Abstract
THE physical inheritance of man having been placed in proper relation to its animal ancestry, Sir Arthur Keith turns to man's mental attributes, and at the University of Manchester on May 9 delivered what may be regarded as a supplement to his British Association address at Leeds. The spiritual characteristics of mankind have always proved the most obstinate to be enrolled under the banner of evolution, and Sir Arthur's frank statement of his conclusions has given rise to much newspaper controversy, some of which scarcely did justice to his views. The Manchester lecture appears under the title “Implications of Darwinism” in the English Review for June; but the title might as well have been “The Uniqueness of Man's Spiritual Attributes,” for care is taken to show that the crude mental inheritance derived from his animal ancestry is overlaid in man by a more perfected control. It comes to this: that while man's brain, and with it man's mentality, are grounded upon those of his ancestral apes, the balance has been altered by the expansion and finer development of the brain matter, so that what are looked upon as higher centres predominate over the lower or crude animal centres.
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News and Views. Nature 121, 993–997 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/121993c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/121993c0