The Evolution of Man — Volume 2
The Evolution of Man — Volume 2
By Ernst Haeckel
19 May, 2020
In turning from the embryology to the phylogeny of man—from the development of the individual to that of the species—we must bear in mind the direct causal connection that exists between these two main branches of the science of human evolution.
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In turning from the embryology to the phylogeny of man—from the development of the individual to that of the species—we must bear in mind the direct causal connection that exists between these two main branches of the science of human evolution. This important causal nexus finds its simplest expression in "the fundamental law of organic development," the content and purport of which we have fully considered in the first chapter. According to this biogenetic law, ontogeny is a brief and condensed recapitulation of phylogeny. If this compendious reproduction were complete in all cases, it would be very easy to construct the whole story of evolution on an embryonic basis. When we wanted to know the ancestors of any higher organism, and, therefore, of man—to know from what forms the race as a whole has been evolved we should merely have to follow the series of forms in the development of the individual from the ovum; we could then regard each of the successive forms as the representative of an extinct ancestral form. However, this direct application of ontogenetic facts to phylogenetic ideas is possible, without limitations, only in a very small section of the animal kingdom. Less