Pageant of Evolution

Hawera Star, Volume L, 26 April 1930, Page 9

Pageant of Evolution

300 Million Years

A BOUT three hundred years ago telescopic astronomy began with Galileo Galilei, and the outcome has been one of the greatest of man s achievements. Yet there >vas not in the beginning, of telescopic astronomy anything abrupty discontinuous, miraculous, or mysterious. Even a great astronomer is not different in kind from commonplace men; there is no more, to be explained than an intensification of ordinary powers and a new pattern of mind, writes Professor J. Arthur Thomson in “John o’ Imndon’s Weekly.” Some three thousand years ago observational and deflective astronomy began with the precursors of Hipparchus, and the outcome has been the iscientific view of Nature. Yet there is not even in the genius of such intellectual giants as Eudoxus and Archimedes anything inexplicably new. It has been said of Archimedes that he was “perhaps the most perfect type of scientific- intellect that has appeared in the world,” but be was not in any way foreign in Ids lineage. He had his* precursors just as he has had ids continuations.

heritance of old-established social promptings. Perhaps three hundred thousand vears ago Mail himself came to his own—a being able to form general ideas and experiment with them and communicate them to his fellows. Ais distinguished from intelligence, he had also JLteaison; as distinguished from words, he had also Language. We are speaking here not of "‘tentative men,’ like Jibanth’ropus of Piltdowu or Pitheconthropus of Java, but of early true men who represented the genius homo, to which we, of the homo sapiens species have the honour to belong. 'He was probably a cerebral mutation, and no anthropologist will belittle the difficulty of giving a circumstantial account of the factors that led to his emergence. But our present point is that there is no warrant for regarding man- as implying any breach of continuity with the anthropoids, from which his lineage had diverged long before. Man has an undeniable apartness, but in emphasising this wo must not lose sight of his solidarity with the rest of creation. He was probably, as we have isaid, a cerebral mutation, hue lie was not a great exception. He was a novel pattern, but he was hut thje finest bloom on «| fine-flowered tree. He was the culmination of evolutionary trends, especially in the cerebral cortex, which are recognisable in his prehuman ancestry. Not, of course, that he was an additive result of the wrinklings of the cerebral cortex and the multiplying oi nerve cells in the “nehpallium,” he was fix new creation, in whom thje ; whole world became new. Into the fabric of humanity came many strands of many mammals, (but some threads were new and others became new when woven into a. new pattern. If we multiply our three hundred years again, and try to think back for three hundred millions of years, we find ourselves among the first animals, feeding on the fragments of a still earlier vegetation. If anyone is sure that the figure should be five hundred millions or nine hundred millions, who shall say him nay? But he must not. of course, push the emergence of liv ing organisms upon the earth back ti a time when the temperature was ton

liig.li to allow of plenty of water in a liquid state. That is a sine qua non lor protoplasmic life, as we know it; and we need not talk of any other. Living creatures are very different from .stones and stars, crystals and dew drops. They have unique qualities of persisting in spite of ceaseless change; of multiplying; of enregistering their experience so that subsequent behaviour is affected; or gutting tilings done; of evolving progressively. Have we not here an undeniable ‘ discontinuity—that between the living and the non-living? And yet there is much t>o discountenance* tins, as a dogmatism at least. There are no chemical elements in living creatures that are not common in the world around them; there is no specific vital energy that is not recognisable in the physical universe; with the help ol light the synthetic chemist can truild up sugar from water and carbonic acid gas, and he can go on and on till he makes nitrogenous car-bou-compouncls which are the buildingstones of living matter. Moreover, as everyone knows, the modern conception of non-living matter is far removed from the* old inertness and passivity. While it seems to us personally that, the ways of organisms transcend all mechanism, and require special categories for their description, there is no doubt that our ' increasing knowledge of the non-living order of nature is disclosing a physical world with which living creatures are not so discontinuous as they once appeared. It was in a cosmos that life emerged, not in a chaos, if there ever was any such state. And, on the animal side at least, organisms soon began to show an indication of an inner or mental life—perhaps the central secret of esprit de corps. And as we cannot juggle anvthing like “mind” out of “matter”—which is after all a mental abstraction —we come back to the Aristotelianism that there can be nothing in the end which was not present in kind in the beginning. Whether we start with the beginning of society, or man, or life or the earth, or the nebula. we must start with an order of nature which cannot be called inanimate. For of each and all it must be said: In the beginning was mind.

Perhaps thirty thousand years ago the inhabitants of several adjacent villages banded themselves together to build with speed a breakwater against the flood that had so often before swept away their homesteads. It mattered little what the common cause was, but its outcome was a, human society—a unit larger than the family, a corporate body of many self-subor-dinating members acting ais one, with a common endeavour that made the whole more than the sum of its parts. It was a momentuous step when the; nascent espirit do corps found expression in a society thrilled by a common endeavour; ancl the outcome of the small beginnings holds us all in its grasp —so potent both for good and ill. No one supposes that the problem of the origin of man’s societary forms is an easy problem; but our present point is that there is nothing startling! or unexpected or seeming magical in such a beginning. For even early man was never an each-for-himself * individualistic solitary ; he was a scion of a gregarious stock, with social predispositions, with a prolonged infancy and playful childhood in a family circle, with an in-

Order Throughout the Ages