Sir Arthur Keith on the Descent of Man

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 March 1928, Page 9

Sir Arthur Keith on the Descent of Man

/WlkY IR ARTHUR KEITH, Hunterian Professor at ! the Royal Collese of Surgeons, and Conservator of its great mU ’ seum in Lincoln’s Inn, ' was born in Aberdeenshire sixty-one years ago. As President of the British Association at Leeds last September, his address—“ Darwin’s Theory of Mans Origin as it stands To-day”—was the occasion of the revival of the old controversy over man’s relationships to lower animal forms. Practically what was said in 1860, after the publication of the “Origin of Species,” was said all over again in 1927. A Curious Fact It is curious, as the scientific correspondent of “The Times” points out, that the controversy which immediately broke out was not concerned with the highly technical aspect of the question; that is to say, the means by which evolution came about, but the fact of evolution itself, and especially the fact of Man’s descent. What Sir Arthur Keith said is ver?/ well summarised by “The Times” correspondent: — When Darwin wrote “The Descent of Man,” the arguments he was able to assemble were almost wholly circumstantial. He showed that the human body was built on the same general plan as that of other mammals, and showed particular resemblances with that of the apes. He described a number of organs which were rudimentary in man and apparently functionless, but explicable if they were legacies from ancestors in which they were fully developed. He showed that the embryological development of man was practically identical with that of the apes. He discussed at length many of the themes opened in “The Origin of Species,” developed them further, and showed how the origin of man by descent from apes was possible or even probable. Similarly he analysed human mental capacities and showed their relation to those of animals, and collected evidence of the development of intellectual and moral faculties during primeval and civilised times. With patient genius he built up a case, convincing everyone who understood it, that man had ascended from the lower animals, or that scientific reasoning was a delusion. But it remained a case, as there was almost no fossil evidence.

A Case for Experts

What can the non-scientific person possibly say about the significance of our possession of an appendix verrniformis, of the presence of gill-slits in the human embryo, or of the hippo-

campal convolution in the brain of apes. The ordinary man would say: “These things are Greek. to me”; just so, but it is on these things that the arguments of the evolutionists are based. What can the average man know about the age of a skull from Java or Neanderthal or Piltdown? Nothing; but it is after a study c£ these remains that the evolutionist has come to his conclusions, writes Professor D. F. Fraser-Harris in “The Outlook.” But, as I have said, the curious thing is that most of the controversy that arose after Sir Arthur Keith’s address was not concerned with the technical discoveries of recent years, but about the general fact of man’s descent and the circumstantial evidence which was advanced by Darwin forty years ago, and then generally accepted. His’critics and his defenders alike seemed to believe that not Augustine on the Fall but Darwin on the Descent was the matter at issue. In humbler circles all the old arguments against our kinship with apes were repeated, some of them as crude as the absence of a tail in man, others as subtly self-deceptive as that Darwin was not acquainted with the work of Mendel. The most popular of these resuscitations is the suggestion that the modern great apes are degenerate men —a view which is supported by no shadow of evidence. It would seem that Sir Arthur Keith’s address has “more than justified itself as a needed effort in popular education.”

Keith’s Career

Keith was in the first instance a student of medicine. He began his studies at the University of Aberdeen —“Dugald Dalgettey’s College,” as lie called it, in the North of Scotland. Here he was soon fascinated by the theories which about forty-three years ago were occupying the foremost minds in biology. Keith, as a young man, found in anatomy not what most students find in it, a mass of dry and apparently unrelated facts to be memorised somehow, but a realm of transcendingly interesting /speculation. Man’s origin was, he considered, Hie thing to try to understand. Was this body of ours created out of nothing

in an instant of time with all its vestigial organs complete, or did it assume its present form after aeons of modification from some remote ancestral form? In due time Keith took his M.D. degree; but his heart was not in medical practice, for already science had marked him for her own. He was determined to grasp, if possible, the scope and the details of that matvellous series of changes whereby through vast periods of time man has become to-day the paragon of animal:-. His own words on one occasion were: “In what some people call a great Golgotha, the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places.” He not only knows the museum but knows how to make it illustrate his lectures and his admirable writings, for he is the author of several books on anatomy, embryology, and anthropology—the sciences of mankind —books which are regarded by his peers in science to be standard, authoritative works of reference. His first book on “Man’s Evolution” his publisher returned to him with the remark: “Too good for apy public I know of.”