Textbook of Evolution and Genetics (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Textbook of Evolution and Genetics

If we look back through the long ages of recorded history we cannot fail to note another analogy in the gradually increasing complexity of society, in the development of mankind from savagery to primitive cultures and finally to the great civilizations which have come and gone. Each stage has contributed to the greatness of its successors, each has added to the complexity of human knowledge, each has made man a little more independent of his environment, each has turned his thoughts a little more keenly inward until race consciousness has become an active factor in the shaping of human destiny. Behind this long record we find a few remnants which tell us of the infancy of the human race. Crude drawings on the walls of caverns and the implements which these primitive peoples used disclose something of their limited culture. Bones associated with these eloquent legacies tell us much of the characteristics of the people who left them. Every thing points to gradual change, but behind these records - what?

Man has first of all a heritage, in common with all other organ isms, a thing without which he cannot exist. He lives surrounded by conditions of various kinds which, in the aggregate, we call his environment. Environment is a second essential; to it the heritage responds within the limits of its possibility. The combination means life. We know from our own experience that life can exist without consciousness. We know too that at some time in the ascending complexity of individual development consciousness dawns, and the individual responds to the world about him not merely as a series of reactions to environmental stimuli, but with an awakening realization of other entities about him, and at last a consciousness of self. Where this point lies in the organic world we cannot say with certainty; it may be that man alone is more than an organic automaton. The light of personal experience clarifies its significance. Have we always, as a species, possessed this quality which must develop in each individual? In View of the records just mentioned this seems unlikely. Back of that crude beginning of our record of man's progress there must have been something. Consciousness must have had a beginning.

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