] in trying ... to show that man differs from animals only in degree, not in kind; wrote Henry Chapman, who reflects the typical ideas of his period, we hope to have made out a series of transitional forms, beginning with the lower monkeys and ascending from them, through the higher apes and the lower races of mankind to the higher. Thus the skulls of the Chimpanzee, Idiot, Negro and Kalmuck offer a series of ascending forms." [22] It becomes obvious, in the light of such views, that however much Darwin may have talked of the great length of the time scale, such assumptions as those of Chapman, Haeckel, and numerous others would stand in more or less unspoken opposition to an extended history for man. If the sequence of ascent was almost totally visible in the living world, how could it, in reality, be very greatly extended in time? There was, in other words, an unspoken contradiction between the geological demands upon the past and the emphasis of the biologist, particularly in the case of man, upon the living scale of life. The eighteenth century, it is evident, still possessed great power over men's minds. When, therefore, tools and implements began to be traced into Ice Age gravels, and when, moreover, it was seen that these tools were primitive, even though found in an area of present-day high civilization, there was a quickening of interest in evolutionary circles. It was al ready known that the Pleistocene fauna of Europe differed markedly from that of the present, and that several huge beasts 'Such as the hairy mammoth had completely vanished. Awareness of these faunal modifications led to the assumption that when man was found at such levels he would prove to be very primitive -- a real missing link -- of a kind mentally comparable to microcephals and Hottentots. If the big mammals had changed there seemed no reason to suppose that man had not likewise altered in appearance. In fact, so strong had this preconception become that there arose a tendency to see, even among remains that we would now classify as mesolithic, evidences of biological inferiority. Even when the form of the skulls belied such a judgment it was argued that these crania, though indistinguishable from those of modern man, must have contained less gray matter and more interstitial tissue. [23] Such a climate of thought caused the rejection, at first, of clues to the life habits of our upper paleolithic ancestors. u Many did not believe paleolithic men to have been mentally capable of burying their dead, and regarded their mural art with incredulity. As it began to be realized that the Engis skull and other Cra-Magnon specimens revealed no signs of biological inferiority, the notion that simple technological developments could be equated with inferior brains received a severe blow. European man was now looking upon the remains of his own ancestors, both physically and culturally. In physique and skull capacity they were his equals, if not superiors. Even the poorly understood Neanderthal calvarium had housed a large brain. At this point there arose in English intellectual circles a considerable debate between the evolutionists and what we may term the "degenerationists." The "degeneration" school of thought has a long and interesting history which can be pursued into pre-evolutionary times as a pessimistic phase of Christian philosophy related to the doctrine of the Fall of Man and the idea of the sin of the microcosm (man) infecting the macrocosm (the universe). [25] In its new phase at the mid-nineteenth century it represented the last stand of the special creationists against human evolution. In brief compass, this school of thought regarded existing savages, not as surviving fossils representing the past condition of man, but rather as degenerate peoples fallen away from a more ideal condition. Richard Whately (1787-1863), Archbishop of Dublin, was a leading mid-century exponent of this point of view." His influence in conservative circles was powerful, and he had, moreover, the effect of bestirring even his scientific opponents with the necessity of making a response. Using the fact that modem natives often proved intractable and averse to the acceptance of cultural traits from Western society, the Bishop argued that savages were incapable of raising themselves to civilized levels by their own efforts. In the beginning, therefore, civilized man could not have achieved this status unaided, but must have received a divine revelation. Basically the Bishop was using the uninventiveness of man as a premise In a manner -- minus its theological trappings -- not too distinct from that of some of the more extreme diffusionists of the early twentieth century. A considerable debate arose and was continued over a score of years. Some, as Hugh Miller had earlier done, argued that "the farther we remove In any direction from the Adamic center [presumably Palestine], the more animalized and sunk do we find the various tribes or races." [27] A writer in The Contemporary Review observed that "In the savage races of the present day we seem to find the human faculties, not in their fresh virgin state, tending to develop into something better, but arrested and benumbed by long acquiescence in groveling habits. Therefore I think that we are justified In regarding these races as the swamps and backwaters of the stream of noble humanity, and not as the representatives of the fountainhead from which it has been derived." [28] The fall of the ancient civilizations of the Near East and the more recently discovered remains of the Moundbuilders were all presented as clear-cut evidence that man was capable of relapsing from a civilized state. [29] The controversy echoed in the meetings of the British Association and prominent scholars aligned themselves on one side or another. so The entire dilemma was succinctly presented by C. J. D'Oyly when he remarked: "If the Caucasian appeared first, then a degenerating principle, which is observed in no other part of creation, has been allowed to operate, but if the Caucasian has appeared last, then the law of human life, like that of all other organized beings, has been progressive." [31] This remark, which contains three interesting items, is worth consideration. It is revelatory of the white, ethnocentric bias of western Europe in the nineteenth century, it reveals a general acceptance of the evolution of "all other organized beings," but it pauses over what was, given the intellectual climate of the time, an unanswerable question: were the traces of man in the earth a sign of feet going down or of footsteps ascending? The degenerationists had neatly inverted the anthropological argument for evolution: man had not arisen from savagery; he had sunk to it, particularly in those regions most peripheral to Europe. To prove their point lay the Sphinx brooding over fallen Egypt. In the Guatemalan jungles the mathematical computations of the Mayan astronomer-priests lay lost and unread beneath the hungry. rootlets of the rain forest. Who could say that whole nations had not fallen from their once high estate? Steps going up or steps coming down-but how was the archaeologist and ethnologist to judge which, particularly when he was considering peoples without written history, wandering, perhaps, on the bleak shores of Patagonia. In reality both schools of thought were obsessed with one-way processes operating in diametrically opposed directions. The evolutionists, in addition, were struggling to align materials of a widely scattered and unrelated nature. So long as the paleontological record of man was almost lacking, his cultural remains could be read just as easily in terms of peripheral peoples fallen on evil days, and culturally deteriorated, as they could be interpreted in terms of stages in human advancement. This problem was stated with great objectivity by Rudolf Schmid. "Archaeology," he remarked, seems to do no more than admit that its results can be incorporated into the theory of an origin of the human race through gradual development, if this theory can be shown to be correct in some other way, and that its results can just as well be brought into harmony with a contradictory theory." [32] No simple tool, of and by itself, would be sufficient to prove "that there was a condition of mankind lying near that of animals." [33] Grant Allen had been forced to admit that the antiquity of man was growing more far reaching in its implications than had been at first imagined. Instead of being the "missing link," the cave man appeared to be "a mere average savage." The Darwinists seemed confronted either with no traces of man at all or with man essentially like that of the present day. [34] Having now reviewed the problem created by the discovery of the glacial antiquity of European man, let us examine its bearing on the thought of Alfred Russel Wallace. V. Wallace and Human Antiquity If one glances at the map of Wallace's eastern wanderings, one is immediately struck by the many lines which cross and crisscross among the innumerable Islands of the Malay Archipelago [35] They represent the journeys of Wallace over a period of eight years-eight years of passage, often by native prau, among the dangerous reefs and shoals of the eastern seas; eight years among the fevers, the leeches, the ten-inch scorpions; eight years among the solitudes of the great forests. Darwin and Huxley had seen natives in the days of their voyages, but neither had depended so completely or in such a fashion as Wallace upon their good will. It is interesting to observe that Wallace reveals scarcely a trace of the racial superiority so frequently manifested in nineteenth-century scientific circles. "The more I see of uncivilized people, the better I think of human nature; he wrote to a friend in 1855, "and the essential differences between civilized and savage men seem to disappear." [36] When reviewing Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics for Nature in later years, his old thoughts returned. "We find many broad statements as to the low state of morality and of intellect in all prehistoric men," he commented critically, "which facts hardly warrant." [37] So strongly did he differ from the major tendency to arrange natives on decreasing levels of intellect and to picture them as depraved in habits that Sir John Lubbock commented that Wallace's description of savage people differed greatly from that of earlier observers. [38] Somewhere on the seas or in the forests, accompanied by his faithful Malay, Ali, he had ceased to be impressed by the typical conception of the native as a physical and mental fossil. With these attitudes and, paradoxically, being at the same time a confirmed evolutionist, he had returned to England. There he had encountered the degeneration doctrine in the early sixties. Wallace was a man who went his own way. Evolutionist though he was, he had been impressed by some lectures given by a Mr. Albert Mott, the president of the Liverpool Philosophical Society. Mr. Mott appears to have regarded modem man as being basically in no way morally superior to his ancestors. In addition he had advanced the view that savages were often the descendants of more civilized races. [39] Although we do not possess the entire record of Wallace's thinking during the period just prior to 1864, when he published his first great addition to the theory of evolution, we can, nevertheless, discern certain stages in the development of his thought as it progresses through several successive contributions. We can begin with his statement of 1864, which received the approbation of Darwin. [40] In this paper, which marks the beginning of Wallace's divergence from Darwin, we may note three things: (1) he seeks to account for the apparent long-time stability in the appearance of the human species as compared with the faunal variations observable in the upper Pleistocene; (2) he attempts to explain the racial varieties of man on another basis than that of successive stages; (3) he points out, for the first time, that with the rise of the human brain the whole nature of the natural selection process has altered. It should be emphasized once more that there is nothing whatever of a mystical or theological point of view in this paper. It clings carefully to the basic Darwinian formulation of insensible variations selected for survival through the struggle for existence. Darwin himself received the paper with manifestations of pleasure and interest. In a letter to Hooker in May of 1864 he wrote: "I have now read Wallace's paper on Man, and think it most striking and original and forcible. I wish he had written Lyell's chapters on Man.... I am not sure that I fully agree with his views about Man, but there is no doubt. in my opinion, on the remarkable genius shown by the paper. I agree, however, to the main new leading idea." [41] Actually Darwin's point of difference with Wallace at this time revolved around comparatively minor matters involving racial differentiation which Wallace, in a letter to Darwin, clarified more fully and satisfactorily than in his paper. [42] Wallace set out to explain the apparent stability of the human stock by pointing out that it was necessary to account for the fact that the bodily differences between man and the great apes were small but that the gap between them in mental and cranial characters was vast. Unlike some of the other Darwinists, he was not greatly impressed by the living taxonomic scale, nor did he regard modem primitives as almost filling in the gap between man and ape. In effect, what Wallace proposed would run somewhat as follows: he saw the evolution of man as occurring really in two stages. The first would have been represented by the series of physical changes which culminated in his achievement of bipedal posture and the freeing of the hands as implements to carry out the dictates of the brain. This earlier phase of human evolution, whatever the forces that promoted it, was the product of the same type of natural selection that had produced a seal's flipper or the wing of a bird. It was, essentially, an evolution of parts, specializations promoting certain adaptive ecological adjustments of the individual. This type of evolutionary adjustment is omnipresent in the living world. It has led to the discovery of the principles of comparative anatomy and adaptive radiation. The investigation of the mechanisms involving the production of new organs and the alteration of living forms occupies the whole of the Origin of Species. The second stage in human evolution, however -- the stage which represents Wallace's original contribution to the subject, and which elicited admiring plaudits from Darwin -- involves his recognition of the role of the human brain as a totally new factor in the history of life. Wallace was apparently the first evolutionist to recognize clearly and consciously and with a full grasp of its implications the fact that, with the emergence of that bodily specialization which constitutes the human brain, bodily specialization itself might be said to be outmoded. The evolution of parts, the evolution of the sort of unconscious adaptations which are to be observed in the life cycle of a complicated parasite or the surgical mouth parts of a vampire bat, had been forever surpassed. Nature, instead of delimiting through parts a creature confined to some narrow niche of existence, had at last produced an organism potentially capable of the endless inventing and discarding of parts through the medium of a specialized organ whose primary purpose was, paradoxically, the evasion of specialization. The long dominance of partitive evolution, with its choking of life in blind alleys having no evolutionary outlet, was at last over. However imperfect this new brain might be, it had opened up new vistas which, if not limitless, were as yet beyond human experience. There had come into existence, Wallace emphasized, a being in whom mind was of vastly greater importance than bodily structure. For the first time there was offered to a complex living creature the possibility of escape from the endless paleontological story of a generalized animal becoming increasingly specialized until the destruction of its ecological niche foretells its own extinction. Man has the possibilities within him of remaining in the body he now inhabits while whole faunas rise and change or pass away. "We must look," said Wallace, "very far in the past to find man in that early condition in which his mind was not sufficiently developed to remove his body from the modifying influence of external conditions and the cumulative action of 'natural selection.'" [43] Wallace, in other words, conceived of man's body, even though he made allowance for certain continuing minor selective effects, as having reached a kind of timeless aspect in the midst of universal change. "My argument is," he wrote to Darwin, "that this great cranial difference has been slowly developing while the rest of the skeleton has remained nearly stationary; and while the Miocene Dryopithecus has been modified into the existing gorilla, speechless and ape-brained man (but yet man.) has been developed into great-brained, speech forming man." [44] The order of time necessary to bridge the difference between the cranium of an ape and a man he suggested might be enormous and as quite possibly extending into the middle Tertiary. "While the animals which surrounded him have been undergoing modification In an parts of their bodies to a generic or even family degree of difference he [man] has been changing almost wholly in the head." Ten million years or more might be Involved in this peculiar evolutionary development. It had been absurd from the first to expect to see the human phylogeny revealed among the historic races or among upper paleolithic Cro-Magnons. The major racial criteria, he was inclined to believe, dated to the infancy of the race before man was able successfully to protect his body from change." In any case he thought the advantage of his theory lay in its perception of a heretofore unrecognized aspect of evolution and, along with this, a point of view which "neither requires us to depreciate the intellectual chasm which separates man from the apes, nor refuses full recognition of the striking resemblances to them which exists in other parts of his structure." [46] While Wallace, like Darwin at this time, still conceived of human advance largely in terms of intergroup struggle, it is evident that the long phylogeny he had introduced for man lightened the emphasis upon a short unilinear succession of the modem races. Wallace's ideas had greater Christian appeal and, like the degenerationists, he recognized the fact that the decline of elaborate civilizations was sometimes possible. His "compromise," as in a sense it was, between the evolutionists and the degenerationists, was somewhat face-saving for the less fanatical elements in both parties. The Darwinians liked the new lease on time which had been given them. Huxley was willing to consider a Miocene date for man, and Lyell was intrigued by the new hypothesis. Time was still a commodity with which geologists could afford to be bountiful. Moreover, in a world which had yet to yield evidence of genuinely primitive hominids, Wallace had found a way around the big-brained men of the upper Pleistocene. Man might prove to be a very persistent and ancient type in his last, his intellectual phase." [46] Wallace, however, did not leave the subject alone. He persisted in returning to it in a succession of later papers, In doing so he ended by disturbing Darwin and drawing upon his own head accusations of mysticism. It is at this point that we must proceed with the greatest caution. The controversy is less than a century away and it is easy still to find oneself emotionally attracted to one side or the other. What one must do dispassionately is to realize that whatever one may think of certain of Wallace's philosophical interpretations of nature, the man recognized some genuinely unexplained phenomena. It is an ironic aftermath of the Darwinian era that the two discoverers and popularizers of the theory of natural selection should both have found that doctrine inadequate when applied to man. Wallace made the more spectacular rejection and as a consequence, his own somewhat mystical religious convictions occupied more attention than the problems which he raised. Darwin, by contrast, escaped attention through a gift for being ambiguously inconspicuous. Yet it is plain that the Lamarckianism, which increasingly characterized his later years, is particularly evident in his treatment of man. VI. The Concept of Latency We have already had occasion to observe that from the sixties onward there was a decline in geological prestige. Limitless earthly time was being subjected to the scrutiny of a physics which was intensely conscious of heat loss and the second law of thermodynamics. Kelvin, the odious specter who dogged Darwin's footsteps, threatened to compress the earth's history into something like twenty-five million years. There were physicists who argued for even less. Wallace's generous grant of ten million years, or even more, for the development of man would, according to this system, have taken half of the world's time and left the emergence of the rest of life to be dealt with in a compressed series of episodes remarkably similar to the old catastrophism. Keeping in mind this background of thought to which the Darwinists were being forced to give serious attention, let us now examine Wallace's later contributions to human evolution. Wallace had always expressed himself as open to conviction on the subject of human antiquity, but in proposing his theory that man was very old he had recourse to no other possibility so long as he abided by strict Darwinian tenets. These included, first, organic change by almost imperceptible increments, for the Darwinians on the whole abjured saltatory macro-mutations. Second, for intensive selection, a considerable emphasis on large populations. Thus Darwin remarked to Lyell in 1860: "Where there are few individuals variation at most must be slower." [47] In this same vein Wallace observed in 1876, after he had begun to entertain other views, that, according to Darwin's hypothesis, so "distinct a creature as man must have risen at a very early period into the position of a dominant race, and spread in dense waves of population over all suitable portions of the great continent -- for this ... is essential to rapid developmental progress through the agency of natural selection." Third, and most important perhaps in its final effect upon the thinking of Wallace, was Darwin's heavy emphasis upon utility, upon limited perfection. "Natural selection," he had contended in the Origin, "tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitantsof the same country with which it had to struggle for existence. Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection." [48] It was just this reservation when applied to the problem of the rise of the human brain which led Wallace to break with the views of his distinguished colleague. In 1869, much to the dismay of Darwin, he came to the conclusion that natural selection and its purely utilitarian approach to life would not account for many aspects and capacities of the human brain. [49] Furthermore, he began to express concern over the difficulty of accounting for the absence of numerous human remains in the older geological deposits, if humanity had been indeed as numerous as the Darwinian theory demanded. [50] Wallace contended in the Quarterly Review article, which soon drew the attention of Darwin and Huxley, that the brain of the lowest savages, or even of the known prehistoric races, was little inferior to that of Europeans. "Natural selection," he argued, "could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average member of our learned societies." Today, when careful distinctions are made between natural genetic endowment and cultural inheritance, such a remark does not sound particularly iconoclastic. In the time of Wallace, however, it was a direct challenge to Western ethnocentrism and the whole conception of the native as a living fossil destined to be swept away in the struggle for existence because of his feeble and archaic intellect. In contrast to the apocryphal stories of natives who spoke like monkeys, or were almost mute, Wallace pointed out "that, among the lowest savages with the least copious vocabularies, the capacity of uttering a variety of distinct articulate sounds, and of applying to them an almost infinite amount of modulation and inflection, is not in any way inferior to that of the higher races. An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor." In this last sentence we come upon the clue to all of Wallace's later thinking upon man. He had become firmly convinced that man's latent intellectual powers, even in a savage state, were far in excess of what he might have achieved through natural selection alone. "We have to ask; he said later, "what relation the successive stages of improvement of the mathematical faculty had to the life or death of its possessors, to the struggle of tribe with tribe, or nation with nation; or to the ultimate survival of one race and the extinction of another." Musical gifts, high ethical behavior, he had come to doubt as being ever the product of utility in the war of nature. They lay ready for exploitation as much among savages as among the civilized. They were latent powers. "It is a somewhat curious fact," Wallace remarked a little wryly, "that while all modem writers admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very recent development of his intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possibility of men, equal in mental capacity to ourselves, having existed in prehistoric times." [51] Wallace, in other words, had come to the conclusion that whatever the age of man might eventually prove to be, man's intellectual development had reached, biologically, a high level very long ago. Surveying such aspects of man's mental characters having no apparent relation to his material progress, his curious hairlessness, the structure of his larynx, his adept hand, Wallace was inclined to the belief that "some higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed." [52] "If you had not told me; wrote Darwin after the appearance of the Quarterly Review article, "I should have thought your remarks had been added by someone else. As you expected, 1 differ grievously from you, and am very sorry for it. I can see no necessity for calling in an additional and proximate cause in regard to man." [53] The two men remained friends, but the episode must have left both of them -- each in his own way a solitary thinker -- a little lonelier. "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child," sighed Darwin tolerantly, though he could never endure "miraculous additions at anyone stage of ascent." [54] Others viewed Wallace's case more sympathetically. "If we do not admit that latent capacities in the savage brain were implanted for use at some time in the distant future," wrote one reviewer, "we can only say that they are the result of a force which we do not know, and of a law which we have not grasped." [55] But the current of the times was running against mysticism and toward a positivist scientific approach. The Pithecanthropus skull cap and the discoveries at Piltdown gave a new impetus to the pursuit of the fossil history of man. The point raised by Rudolf Schmid -- that the quarrel between degenerationists and evolutionists had to be settled in some other way than by archaeology -- was at last answered by way of paleontology. The degeneration argument was difficult to sustain in the face of so pithecoid a fossil as Pithecanthropus or the ape-jawed creature (later found to be a hoax) from Piltdown. Wallace's contributions to anthropology, on the other hand, the recognition that man had transferred to his tools and mechanical devices the specialized evolution which so totally involves the world of plants and animals, were absorbed into the general body of scientific knowledge. [56] Absorbed also, though in some degree reluctantly, has been the recognition that the higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been roughly stationary throughout the whole range of historic time and must be distinguished from material progress. The Hottentot has ceased to be a step from the monkey people; the Negro's skull is no longer placed on the lecturer's table between that of the gorilla and the Caucasian. Looking back from this vantage point in time we can recognize that some of the physical features of man which troubled Wallace in terms of the selective forces known in his day can now in some degree be accounted for in terms of pedomorphism -- the retention of embryonic or infantile characters into adult life. That such forces have probably played a key part in human evolution is now generally recognized. [57] Wallace observed what he was not in a position to understand. If it led him, finally, away from his fellows toward a somewhat cloud-borne thought, it led him also toward the next century, toward a drama of which he would witness the beginning act before he died in 1913. VII. Brains and Time All through the nineteenth century the brain as the most mysterious of human organs had been under examination. It was then, as it is now, "the greatest enigma of modern science." Cuvier as early as 1804 called attention to the possibility of investigating the brains of extinct animals through natural endocasts. [58] Writing in his Notebook of 1837, Darwin foresaw that his theory would "give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instincts, heredity and mind-heredity." [59] In 1851 J. Stanley Grimes (1807-1903), a forgotten American evolutionist, produced a book which, falling under criticism, he rapidly suppressed; it was entitled Phreno-Geology: The Progressive Creation of Man, Indicated by Natural History and Confirmed by Discoveries which Connect the Organization and Functions of the Brain with the Successive Geological Periods (Boston). [60] As the title indicates, Grimes attempted to correlate the various portions of the brain as they were then understood phrenologically with the different geological periods which rendered their emergence necessary. It is evident that Grimes was acquainted with the work of Von Baer and other European naturalists. His evolutionary philosophy, though crudely entangled with phrenological ideas, contains glimpses of adaptive radiation and of mutations (he terms them "idiosyncracies") such "as to be able to sustain the shock of new circumstances and survive." [61] The book constitutes renewed evidence of the wide dispersal of evolutionary ideas after the success of the Vestiges and shows how infinitesimally close some of these writers came to the leading idea of the Origin. Grimes, as in so many other cases, did not have the technical background to deal with the ideas he had encountered or the ability to realize which of his own were important. His gropings upon brain evolution, however, are in a sense a prelude to the post-Darwinian recognition that the brain, like other bodily organs, has a history extending into the animal past. In this sense he is a pioneer forerunner of men like the neurologist J. Hughlings Jackson, who, later on in the century, observed that as evolution progresses the higher centers of the brain grow more complex and increasingly independent of the lower centers out of which they evolved. [62] Two things, however, these students of the evolving brain were unable to say. They could give no answer to the question of how long it had taken that organ to achieve its present status, nor could they be sure whether Wallace was right in his assumption that the human head had undergone its major alterations after a long period of upright terrestrial activity during which a completely non-prehensile foot had been developed. "We may suppose," Wallace had commented, "that when he had reached the erect form and possessed all the external appearance of man, his brain still remained undeveloped." [63] The one phase was merely a specialized adaptation in the old evolutionary sense; the second, involving the brain, had introduced a new power into the universe. As the attack of physics upon geological time intensified, even Darwin had written to his friend Hugh Falconer: "I should rather like to see it rendered highly probable that the process of formation of a new species was short compared to its duration...." Although he carefully dissociated himself in the same letter from any belief "that new species are suddenly formed like monsters," and emphasized again that species formation was a long process, it is evident that he was willing to consider the possible emergence of a new form in much less time than its after-survival as a species would suggest. [64] Similarly Wallace in 1876, although in the old terms of natural selection he had advocated a very lengthy history for man, was willing to venture that "if ... continued researches in all parts of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light any proofs of his presence, [65] it will be at least a presumption that he came into existence at a much later date, and by a much more rapid process of development." Wallace, at this point, could suggest as a "fair argument" only the possibility that man's evolution had been guided by "higher agencies." [66] Since this hypothesis removed the issue to the domain of metaphysics, it was not taken seriously in science, and the genuine question which he had raised about human antiquity faded from scientific attention. Although discoveries of fossil human material had been slight, the Pithecanthropus skull cap and thigh bone had suggested a development in which bipedalism, as Wallace had prophesied, preceded the full growth of the brain. Furthermore, the renewed grant of geological time. which emerged after the recognition of radioactivity, made the issue of human antiquity less pressing than it had begun to appear in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Then in 1912 came the public announcement of the discovery of the Piltdown skull which precipitated the caustic remark from Wallace that "it does not prove much, if anything." [*] It was, perhaps, Wallace's last comment upon the fossil past of man. He died in November of the following year. It may reasonably be asked why he had dismissed in this cavalier manner the skull with which so many others were impressed -- he, the last survivor of those who had fought and won the battle for evolution long ago, he who had lived to see the shadows which had haunted Darwin well-nigh dispelled. Did he have some inkling that the skull was an imposture? [67] It seems unlikely. Rather it may be suspected that in some degree he was actuated by the thought that the skull did not fit his own conception of human evolution. The Piltdown skull had presented the contemporary workers with a most peculiar situation. Both Pithecanthropus and Piltdown, at the time of discovery, had been assigned very early datings around the Plio-Pleistocene border. Yet the disparity in appearance between the two specimens was such as to suggest quite different evolutionary forces at work. The Java cranium, as we have noted, seemed to substantiate Wallace's view of a brain slowly increasing in size long after the attainment of the upright posture. Piltdown, by contrast, with its anthropoid jaw combined with a sapiens cranium suggested that the brain had advanced more rapidly than other parts of the body. Suggestions were also made that the creature had not even fully acquired an upright position. [68] So great was the resulting confusion introduced into human paleontology that all kinds of supporting hypotheses and ramifying family trees had to be elaborated to take care of this anomalous situation. Watson, after pointing out in 1928 that the specimens were of approximately the same age, commented that on the analogy of what we knew of evolution in other mammals it should be possible to discover "the characteristic structure of early Pleistocene man." The results of such a comparison, Watson had to confess, were "very disappointing." He found human variability "unusually great," and was only able to reduce the differences by attributing a small and primitive brain to the Piltdown fragments. [69] Within the last two decades a new and striking series of developments have served to rearouse the long dormant interest in the antiquity of the human line. We here refer to Wallace's second phase of human evolution: that involving the emergence of the true culture- producing brain. In the first place there is a growing body of evidence -- not at this writing conclusive, but far more weighty than at the time Wallace first raised the question in 1876 -- suggesting that in geological terms the evolution of the human brain has been extremely rapid. Dr. Tilly Edinger, distinguished paleoneurologist of Harvard University, has commented that enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres by fifty per cent seems to have taken place, geologically speaking, almost instantaneously, without having been accompanied by any marked increase in body size. [70] There are also suggestions, in terms of new dating .methods, that the million-year age of the Pleistocene period may be shortened by new studies, [71] which would have the indirect consequence of further reducing the age of the fossil men now known to us. Pithecanthropus, once assigned a late Pliocene age, has long since been correlated with the middle Pleistocene, and a great many, in fact most, of the paleanthropic men remaining to us fall within the latter half of Pleistocene time. Below this level, and stretching backward into the mistier reaches of the lower Pleistocene, the researches of Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, J. T. Robinson, and others have revealed a curious series of anthropoids so close to the human border line that it remains a moot question whether they were already "tool users" in a very primitive way, or whether they are actually bipedal apes whose brains had not achieved even a low "human" level. Numerous finds and accumulating information may settle these disputed points before long. Whether all of this rather variable assemblage now referred to as the Australopithecine man-apes is on the direct human line of ascent or not, it suggests the postulated earlier omnivorous ground phase of Wallace's twofold scheme of hominid evolution. The variability of the forms themselves unmistakably reminds one also of another aspect of Wallace's thought. In the tropics, he had theorized, perhaps in Africa, "we may trace back the gradually decreasing brain of former races, till we come to a time when the body also begins materially to differ. There we should reach the starting point of the human family. Before that period [man] had not enough mind to preserve his body from change, and would, therefore, have been subject to the same comparatively rapid modifications of form as other mammals." [72] Curiously enough, of all the ancestral primate relatives of man, these East African grassland apes, if apes they were, have come closest to filling those century-old speculations. One asks inevitably, and asks again, what forces were at work, if indeed the human brain, as now seems likely, "exploded" so precipitously upon the world. Certainly competitive tribal struggle in the old Darwinian sense would seem to have little to do with man's pedomorphic nakedness and the other curious qualities that drew Wallace's attention long ago. This does not mean that we have to abandon natural selection as a principle, but it is obvious that we must seek selective factors of a sort that Darwin never envisaged, and which may be bound up with speech and social factors difficult to investigate paleontologically. As Watson has remarked, the most fascinating problems of human evolution may actually lie beyond the grasp of the paleontologist who must, of necessity, deal with the shapes of bone. It may be, as he says, that "those structures whose qualities can alone explain the meaning of man's evolution lie beyond his sight." [73] Even a great modern geneticist has confessed humbly: "The causes which have brought about the development of the human species can be only dimly discerned...." [74] H.S. Harrison once put the matter: "Man did very well before he was a man at all, and no one has given any reason why he ceased to be an ape." We are "trying to understand ... the way in which natural man became unnatural." [75] Can it be, one wonders, as one surveys this century-long discussion, that both Darwin and Wallace had within their grasp the general outline of a theory which, without the necessary addition of any metaphysical elements, might have answered some of the questions which so constantly baffled them? With man, as Fiske remarked, one is started upon a new chapter in the history of the universe. It is as though nature had chosen to bypass all her previous experiments in the making of limbs, paddles, teeth, and fins save for one thing: to place a manipulative forelimb under the conscious control of the brain, to totally encephalize the hand. The brain and hand alone will now order the environment that once ordered them. Trees will be cut, fires will be started, flint will fly. But, asked Wallace, how did it come? Darwin "has taken care to impress upon us that natural selection has no power to produce absolute perfection, no power to advance any being much beyond his fellow beings, but only just so much beyond them as to enable it to survive them in the struggle for existence." [76] The power of natural selection is thus limited, but man, even savage man, sings and dreams, contains within himself vast latent powers that, properly educated, measure worlds and atoms. These powers are not the product of internecine struggle. From whence did they come? A brain a little better than that of a gorilla would have sufficed for man. Hidden in a few obscure sentences in the Descent Of Man is Darwin's answer, and it is a tremendous one, so far as his point of view and Wallace's are concerned. Yet in reality it is a sleepwalker's answer, the response of a man so deeply immersed in the thinking of his period that his response is like that of an oracle who, in a trance, speaks a prophetic truth but does not envision its consequences. "In many cases," wrote Darwin, "the continued development of a part, for instance of the beak of a bird, or of the teeth of a mammal, would not aid the species in gaining its food, or for any other object; but with man we can see no definite limit to the continued development of the brain and mental faculties, as far as advantage is concerned." [77] In those words Darwin momentarily broke with his principle of relative or limited perfection because he had realized that the achievement of the reasoning brain swings open a possible door to perfection whose story is not told by the limited advantage of a butterfly's wing -- though the life of man may yet prove as airy and as insubstantial as that delicate insect. For an instant, for just a solitary, musing instant as he wrote, the mind that had conceived in youth the whole vast evil and the good of life perhaps heard far-off an opening door. But Darwin was old, and the moment passed. He composed no essay, he made no answer. Across the pages of the selfsame book march struggle and habit, the war of tribe with tribe. He did not realize, nor did Wallace, without appeal to special intervention, realize that with the shift from the evolution of parts to the evolution of the brain the principle of relative perfection did not rule. Once the higher qualities begin to emerge, man in his loneliness may well have felt drawn to them as even a dog prefers the kinder, understanding hand. Selection, then, to a certain extent, may have come under the guidance of man's nobler nature, just as he unconsciously selected for temperament the kind of animals he wanted. In the words of F. R. Tennant, "The human mind once having attained in the course of evolution to ideation, social intercourse and language, is in a position to develop spontaneously, no longer controlled by mechanical selection (which is but rejection) but by its own interest and intrinsic potencies. From intelligence and emotional sensibility that are biologically useful it may proceed to disinterested science, to pure mathematics having no relation to the needs of life, to art, morality, and religion, no one of which products, rather than another, requires the Deus ex machina to cause its emergence." [78] These remarks are not given to suggest that every aspect of the rise of the human brain, or the matter of how it came by the curious accelerated spurt which it shows at birth, is fully understood. Rather it is to reiterate that in the expanded cortex of man a new world has opened out. The precise instincts of the lower mammals have been replaced by a highly malleable and adaptive behavior controlled by the culture of the group. This cultural phase of man, which has seemed to set him off so totally from other animals, has been recently re-examined by A. I. Hallowell, who comes to the conclusion that a false dichotomy has been erected by our tendency to regard existing man as the possessor of "culture," and the animal world, including our primate relatives, as totally lacking in such human traits. "The possession of culture," he writes, "has tended to become an all-or-none proposition." By contrast he postulates what he terms a proto-cultural stage which might well have been reached early, "even before the development of speech." There may have been some slight degree of tool using, some learned behavior, but not the whole range of activities, including speech, which we now tend to regard as so uniquely human. Because Darwin and his associates pushed living apes too close to living men, a reaction set in which led anthropologists, even while rendering lip service to morphological evolution, to imply that culture is a whole with a "relatively constant categorical content." Culture and "man," whatever this latter word might mean in the cloudy borderlands of prehistory, had presumably appeared together. [79] Obviously such a clear-cut artificial distinction interposed a barrier between man and his remote forerunners which would have baffled Darwin and his associates. Ironically enough, a good bit of the responsibility for this artificial barrier must be attributed to the Darwinian circle. They had been too hasty in their assumption that animals possessed rudimentary speech and that living natives echoed the higher primates in their vocabularies. They had confused culture with biological endowment as thoroughly, perhaps, as later anthropologists have tended to assume that what we call "culture" is a single emergent without rudimentary preliminaries which may even precede language. They had, with such notable and infrequent exceptions as Wallace, contributed, though often unintentionally, to racial prejudice. Perhaps there is something appropriate, in the end, about the fact that Wallace was a searcher after birds of paradise and that he was a butterfly hunter among the islands of the Coral Sea. He loved beauty, and among the many rarities he came to cherish was the potential moral beauty of man. He found it among simple people and it never passed away from his heart. _______________ Notes: 1. Anonymous, "The Origin of Intellect," Edinburgh Review, 1889, Vol. 170, p. 359. 2. Descent of Man, 2d revised ed., New York, 1874, pp. 30, 178. VAP, Vol. 2, p. 63. Also LLD, Vol. 2, p. 211. 3. Descent of Man, 2d ed., New York, 1874. p. 40. 4. Ibid., p. 37. See also LLD, Vol. 3, p. 90. 5. Ibid., pp. 46, 60. 6. Ibid., p. 56. 7. See, for example, Ibid., pp. 98-99. 8. Henry C. Chapman in his Evolution of Life (Philadelphia 1873) said that "the roots in the languages of the lowest races of mankind resemble the sounds made by monkeys" (pp. 172-73). Innumerable similar remarks exist in the literature of the period. "Even to this day," comments one writer as late as 1914, "there are said to be some low tribes In South America whose spoken language is so imperfect that they cannot converse in the dark." Science Progress, 1914, Vol. 8, p. 524. 9. My Life, New York, 1905, Vol. 1, p. 433. 10. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 95. 11. My Life, Vol. 1, pp. 354-55. 12. Descent of Man, 2d ed., New York, 1874, p. 9. 13. Ibid., p. 176. 14. Ibid., p. 59. 15. For more extended discussion of this subject the reader should consult R. I. Pocock, "The New Heresy of Man's Descent," Conquest, 1920, Vol. 1, pp. 151-57, and W. L. Straus, Jr., "The Riddle of Man's Ancestry," The Quarterly Review of Biology, 1949, Vol. 24, pp. 200-23. 16. New York edition of 1884, p. 22. 17. W. J. Sollas, "The Evolution of Man," Scientia, 1911, Vol. 9, p. 136. 18. O, 6th ed. Modem Library, New York, p. 152. 19. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, p. 347. 20. See Walter Smith, "Why Is the Human Ear Immobile?" popular Science Monthly, 1904, Vol. 65. p. 225. 21. H. C. Chapman, op. cit., p. 172. 22. Op. cit., p. 169. 23. Rudolph Virchow, Freedom of Science in the Modern State,London, 1878, pp. 58-61. Virchow himself, however, did not accept this. 24. Glyn Daniel, A Hundred Years of Archaeology, Duckworth, London, 1950, p. 97. 25. Ronald W. Hepburn, "George Hakewill: The Virility of Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1955. Vol. 16. pp. 135-50. The whole earlier history of the subject has been excellently treated In Ernest Tuveson's Millennium and Utopia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1949, and in Victor Harris's All Coherence Gone, University of Chicago Press, 1949. E. S. Carpenter has devoted attention to its nineteenth-century aspect in his paper "The Role of Archaeology in the 19th Century Controversy Between Developmentalism and Degeneration," Pennsylvania Archaeologist, 1950, Vol. 20, pp. 5-18. 26. Richard Whately, "On the Origin of Civilization," Miscellaneous Lecturer and Reviews, London, 1861, pp. 26-59. The paper dates originally to 1854. 27. Testimony of the Rocks, Edinburgh, 1869, pp. 229-30. 28. A. Grant, "Philosophy and Mr. Darwin," The Contemporary Review, 1871, Vol. 17, p. 281. 29. H. B. Tristram, "Recent Geographical and Historical Progress in Zoology," The Contemporary Review, 1866, Vol., p. 124. 30. For a contemporary analysis of some of the leading arguments and books see J. Hannah, "Primeval Man," The Contemporary Review, 1869, Vol. 2, pp. 161-77. 31. "Man In Creation," The Contemporary Review, 1868, Vol. 8, p. 555. 32. The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion and Morality, Chicago, 1883, p. 91. 33. Ibid., p. 90. 34. "Who Was Primitive Man?" Fortnightly Review, 1882, Vol. 38, pp. 308-9. 35. My Life, New York, 1905, Vol. 1, p. 368. 36. Ibid., p. 342. 37. "Modern Applications of the Doctrine of Natural Selection," Nature, 1873, Vol. 7, p. 277. 38. "The Malayan Archipelago," Macmillan's Magazine, 1869, Vol. 19. p. 533. 39. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, p. 335. I have been able to and a record of one paper of Mott's delivered before the Liverpool Philosophical Society on October 6, 1873. It Is entitled "On the Origin of Savage Life." St. George Mivart quotes extensively from it in his Lessons from Nature, New York, 1876, p. 148 ff. 40. A. R. Wallace, "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the "Theory of Natural Selection,'" Anthropological Review, 1864, Vol. 2, pp. clviii-clxxxvii. 41. MLD, Vol. 2. pp. 31-32. 42. Ibid., pp. 35-36. 43. Op. cit., p. clxvii. 44. My Life, Vol. 1. p. 419. 45. See Stanley Garn, "Race and Evolution." American Anthropologist, 1957. Vol. 59. pp. 218-23 for a discussion of modern genetic views on race. Today, so far as racial characteristics go, man is seen as possibly more malleable than Wallace envisaged. 46. Anthropological Review, 1864, Vol. 2, p. clxix. 47. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 143. Modern students of genetic drift, quantum evolution, and similar subjects will realize that small populations need not Inhibit evolutionary change. but this fact was not grasped in the Darwinian period, which lacked our present knowledge of genetics. 48 O, pp. 172-73. 49."Geological Climates and the Origin of Species," Quarterly Review, 1869, Vol. 126, pp. 359-94. Other papers followed. Most of them can be found In the uniform edition of Wallace's works issued by the Macmillan Co. of London. 50. Darwinism, London, 1896, p. 458. 51. "Difficulties of Development as Applied to Man," Popular Science Monthly, 1876, Vol. 10, p. 65. 52. Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, London, 1895, p. 204. This particular paper, "Limits of Natural Selection in Man," was written in 1870. 53. Marchant, op. cit., p. 199. 54. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 211. 55. Anonymous, "Darwin on the Descent of Man," Edinburgh Review, 1871, Vol. 134, p. 204. 56. The idea was hailed by most of the leading thinkers of the period, including Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Chauncey Wright, James McCosh, Edward S. Morse, E. Ray Lankester and many others. In the words of John Fiske "it seemed to open up an entirely new world of speculation." (A Century of Science, Boston 1899 p. 104.) 57. See Gavin de Beer, Embyros and Ancestors, 2d rev. ed., Oxford University Press, 1951; also M. F. Ashley Montagu, "Time, Morphology, and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man," American Anthropologist, 1955, Vol. 57, pp. 13-27· 58. Tilly Edinger, "Objets et Resultats de la Paleoneurologie," Annales de Paleontologie, 1956, Vol. 42, p. 97. 59. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 8. 60. Later, In 1881, the work was republished under the title Problems of Creation (Chicago). 61. Op. cit., [in text above] p. 135. 62. Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System, London, 1888, p. 38. 63. The Wonderful Century, New York, 1898, p. 134. 64. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 244. 65. That is, in truly ancient deposits. 66. "Difficulties of Development as Applied to Man," Popular Science Monthly, 1876, Vol. 10, p. 65. * Marchant, op. cit., p. 347. 67. For an account of the exposure of the hoax in 1953 the reader is referred to J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery, Oxford University Press, 1955. 68. W. P. Pycraft, "The Jaw of Piltdown Man," Science Progress, 1917, Vol. 65, p. 391. 69. D. M. S. Watson, Paleontology and the Evolution of Man, Oxford University Press, 1928, pp. 14-19. It should he said in justice to Dr. Watson that many other scholars found similar difficulties and made similar adjustments in dealing with the Piltdown material. His very complaints reveal an intuitive sense that something about the situation was abnormal. I merely use his work to illustrate a general trend of thought. 70. Op. cit., p. 5. 71. Cesare Emiliani, "Note on Absolute Chronology of Human Evolution," Science, 1956, Vol. 123, pp. 924-26. 72. Op. cit., 1864, p. clxviii. 73. Watson, op. cit., p. 27. 74. Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom, Columbia University Press, 1956, p. 9. 75. H. S. Harrison "Evolution In Material Culture," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1930, p. 140. 76. A. R. Wallace, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, London, 1895, p. 187. 77. Op. cit., p. 169. (Italics mine. L.E.) 79. A. I. Hallowell, "The Structural and Functional Dimensions of a Human Existence," The Quarterly Review of Biology, 1956, Vol. 31, pp. 88-101.
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