United States or Finland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It summarises the history of species; ontogenesis, we are told, reproduces phylogenesis. And what do we observe then?
Then Science is more ignorant than the children at any village school. CONRAD. Of course if you think it more scientific to say that what we are discussing is not Adam and Eve and Eden, but the phylogeny of the blastoderm SAVVY. You neednt swear, Nunk. I can call Genesis Phylogenesis.
Or, briefly stated, ontogenesis, or the embryonic development of the individual, is a brief recapitulation of phylogenesis, or the ancestral development of the phylum or group. The illustration and proof of this law is the work of the embryologist. We have time to draw only one or two illustrations from the embryonic development of birds.
The third is intended to show that there is in the forms of life themselves, as a faculty of adaptation peculiar to them, a primary purposiveness, which is unquestionably active throughout the lifetime and development of every individual, but which is also the deepest cause of “phylogenesis,” or the formation of a race.
It is probable that the sensitive and travelling leucocytes of our invertebrate ancestors have powerfully co-operated for millions of years in the phylogenesis of the advancing animal organisation. The red blood-cells have a much more restricted sphere of distribution and activity.
The more we reflect upon it, the more we shall see that this production of the same effect by two different accumulations of an enormous number of small causes is contrary to the principles of mechanistic philosophy. We have concentrated the full force of our discussion upon an example drawn from phylogenesis. But ontogenesis would have furnished us with facts no less cogent.
If we are evolutionists at all, and grant the causal connection of ontogenesis and phylogenesis, we are forced to admit this thesis: The human soul or psyche, as a function of the medullary tube, has developed along with it; and just as brain and spinal cord now develop from the simple medullary tube in every human individual, so the human mind or the psychic life of the whole human race has been gradually evolved from the lower vertebrate soul.
Word Of The Day