Читать книгу Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog - Robert Blatchford - Страница 8

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The cause of variation can be easily understood.

Variation is due to the fact that every child has two parents. If these two parents were exactly alike, and if their ancestors had been all exactly alike, their children would be exactly like each other and like their parents.

But the father and mother are of different families, of different natures, and perhaps of different races. And the ancestors of the father and mother—millions in number—were all different from each other in nature and in descent.

Now, since a child inherits some qualities from its father and some from its mother, it follows that if the father and mother are different from each other, the child must differ from both, and yet resemble both. For he will inherit from the father qualities which the mother has not inherited from her ancestors, and he will inherit from the mother qualities which the father did not inherit from his ancestors. So the child will resemble both parents, without being an exact copy of either. It "varies" from both parents by inheriting from each.

The child of a black and a white parent is what we call a half-caste: he is neither a negro nor a white man. The pup of a bulldog and a terrier is neither a bull-dog nor a terrier; he is a bull-terrier terrier.

But heredity goes farther than that, and variation is more complex than that.

We must not think of a man as inheriting from his father and mother only. He inherits from the parents of both his parents; and from thousands of ancestors before those. He inherits from men and women who died thousands of years before he was born. He inherits from the cave-man, from the tree-man, from the ape-man, from the ape, and from the beast before the ape.

The child in the womb begins as a cell, and develops through the stages of evolution, becoming an embryo worm, fish, quadruped, ape, and, finally, a human baby.

The child is born with the bodily and mental qualities inherited from many generations of beasts and many generations of men.

Any one of the many ancient qualities of mind or body may crop up again in a modern child. Children have been born with tails: children have been born with six nipples, like a dog, instead of with two, like a human being.

And now I will explain, simply and briefly, what we mean by the word "Atavism."