| Summary: | "There is one aspect of the general problem of evolution that has not been broadly treated within recent years, and that is, a critical examination of the methods of determining racial descent and an estimation of the comparative values of the phenomena to be interpreted. Numerous special genealogies of particular groups have been elaborated, and they compose a considerable part of the literature of comparative anatomy. But an attempt to deduce the more general and fundamental principles of the subject is a desideratum. A very marked trend of modern biological thought is in the direction of interpreting phenomena of process by means of experiment, which has accordingly come to be known as the experimental method. This has been fruitful, although it has not nearly fulfilled what it seemed to promise. The comparative method has accomplished about as much. The various activities of living organisms may be gradually analyzed by experiments where the amount and kind of the stimulus is known, and in this way complex associations be split into simple components. If one should limit himself to the strictly experimental method, however, he would be neglecting an enormous range of phenomena. For living organisms are in number and variety hardly commensurate with the vast assemblage of their ancestors. Are we then to leave out of consideration all this once existing life, simply because its units are no longer subject to experiment? Most assuredly not. And this is the greater part of the ground of the study of racial descent, known more concisely as phylogeny. The study of genetic relations of organisms has always impressed itself as a source of great interest, ever since the idea of the mutability of species became founded. We should not mentally separate modern organisms from those that have become extinct, and without some idealization of the latter we can form no adequate conception of the former. For all the explanations of the biologist are interpretations of genesis, whether he considers a race, an individual, a part or a habit"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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