EXCHANGE
BIOLOGY
LIBRARY
G
THE COLVER LECTURES
IN BROWN UNIVERSITY
1921
HUMAN LIFE AS THE BIOLOGIST
SEES IT
BY
VERNON KELLOGG
BROWN UNIVERSITY. THE COLVFJR ^CTtfEBS, 1921;
HUMAN LIFE
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
BY
VERNON KELLOGG, Sc.D., LL.D.
SECRETARY, NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL; SOMETIME
PROFESSOR IN STANFORD UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1922
BIOLOGY
LIBRARY
G
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY BROWN UNIVERSITY
AU rightt reserved
THE Colver lectureship is provided by a fund of
$10,000 presented to the University by Mr. and
Mrs. Jesse L. Rosenberger of Chicago in memory of
Mrs. Rosenberger's father, Charles K. Colver of the
class of 1842. The following sentences from the letter
accompanying the gift explain the purposes of the foun-
dation:
"It is desired that, so far as possible, for these lectures
only subjects of particular importance and lecturers emi-
nent in scholarship or of other marked qualifications
shall be chosen. It is desired that the lectures shall be
distinctive and valuable contributions to human knowl-
edge, known for their quality rather than their number.
Income, or portions of income, not used for lectures may
be used for the publication of any of the lectures deemed
desirable to be so published."
Charles Kendrick Colver (1821-1896) was a graduate
of Brown University of the class of 1842. The necrol-
ogist of the University wrote of him: "He was distin-
guished for his broad and accurate scholarship, his
unswerving personal integrity, championship of truth,
and obedience to God in his daily life. He was severely
simple and unworldly in character."
The lectures now published in this series are:
1916
The American Conception of Liberty and Government, by
Frank Johnson Goodnow, LL.D., President of Johns
Hopkins University.
1917
Medical Research and Human Welfare, by W. W. Keen,
M.D., LL.D. (Brown), Emeritus Professor of Sur-
gery, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia.
V
1918
The Responsible State: A Reexamination of Fundamental
Political Doctrines in the Light of World War and the
Menace of Anarchism, by Franklin Henry Giddings,
LL.D., Professor of Sociology and the History of
Civilization in Columbia University; sometime Pro-
fessor of Political Science in Bryn Mawr College.
1919
Democracy: Discipline: Peace, by William Roscoe
Thayer.
1920
Plymouth and the Pilgrims, by Arthur Lord.
1921
Human Life as the Biologist Sees It, by Vernon Kellogg,
Sc.D., LL.D., Secretary, National Research Council;
sometime Professor in Stanford University.
vi
CONTENTS
PART I
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 3
1. HUMAN ORIGIN AND RELATIONSHIPS. ... 8
2. THE BIOLOGIST AND PRESENT MAN 37
PART II
1. THE BIOLOGIST AND WAR 49
2. HEREDITY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS 64
3. THE BIOLOGIST AND THE REPUBLIC .... 90
PART III
1. THE BIOLOGIST AND EVERYDAY LITE ... 96
2. THE BIOLOGIST AND DEATH 106
3. THE BIOLOGIST AND SOUL 118
4. THE BIOLOGIST AND THE FUTURE
vn
HUMAN LIFE
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
HUMAN LIFE
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
i
INTRODUCTORY
WHILE engaged in the work of Mr.
Hoover's relief organizations I saw a good
deal at very close range of the behavior of
men at war. I saw a constant struggle
in the case of some of these men in posi-
tions of authority between two elements
in their make-up; a brute element inherent
in them as a biologically inherited ves-
tige of prehistoric days, and a strictly
human element more recently acquired
and transmitted to them by education
and social inheritance. Sometimes one ele-
ment dictated their behavior, sometimes
the other. Sometimes, unfortunately,
the element of education reinforced the
element of brute inheritance. The exist-
3
HUMAN LIFE
ence and influence of these two usually
conflicting parts of human make-up were
made especially clear and sharp because
of the unwonted and continuous stress of
the whole situation. It was an unusual
opportunity for the biologist-student of
human life to observe the relative strength
of these two factors which play their parts
in the determination of the behavior and
fate of us all. Are we, in our present
evolutionary stage, more animal than
human or more human than animal?
And why? And can any attempt at
scientific analysis of present human
make-up give us knowledge that will
enable us to live more rationally, more
successfully, more happily?
As detached and cool-blooded as he can
possibly be in his contemplation of the
make-up and the capacities and behavior
of human beings, the biologist is neverthe-
less often overcome by those same feelings
of awe and reverence in the face of the
"wonders of human life," which over-
come other less cool-blooded persons.
4
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
Jn his laboratory and study he may assure
himself that he is dealing only with an
unusually complex, highly-endowed, and,
in every way, remarkable animal, and
reassure himself, in the face of the diffi-
culties of the biological analysis of this
animal, by remembering how he has been
able to reveal, and, in some measure,
explain the make-up and capacities of
other at first baffling animals. But in
his home with his family, and in his social
intercourse with his friends and acquaint-
ances, he sometimes loses the confidence
of his laboratory hours. My wife and
little girl are confusingly different from
that impersonal thing, man as a lab-
oratory subject, which I persist in
hoping to analyze into pieces and prop-
erties capable of scientific explanation, or
at least description. There is something,
or many things, in all the human beings I
know personally, and something in my-
self, which make them and me very dif-
ferent from the samples of the species
that I study in the laboratory.
5
HUMAN LIFE
And yet as biologist I persist in this
study, and I follow closely and hopefully
the similar studies of other biologists,
using this term to mean, in this instance,
men variously called morphologists, phys-
iologists, psychologists, sociologists, econ-
omists, political scientists, and historians,
some of whom may object to being called
biologists but most of whom are glad to be
so called. And in my talks to you, at the
courteous invitation of the authorities of
Brown University, and as the incumbent
for this year of the lectureship endowed
by one of Brown's loyal and generous
alumni, I shall try to tell you quite simply
and frankly something of the biologist's
attitude toward human life as a problem
he feels bound to study, and of what he
thinks he has found out and what he
knows he has not found out in the course
of his study as so far prosecuted.
I started studying human life as a
biologist by studying first plants, then
birds, and, finally, and for a long time,
insects. This might be called my under-
6
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
graduate course in human life. I began
my graduate course first with a baby,
my own for special subject, and then as
she grew older I turned to something
easier, just men and women with whom I
had less personal relations and knew only
as representatives of the animal species,
man. I found that I could not advisedly
let my serious biological studies be in-
terfered with by such incidental but,
some way, very confusing, things as
sympathy and love and pride and hope.
HUMAN LIFE
HUMAN ORIGIN AND
RELATIONSHIPS
THE biologist pays much attention to
origins; often too much. Two things can
have a common or related origin and yet
acquire differences in the course of their
development which make, for all practical
purposes, two very different things out of
them. Quantitative differences may come
to be so great that they have all the
practical effect of qualitative differences.
Or qualitative differences, very small, in-
deed, when measured by the chemist or
physicist and described in the terminology
of their sciences, may have very large
effects in the practical relation of the
substances or things exhibiting them.
The sugar-loving man who eats a little
of a certain substance which the chemist
assures him is made up of the same
numbers of atoms of the same three
kinds of chemical elements of which
8
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
sugar is composed, although these atoms
are arranged within the molecules in a
way slightly differing from their arrange-
ment in sugar, may find himself poisoned
instead of strengthened. Or, the man
who accepts the statement of the zoologi-
cal morphologist that the nervous system
of a certain animal differs primarily
from that of another in that there is not
quite so much of it, but that it is, as far as
it goes, of essentially the same kind, and
who therefore expects to find his first
animal exhibiting the same kind of sense,
only not quite so much of it, as his
second, will be much surprised when he
becomes really acquainted with the sense
differences of his two animals.
Nevertheless the biologist has good
grounds for paying much attention to
commonness of origin and similarities of
structural make-up in his attempts to
read the riddle of life, even human life.
Things that have come from the same
thing, or that have a fundamental like-
ness of structure, are bound to have some
9
HUMAN LIFE
commonness of capacity and behavior.
And so the biologist in his approach to
man as a subject of scientific scrutiny is
deeply interested in the possible unravel-
ing of the tangled and broken skein of
his biological history. Whence and how
has he come into being? And into being
in the particular form and condition
which now characterize him? Can human
characteristics be found in less complex
stage of development and organization
elsewhere in the world of life? And if the
human body shows no radical qualitative
differences from other animal bodies what
will be the significance of this to the
biologist in his attempt to study and
appraise human life?
As to human origin the biologist finds
no tangible evidence to support any other
explanation than the now familiar and
widely-accepted one of evolution from
pre-existing lower animal kinds. For this
explanation he does find what is, to him,
practically convincing evidence. It is of
no very great interest, certainly of no
10
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
very great importance to most of us,
if we once accept this evolutionary ex-
planation of origin, whether man is
traced backward to this or that particular
kind of anthropoid ape, or other less
anthropoid ancestor. However, when we
watch a chimpanzee for some time we
come to have a hope that he is not the
particular anthropoid whom the biologist
would ask us to recognize with any
filial admiration or affection. The feeling
is even more marked when the orang-utan
or the gorilla is the object of our curiosity.
It is true, though, that if we watch a
chimpanzee long enough a rather unset-
tling feeling is likely to grow on us that
there is something uncannily familiar
about him. He seems to be a caricature
of some people we know; he behaves curi-
ously like some children, other people's
children, that we recall.
I had an experience with a chimpanzee
once in Berlin, which sticks always in my
memory. I was giving at the time, as a
student of zoology, some special attention
11
HUMAN LIFE
to anthropoids, and used to go out almost
daily to the Zoological Gardens where I
had become acquainted with the keeper
of the apes. He had a favorite chimpan-
zee which he used to keep with him a
great deal in his own room or office, and
I got into the habit of dropping in fre-
quently for an afternoon chat with the
friendly pair. The keeper was a rather
stolid sort of person who seemed to me to
possess a marked paucity of human feeling
and expression. On the other hand the
chimpanzee seemed possessed of a wide
range of human-like interests and feelings
and was fascinatingly varied and interest-
ing in his expression of them. The con-
viction even grew on me that he was
almost the more human of the two.
He rarely paid me the compliment of
showing any special recognition of me or
interest in me. I seemed to lack any
special traits of attractiveness for him.
But when one day, with the permission of
the keeper, I brought an American fam-
ily with me who had with them a coal
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
black, extremely African negress as nurse-
maid, the chimpanzee was so animatedly
friendly to this dear old mammy from the
very first moment of her entrance that
she soon fled, screaming with horror and
fright. I shall never forget the strong
impression made on me of the chimpan-
zee's immediate apparent recognition of
Matilda as an old acquaintance; she was
the kind of human being he knew about
and was interested in. Yet as he had been
brought to the Gardens as a baby and
had had really no personal acquaintance-
ship with negroes, if he really knew Ma-
tilda or had some sense of relationship
with her, it must have been a case of
biological memory.
However, the biologist does not claim
that we are directly descended from the
chimpanzee or any other particular an-
thropoid or particular lower kind of
monkey that we know, either living or
extinct. Some biologists favor an origin
from a generalized Lemurine type, others
from a Tarsius type, and others venture
13
HUMAN LIFE
to claim a breaking away from the
quadrumanous group much higher up in
its series, seeing in the anthropoids and
man the latest and highest two diverging
branches in the tall genealogical tree of
human ancestry. That anthropoid and
human structure are too fundamentally
and minutely similar to be coincidence or
anything else than true homology, and
hence indisputable evidence of a common-
ness of origin, the biologist simply accepts
as a biological fact without regard to his
feelings of friendliness or unfriendliness
for chimpanzees and their immediate
relatives.
I This structural evidence of ancestral
relationship between the anthropoids and
man is, of course, added to by several
other well-known kinds of likenesses,
physiological, psychological, and even
ecological. The similarity of the chemical
character of the blood of the two groups
as evidenced by the identity of its re-
actions in the face of certain stimulation,
the so-called precipitin reactions, these
14
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
reactions differing from those of the
blood of other higher mammals, is a
notable modern addition to the biological
evidence for anthropoid and human rela-
tionships. For the same identities or
close similarities in blood character occur
in the case of other kinds of animals well
known to be closely related, as the wolf
and dog, or the horse and ass, and do
not occur when the blood of two less
closely related animals is tested.
A less important and less well-known
added bit of evidence is one that came
under my own observation a few years
ago during the course of some study of
certain highly specialized external insect
parasites of man and some other mam-
mals. In this study it became apparent
that the kinds of these parasites character-
istic of and limited to men and apes are
more closely related to each other than
they are to parasitic kinds characteristic
of the other quadrumana or of any other
mammals. That is, the parasites of the
apes are even less closely related to those
15
HUMAN LIFE
of the other monkeys than they are to
those of man. This points to a probable
commonness of origin of the now slightly
differentiated parasites of men and apes
from some parasite ancestor which may
have helped make life uncomfortable for
certain common ancestors of the anthro-
poids and early men.
The biologist finds another evidence of
man's place in nature as simply one among
the various groups of mammals, in the
conditions of the physical variation among
different human races, or species, as they
would likely be called by any entirely
disinterested student of human kind. If
an expedition of scientific gentlemen from
the Academy of Sciences of Mars, say,
should some day find its way to our
planet, they would doubtless report to
their colleagues, on their return, the
discovery of a considerable number of
earth-inhabiting different species of man,
and might issue a classificatory mono-
graph on them not unlike one of our own
monographs on the various species of
16
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
bears. Our attempts at classifying the
bears, you know, are attended by a good
deal of discussion as to whether some of
the different kinds are just different races
or varieties of one species or whether
they truly represent different species. As
a matter of fact, I suppose this doesn't
much worry the bears; it only worries the
scientists.
There is also some suggestive evidence
about man's position in Nature to be
derived from the facts of the geographical
distribution of his different races. The
suggestiveness comes from the interesting
resemblance of the status of this distribu-
tion to that obtaining generally among
the higher vertebrates. Dr. J. C. Mer-
riam, the distinguished paleontologist and
student of the history of the human
species, has especially stressed this fact
and its significance. Just as the distribu-
tion of the members of a group of mam-
mals or birds indicates in fairly clear
outlines a classification of these members
such as would be made on a basis of their
17
HUMAN LIFE
comparative structure, so the different
subdivisions of human kind show a
similar parallel in their distribution and
structural similarities or dissimilarities.
Now the essential point of all that has
just been said concerning man's striking
structural similarity to certain higher
animals and concerning his likenesses to
them in other ways, physiological, varia-
tional and distributional, is that in these
similarities the biologist finds convincing
proof of man's origin from, and definite
relation to other forms of life. And this
must be ever in our minds in all our
subsequent discussion. But before point-
ing out any of the probable special
significances to the biologist student of
human life of the undoubted evolutionary
derivation of man from lower, non-human
forms of life, let us glance briefly at
another aspect of the consideration of
human origin, namely, the pre-history
of man as an animal of unmistakable
human estate, but of much more primi-
tive human culture than he is at present,
18
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
a history that the discoveries and investi-
gations of the last score of years have
done more to reveal than had all study
previous to the beginning of this century.
The search for relics of man, both of his
body and his handiwork or culture, may
be, and has, in fact, been, pursued in two
slightly different special ways. The his-
torian may trace man back to the days of
earliest history as recorded by preserved
books and scripts. Then the archaeolo-
gist and ethnologist may carry the story,
ever more broken and incomplete, back
by study of his scattered carved hiero-
glyphs and monuments and implements.
Such studies take us back to days of the
earliest civilizations of China and Egypt
and Asia Minor and Crete.
Here the archaeologist hands over the
search to the anthropologist and paleon-
tologist, whom he finds have been working
from the other end, that is, from earlier
periods up to later ones instead of from
later ones back to earlier ones, and have
been working rather as students of biol-
19
HUMAN LIFE
ogy and geology than students of human-
istics. Man for them is an animal whose
evolutionary history is to be traced,
as that of other animals is traced, by
finding and studying his fossils or the
preserved products of his handiwork, or
those of his forebears, in their relation to
successive geologic formations, hence to
time. It is to the paleontologist and
historical anthropologist, therefore, that
we look for facts concerning the very
earliest days of man's existence. How
far back in geologic time, how long ago as
estimated in years and centuries, does
man seem to have lived on this earth?
Where did he live? Does he first appear
as scattered over all the land surface of
the globe, as he now is, or was he originally
limited to a certain part or parts of it?
What sort of man was he in those first
man days? What of his body? What of
his habits, his culture, his relation as
individual to others of his kind? Oh,
there are many crowding questions we
wish to put to the student of prehistoric
20
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
man, too many to enumerate. And we
really hang breathless on his answers.
But before we listen to any of the an-
swers let us note that the anthropologist
in his attempts to satisfy his and our
curiosity about primitive man has a
second string to his bow in addition to
that provided him primarily by the
paleontologist. He recognizes in his
study of the man-group, just as the
general biologist does in his study of any
group of animals or plants, that the
present existing members of his group
are not all of equal evolutionary advance-
ment or chronology. There are always
some of a type less advanced or special-
ized, and some of types more advanced.
The less advanced are usually presumed
to be older in their evolutionary origin
than the more advanced, so that although
they all live now side by side and at the
same time, some may be looked on as in a
form or stage of greater primitiveness or
antiquity as compared with others. This
is indeed quite true of the various living
HUMAN LIFE
kinds or races of man. The native
Australians, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the
Ainos of Japan, the Bushmen of Central
Africa and several other scattered similar
small groups do represent in their physical
structure, mental capacity and general
culture more primitive stages in human
evolution than those represented by the
larger Caucasian, Mongolian, Negro and
Polynesian groups that comprise the
great majority of living men.
In comparing the physical and men-
tal character and the culture of these
living primitive types with the character
and culture of various extinct types of
men, as indicated by their recovered
bones and articles of handiwork, the
anthropologist finds such similarities that
he can refer with some confidence to
these living primitive types as paralleling
in many characteristics some of the more
recent types of prehistoric man. He has
not yet found alive that missing link
between man and the anthropoids which
some anthropologists have fondly iin-
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
agined may still be living in unexplored
regions of Africa or Asia and to find
which expeditions have been occasionally
sent out, only so far to return empty-
handed. Nor does he find any living
types which can possibly be construed to
parallel in their condition, or actually to
be persisting remnants of, the most
ancient or most primitive types of real
men. But he gets nearer to understand-
ing the life of man in those days when
types of men now extinct were the
highest types, by looking at human life
as exhibited by the lowest types now
living.
What, then, are some of the specific
facts which have been determined by
paleontologists and anthropologists con-
cerning prehistoric man? To try to tell
the whole story is far beyond my inten-
tion. We have neither time nor, indeed,
need for it for the purposes of this dis-
cussion. But the outstanding parts of it
can be told in few words, and these parts
are extremely pertinent to any general
23
HUMAN LIFE
consideration of human history; to any
special consideration of human life from
the view-point of the biologist they are
truly essential.
I must recall to your minds that geol-
ogists divide the eight hundred million
years, more or less, of earth time into a
series of successive ages characterized by
differing kinds of rocks and by different
floras and faunas, all, with the exception
of the flora and fauna of the present age,
now extinct. It is with only a few of the
more recent of these ages that we need
now concern ourselves in our search for
the geologic evidence of man's origin.
Of course, recent is a comparative term.
It means, in the mouth of the geologist,
something within anywhere from the
last few hundred thousand to the last
few million years.
In the rocks of these more recent ages,
beginning with an age called Lower
Oligocene, and running on up through
Upper Oligocene, Lower, Mid and Upper
Miocene and Pliocene, have been found
24
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
the fossil remains of numerous now
extinct anthropoid apes. These have