Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/275

Rh many special details man and the anthrapoid apes are extremely similar. Homologies are so obvious that even the novice in comparative anatomy notes them at a glance. Man is many degrees closer anatomically to the great apes than the latter are to the true monkeys, yet the special creationist insists upon placing man in biological isolation as a creature without affinities to the animal world. If a man is a creature apart from all animals it is extremely difficult to understand the significance of the fact that he is constructed along lines so closely similar to those of certain animals; that his processes of reproduction are exactly those of other animals; that in his development he shows the closest parallelism step for step to the apes, that his modes of nutrition, respiration, excretion, involve the same chemical processes, and that even his fundamental psychological process are of the same kind, though differing in degree of specialization, as are those of lower animals.

Comparative anatomists recognize man as a vertebrate, for he has all of the characteristic features of that group. He is obviously a mammal, for he complies with qualifications of that class in having hair; in giving birth to living young after a period of uterine development; in suckling the young by means of mammary glands; in having two sets of teeth, one suceedingsucceeding [sic] the other; in having the teeth differentiated into incisors, canines and molars; and in many other particulars of skeleton, muscular system, circulatory system, alimentary system, brain and other parts of the central nervous system. Among mammals, man belongs to the well-defined order of Primates, an order anatomically about halfway between the most generalized and the most specialized of the mammalian orders. Apart from his extraordinary nervous specialization, man is a relatively generalized mammal as compared with such highly specialized types as for example, the whales. The older taxonomists placed man and the other primates at the top of the genealogical tree, assigning to him the central tip of the central branch as though the goal of all organic evolution were man. Accordingly, those mammals such as the whales, which are least like man, were considered the lowest members of the class. There has been within recent years a pronounced reversal of this anthropocentric point of view, which has resulted in a complete revision of the arrangement of mammalian orders, with the insectivora the lowest, the cetacea (whales) the highest, and the primates about intermediate in systematic position.

The order primates consists of two suborders—lemuroidea and anthropoidea. The lemurs or half apes are small arborial animals with somewhat squirrel-like habits, but with flat nails and certain other primate characters. They serve to link up the primates with the most primitive of the mammalian orders, the insectivora, which are now believed, on anatomical and paleontological grounds, to be ancestral not only to the primates but to most of the other modern mammalian orders. The anthropoid or man-like primates are divided into four distinct families: The Hapalidae or marinosets; the Cercopithecidate or new world monkeys; the Simiidae or anthropoid apes, and the Hominidae or men. The family Hominidae includes four genera: The genus Pithecanthropus, represented by the fragmentary remains of an extinct Javan ape-man, the genus Paleanthropus, the genus Eanthropus and the genus Homo, including in addition to the existing species, Homo sapiens, several different extinct human species known as the Dawn man, the Neaderthal man, the Rhodesian man, and others.

The species Homo sapiens consists of at least four subspecies or major varieties, each consisting of numerous minor races and admixtures of these. This high degree of diversity within the species is evidence of rapid evolution. If a little over 4,000 years ago, as the special creationists claim, one man was created and has become the