Segregation and Evolution by Arthur Keith

Science & Insight

Segregation and Evolution by Arthur Keith

December 1964

One of the English-speaking world’s most distinguished anthropologists, Sir Arthur Keith died only a few years ago. The impact of his pioneering work has yet to be felt in our schools where there is a deliberate conspiracy operating to insulate students from his teachings. This essay and others that follow are selected from his book, A New Theory of Human Evolution.

In 1908, when I had entered my forty-third year, I was placed in charge of the vast treasury of things housed in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Up to that time I had occupied myself with an anatomical exploration of the bodies of man and ape with a view to determining the structural relationship of the one to the other. Soon after taking office at the College of Surgeons there was a shift in the main object of my inquiries; my chief interest became centered, not in the structural resemblances and differences between man and ape, but in the problem of how the many species of ape, and, in particular, the various races of mankind, had come by the forms in which we now find them. In short, I found myself in pursuit of what, in crude terms, may be described as the “machinery of human evolution.”

At the time of which I write a fundamental addition was being made to our knowledge of the machinery of evolution by the discovery of substances to which Starling had given the name “hormones.” These substances, formed in the organs of the living body and circulating with the blood, served not only to harmonize the several functions of the body but, as Starling inferred, to coordinate the development and growth of the organs and regions of the body, and so determine their form and features. To obtain a knowledge of the part played by hormones in the shaping of the human head and body, I applied myself to a close study of those disorders of growth which, we had reason to believe, were due to derangements of the hormone system-the Surgeon’s museum being particularly rich in examples of such disorders.