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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Mission in China” as soon as possible. In 1923, an agreement was reached between the Muséum and three financial backers, the Ministry of Public Instruction, the Académie des Sciences and the IPH. Teilhard de Chardin was officially attached to the IPH as a geologist-paleontologist with a spacious office reserved for chair professors and which was assigned to him until December 1954.

      He was therefore commissioned on behalf of the IPH to enrich the collections. In accordance with the Jesuits, the single specimens would be sent to France, while duplicates would remain at the Museum of Tien-Tsin. The latter would be entirely financed by the French State (French Embassy and Mission for the fieldworks and studies of Teilhard). The reasons for his visits to China were exclusively scientific.

      In France, Louis Vialetton was deconstructing Lamarcko-Darwinian gradualism. Teilhard took advantage of this discovery to affirm his position and wrote a text in 1925 entitled “L’hominisation. Introduction à une étude scientifique du Phénomène humain” (Hominization. Introduction to a scientific study of the human phenomenon), which was unpublished until 1957:

      Illusion, the ordered, organized, inescapable distribution of the living through time and space? This I deny with all the strength of my paleontological experience. There is a natural (i.e. scientific) reason for the phenomenon of their successive appearance. (Teilhard de Chardin, Le paradoxe transformiste, 1925, author’s translation)

      Vialleton did not question evolution but rather the impotence of the Lamarcko-Darwinian model to account for the complexity of organisms, and the evolution of these organized complexities, while Teilhard was convinced of an organic uniqueness between geophysics and biophysics, between organisms and their environments considered at the biospheric and atmospheric scales of the planet. He would often tend to confuse physics with nature. Physics is a scientific discipline that studies light, phenomena of attraction (magnetization), the smallest levels of organization that always refer to forces of attraction, cohesion or repulsion, electromagnetics, waves and/or particles. This science extrapolates what the eyes do not see with equations, and, for evolution, a science confronted with the phylogenetic and irreversible self-organization processes that cannot be reproduced experimentally and that will escape measurement forever. Evolution in the past is not an illusion thanks to fossils, but its explanation will always be a theory limited by the absence of its object of study: the scientific reconstruction of a series of successive ontogenetic transformations, will always be that of a disappeared duration.

      The Earth is a dynamic system that evolves ineluctably toward a state of equilibrium because of the cooling of its core; for Teilhard and the geologists this reality must never be lost sight of, under the biosphere the planet is cooling and the crust moves accordingly. Hominization is part of the irreversible organic co-evolutions of this planetary geological scale, it continues the mega-evolution that generated the increasing complexity of the nervous system and of the organization that it controls, this evidence is no longer perceived today because of the hyper-specialization on fossil anatomical details.

      For Teilhard, the formation of the biosphere was prolonged by the “anthroposphere”. He distinguished the place of the human phenomenon in this mega-evolution thanks to long geological durations. Hominization was said to be orthogenetic, or oriented, and he called it “orthogenèse de fond” or “background orthogenesis”, insofar as it prolonged the complexification of the central nervous system. Teilhard developed his thought by comparing the human lineage from the prosimian stem with other mammalian phylums he studied. The Paninae (gorilla and chimpanzee) and the hominins have a common ancestor, but Paninae’s lineage diverged from this “background orthogenesis” 8 million years ago, forming divergent branches, whereas hominins were the manifestation of this “background orthogenesis”, they were the apex of the growing trunk. And China was going to prove it with what the eyes see immediately: the organization of the cerebral hemispheres.

      China took new measures and prohibited the sending of fossils abroad. In 1926, Teilhard was definitively excluded from the chair of Geology at the Catholic Institute, and Marcellin Boule was forced to resign, since Licent was no longer allowed to send the collections. His only attachment remained to the IPH and he wanted the Institute and the Muséum to contribute to the development of paleontology in China. In October 1926, the Crown Prince of Sweden, Gustav VI, who was also an archeologist, was received by the Geological Survey of China. A colloquium was organized in his honor at the Peking Union Medical


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