Introduction to the Science of Sociology

Anglický jazyk

Introduction to the Science of Sociology

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Excerpt: ...that the brain must be bathed by warm blood to be highly active, and this requires aerial respiration; so that warm-blooded mammals when inhabiting the water lie under a disadvantage in having to come continually to the surface to breathe. With fishes, members of the shark family would not tend to supplant the lancelet; for the lancelet, as I hear from Fritz Müller, has as sole companion and competitor on the barren sandy shore of South Brazil an anomalous annelid. The three lowest orders of mammals, namely, marsupials, edentata, and rodents, coexist in South America in the same region with numerous monkeys, and probably interfere little with each other. Although organization, on the whole, may have advanced and may be still advancing throughout the world, yet the scale will always present many degrees of perfection; for the high advancement of certain whole classes, or of certain members of each class, does not at all necessarily lead to the extinction of those groups with which they do not enter into close competition. In some cases, lowly organized forms appear to have been preserved to the present day from inhabiting confined or peculiar stations, where they have been Pg 522 subjected to less severe competition and where their scanty numbers have retarded the chance of favorable variations arising. Finally, I believe that many lowly organized forms now exist throughout the world from various causes. In some cases variations or individual differences of a favorable nature may never have arisen for natural selection to act on and accumulate. In no case, probably, has time sufficed for the utmost possible amount of development. In some few cases there has been what we must call retrogression of organization. But the main cause lies in the fact that under very simple conditions of life a high organization would be of no service-possibly would be of actual disservice, as being of a more delicate nature and more liable to be put out of...