The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its Scope

by Henry Edward Crampton

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It is best to look at the whole question in a very simple and common-sense way before undertaking an extended examination of the details of human diversity. The most casual survey of the peoples that we know best because of our own individual nearness to them enables us to realize that the races now upon the earth have not existed forever and ever, or even for the age of 6000 years as contended by Archbishop Ussher. They have all come into existence as such, and they differ from their known antecedents; so that at the very outset common-sense leads us to accept evolution as true, if we admit that human races have changed during the course of recent centuries. We know, for example, that the so-called Mexicans of to-day are a people produced by a fusion of Spanish conquerors and Indian aborigines the Mexican is neither Spaniard nor Indian, though he may resemble both in certain respects; he is a product of natural evolution, accomplished in this case by an amalgamation of two contrasted types. When we speak of the American people, we must realize that it too has come into existence as such, and even, indeed, that it is in the actual process of evolution at the present time. The various foreign elements that have been added during the last few decades by the hundreds of thousands are becoming merged with the people who preceded them, just as the Dutch and the French and the English coalesced during the days of early settlement to form the young American nation. Perhaps most of us call ourselves Anglo-Saxon, but we are in reality somewhat different even in physical respects from the Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's time, who alone deserved the name Anglo-Saxon. This very term indicates an evolution of a type that differs from both the Angles and the early Saxons of King Alfred's age. These are simple examples which illustrate many features of the universal history of human races wherever they are to be found. Even in the comparatively peaceful times of our modern era the history of any race is a veritable turmoil of constant changes; conquerors impress their characters upon the vanquished, while the victors often adopt some of the features of the conquered. Colonies split off from the mother nation to follow out their destinies under other conditions. Nowhere does the naturalist find evidence of long-established permanence, or an unentwined course of an uninterrupted and unmodified line of racial descent.

It is the task of the student of human evolution to unravel the tangled threads of human histories. The task is relatively simple when it is concerned with recent times where the aid of written history may be summoned but when the events of remote and prehistoric ages are to be placed in order, the difficulties seem well-nigh insuperable. All is not known, nor can it ever be known; but wherever facts can be established, science can deal with them. By a study of the present races of mankind, much of their earlier history can be worked out, for their genetic relations may be determined by employing the principle that likeness means consanguinity. Let us suppose an alien visitor to reach our planet from somewhere else; if he were endowed with only ordinary human common-sense, he would very soon ascertain the common origin of the English-speaking people in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and many other places. Even if he could not understand a word of the English language, he would be justified in regarding them all as the descendants of common ancestors because they agree in so many physical qualities. The anthropologist works according to the same common-sense principle, obtaining results that find no explanation other than evolution when the varying characters that are used to determine social relationship are properly classified and related. It is to these characters that we must now give some attention.

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The average stature of adults varies in different races from four feet one inch in certain blacks to nearly six feet and seven inches, as among the Patagonians. These are the extreme values for normal averages, although dwarfs only fifteen inches high have been known, while "giants" sometimes occur with a height of nine feet and five inches. Such individuals are of course rare and abnormal, and are not to be taken into account in establishing the average stature of a race for use in comparison with that of another group.

The color of the skin is another criterion of racial relationship, though it is more variable in races of common descent than we are wont to assume. We are familiar with the fair and florid skin of the northern European, the fair and pale skin in middle and southern Europe, the coppery red of the American Indian, the brown of the Malay, of the Polynesian and of the Moor, the yellowish cast of the Chinese and Japanese, and the deeper velvety black of the Zulu; but it has been found that many of the close relatives of the black are lighter in skin color than some of our Caucasian relatives, so that this character cannot be taken by itself as a single criterion of racial affinity.

Perhaps the most conservative and most reliable character that serves for the broad classification of the human races is the shape of the individual hairs of the head. We are familiar with the straight lank hair of the Mongolian peoples and of the various tribes of American Indians, in whom the hair possesses these peculiarities because each element grows as a nearly perfect cylinder from the cells of the skin at the bottom of a tiny pit or hair-follicle. The familiar wavy hair of white men owes its character to the fact that the individual elements are formed by the skin, not as pencil-like rods, but as flattened cylinders. They are oval or elliptical in cross-section, and when they emerge from the skin they grow into a long spiral. If, now, the hair is formed as a very much flattened rod about one-half as wide in one diameter as in the other, it curls into a very tight close spiral and gives the frizzly or woolly head-covering of the Papuan and of the Negro.

In the next place, the shape of the cranium is a character of much value. This is determined as the proportion between the transverse diameter of the skull above the ears to the long diameter, namely, the line that runs from the middle of the brow to the most posterior point of the skull. In the so-called "long-headed" or dolichocephalic races, the proportion is seventy-five to one hundred, while in those forms that have more rounded or brachycephalic heads, like the Polynesian and the black pygmy, the relation is eighty-three to one hundred. The cranial capacity again varies considerably, from nine hundred cubic centimeters to twenty-two hundred cubic centimeters. Many striking variations are also found in the projection of the jaws. A line drawn from the lower end of the nose to the chin makes a certain angle with the line drawn from the chin to the posterior end of the lower jaw; if the jaw projects very greatly, this angle will be much less than when they do not. In most of the Caucasian peoples, the lines meet at an angle of eighty-nine degrees, or very nearly a right angle, but in some of the lower races the figure may be only fifty-one degrees. Additional characters of the teeth and of the palate are also taken into account, and have proved their utility. Finally, the nose exhibits a wide range of variation from the small delicate feature of the Chinaman to the large, well-arched nose of the Indian. It may be hollowed out at the bridge instead of arched; again, it may be nearly an equilateral triangle in outline, as in the Veddahs, and the nostrils may open somewhat forward instead of downward. As many as fifteen distinct varieties of the human nose have been catalogued by Bertillon.

These are the principal bodily characters which the anthropologist uses to distinguish races and by their means to determine the more immediate or remote community of origin of comparable types. Many of these characteristics, as indeed we may already see, are decidedly important in connection with the second problem specified above, for in the case of the flat triangular nose and projecting jaws of a low negroid we may discern clear resemblances to certain features of the apes.

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