Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 2. Anne Dambricourt Malasse

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Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 2 - Anne Dambricourt Malasse


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of life, it was enough to have recourse to adaptation or natural selection, and to heredity, already a little schematized, the figure of Transformism from Lamarck to Haeckel [...]. The lines formerly drawn disintegrated, so that new explorations brought to light a plethora, in the geological layers, the remains of absolutely new animals, which forced the multiplication of families and zoological orders. Leaves began to hide the twigs, and the twigs, which were too numerous, increasingly hid the branches. For that reason, life became more and more overwhelming for the classifiers, by the richness of its forms. It soon had to be admitted that it was terribly capricious, and inordinately old in its developments. It was first necessary to give up the idea of a regular, continuous, total evolution [...]. The horseshoe crabs of the Pacific are irremediably fixed beings, which did not deviate, in a single important feature, from the type they had in the Secondary, Carboniferous or even Cambrian. This is curious. Even more disturbing, the immobilized types were not species stuck in a kind of morphological impasse. The Malaysian Tarsier or the Lemurs of Madagascar (their morphotype) could have played the role of morphological intermediaries (between the most primitive mammals and the monkeys). We now know true monkeys in the Oligocene, everything is older than we thought, in the world of life. And everything is much more stable too... [...] On groups of ungulates and carnivores, we see it beyond doubt, there are precise, simple, constant rules that preside over the gradual and “directed” complication of organisms, the precious notion of oriented variation [...]. From the smallest detail to the largest sets, our living universe – like our material universe – has a structure, and this structure can only be due to a phenomenon of growth. This is the great proof of transformism, and the measure of what this theory has definitively acquired [...]. From many points of view, a radiolarian, a trilobite, a dinosaur are as differentiated, as complicated as a primate. On the other hand, their nervous system is much less perfect. Should not we look in this direction for the secret law of development? Should we not say that the main stem of the zoological tree has constantly moved in the direction of the largest brain? [...] What makes transformism is not to be a Darwinist or Lamarckist, a mechanic or vitalist, what today’s naturalists hold dear is the fact of a physical connection between the living. (Teilhard de Chardin, Comment se poser aujourd’hui la question du Transformisme, 1921b, author’s translation)

      Teilhard had always thought like a geophysicist: for him the appearance of life was a planetary, and therefore a cosmic phenomenon of geophysical origin. For him, as for Buffon (within the limits of the diversity of his “internal mold”), the history of the Earth’s crust had thus shaped biological evolution, tectonics gave an account of the evolution of species on a planetary scale and he saw the spherical enclosure of the Earth as a constraining physical condition:

      The continents are natural units of the Earth’s crust, so that the problems of the Biosphere can be studied there [...] paying attention to the organo-plastic action exerted on animal and plant forms by the Continental Environment (inorganic or living) in which they develop. (ibid., author’s translation)

      The paleontologist was so convinced that he pushed for the creation of a laboratory of “Continental geology applied to the origins of Man” at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1938, housed at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine (IPH) in Paris. He then created the term “geobiology” for the small Institute that he set up in 1942 in annexes of the French Embassy in Beijing.

      Thus, since Aristotle, the place of Man taken as the objective reference of a ruler has never been invalidated. The discovery of evolution has not contradicted this obvious statement, but it was not theologians who rejoiced in it, quite the contrary. The sovereignty of the naturalist had made it possible to link the gradations of the current horizontal rule, by showing that each one of them was the instant of a duration which sunk all the more deeply into the terrestrial strata the more it approached zero, or, here, the origins of life. No paleontologist has been opposed to this observation of increasing neural complexity since the first Chordates (which include Vertebrates).

      Marcellin Boule counted on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to succeed him to the chair of Paleontology. Emile Licent maintained his correspondence with his Jesuit colleague in 1921, urging him to come to Tien Tsin. He was an unofficial advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Beijing. When Teilhard did not return his letters, he turned to his Swedish geologist colleague, Johan Andersson (1874–1960), who was attached to the laboratory of Carl Wiman (1867–1944) at Uppsala University. Andersson was also an advisor to geologist Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936), director of the Mining Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing, and at the head of major paleontological prospecting programs organized with the Americans at the New York Museum.

      When Teilhard received Licent’s letter a few months later, he realized the chance for the Muséum to collaborate with the biologist from the Jesuit Mission in China. The Professor of geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris could become the leader of the research on the evolution of mammals in continental Asia with the Muséum and the IPH. On November 20, 1922, he formalized the cooperation by publishing a note on giraffes at the Academy of Sciences and convinced


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