Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/277

Rh conservative while the other may become greatly specialized. Of all systems, the blood appears to have been the most conservative and to have retained most fully its ancestral characters. It is on this account that blood tests are so valuable in revealing relationships that can scarcely be determined in any other way.

Far more important than any information as to animal affinities revealed by blood tests is the fact that the classification of animals based on blood tests is essentially the same as that based on morphology. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these two modes of classification had revealed quite contrary arrangements, what a blow to our confidence in the validity of evolution! Conversely, what a strong support of the evolution principle is afforded by the fact that the two systems of classification point to the same lines of descent!

There should be no sharp division between the evidences from comparative anatomy and those from embryology. Those two branches of biology are inseparable; one must be interpreted in the light of the other. Comparative anatomy deals with the adult structures of organisms. Whenever there is any question about homologies of fully developed structures recourse is had to younger and still younger stages, for when structures are really homologous, they tend to be more closely similar the younger they are. Structures that come from the same or similar embryonic are by definition homologous. Therefore the only certain test of homologies is a study of embryology.

It is necessary to bear in mind that an individual is not merely his adult condition; that a species is not fully defined by a description of its adult characteristics. The species characteristics include those of the egg and the sperm, the cleavage pattern, the particular modes of gastrulation and of further differentiation. In brief, the species is fully defined only by a full description of its entire ontogeny. Very closely related species keep step nearly all the way through their ontogenous and diverge only toward the end of their courses. Distantly related forms diverge comparatively early in their developmental paths; while unrelated forms may have little or nothing in common from the beginning.

The most advanced groups of organisms travel a much longer journey before reaching their destination than do organisms of lower status. In many instances certain early stages in the development of an advanced organism resemble in unmistakable ways the end stages of less advanced organisms. There is, in fact, in the long ontogeny of members of high groups, a sort of rough-and-ready repetition of the characteristic features of many lower groups. This fact has so impressed some biologists that they have embodied it into a law, the so-called biogenetic law: that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In less technical language this means that the various stages in the development of the individual are like the various ancestral forms from which the species is descended, the earliest embryonic stages being like the most remote ancestors and the latter stages like the more recent ancestors. In still other words, the concept may be stated as follows: The developmental history of the individual may be regarded as an abbreviated resume of its ancestral history.

In the first place it is obvious that no embryonic stage can be in any real sense the equivalent of any adult ancestor. The most we can affirm is that while some embryonic characters of the higher group strongly remind us of some admit features of lower groups, the tout ensemble of the former is not at all closely similar to that of the latter. In the second place, it should not be forgotten that the embryonic and larval stages of organisms have much more pressing demands upon them than that of recording their ancestral attainments—they must adapt themselves to their