An outcome of the 1930 series of Lane Medical Lectures at Stanford University. To develop the completed personality a long series of interactions between the original basis and the surrounding environment is essential. A discussion of the effects on developing personalities of uniting entire individuals and of transplanting organs and parts leads to a convincing demonstration of the "high improbability of the inheritance of acquired characters."
From the chapter on exaggerated deviations from racial types, in which the author treats of dwarfs and giants, we are led into a section on deviations in structural types among various breeds of dogs. The closing chapters treat mainly of the two normal adult types, the dolichocephalic (linear, long-headed) and the brachycephalic (lateral, short-headed), their characteristics, geographic distribution and age modifications. A brief section is devoted to the sex glands, senility and rejuvenation, the author demonstrating that the sex gland rejuvenation idea is based upon an entirely erroneous conception. Man's deviation from his nearest animal relatives, namely, intellectual achievement, has probably been initiated by two evolutionary changes: (1) some mutation which has resulted in the retention of head proportions comparable to those found in the fetal stages of the higher mammals: this gives a disproportionately large cranium and big brain with small facial region as compared to the reverse adult proportions among other mammals; (2) a germinal mutation resulting in an exaggerated prolongation of childhood and the stages of immaturity to more than twenty years, thus extending enormously the learning period of man. There are considerable experimental material, over seventy figures, and a bibliography of 260 titles.
Charles Rupert Stockard (1879–1939) was an American anatomist and zoologist.
He was born in Stoneville, Mississippi. In 1906, he joined the Department of Anatomy at Cornell Medical College. He became a professor of anatomy in 1911. He was the president of the American Association of Anatomists (1928–1930). He studied zoology under Thomas Hunt Morgan. He received his PhD in zoology from Columbia University in 1906.
He spent years conducting experiments on the effects of alcohol on germ cells, embryos and offspring. Stockard tested the effects of alcohol intoxication on the offspring of pregnant guinea pigs. He discovered that repeated alcohol intoxication in the guinea pigs produced defects and malformations in their offspring that was passed down to two or more generations. His results were challenged by the biologist Raymond Pearl who performed the same experiments with chickens. Pearl discovered that the offspring of the chickens that had been exposed to alcohol were not defected but were healthy. He attributed his findings to the detrimental effects of alcohol only on the eggs and sperm which were already weak, the strong eggs and sperm were unaffected by alcohol intoxication. Pearl argued that his results had a Darwinian, not a Lamarckian explanation.
Other controversial experiments by Stockard included producing teratology in fetuses by inducing hypoxia in the mother. He was the managing editor of American Journal of Anatomy and the co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Zoology.
