Man, compared with other animals, has the fewest instincts and the largest brain in proportion to body size. He builds up, from birth onwards, his own mental mechanisms, and forms more of them, and takes longer in doing so, than any other animal. The later stages of evolution from ape-like ancestors have consisted in the acquisition of a larger brain and in the education of that brain. A new feature in organic development makes its appearance when we set out the facts of man's evolutionary history. This factor is the record of the past, which grows and develops by laws other than those affecting the perishable bodies of successive generations of mankind, so that man, by the interaction of the record and his educability, is subject to laws of development unlike those by which the rest of the living world is governed.

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References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

v • d • e History of biology Fields and disciplines Natural history • History of agriculture • History of medicine • History of anatomy • History of zoology (through 1859)• History of plant systematics • History of geology • History of paleontology • History of evolutionary thought • History of zoology (1859–1912) • History of ecology • History of model organisms • History of phycology • History of genetics • History of biochemistry • History of agricultural science • History of molecular biology • History of molecular evolution • History of immunology • History of biotechnology Institutions Rothamsted Experimental Station • Pasteur Institute • Max Planck Society • Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory • Stazione Zoologica • Marine Biological Laboratory • Rockefeller University • Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute • Laboratory of Molecular Biology Experiments Griffith's experiment • Miller-Urey experiment • Luria-Delbrück experiment • Hershey-Chase experiment • Meselson-Stahl experiment • Crick, Brenner et al. experiment • Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment • Nirenberg and Leder experiment Publications On Generation and Corruption • Historia Plantarum • De humani corporis fabrica • De motu cordis • Micrographia • Systema Naturae • Philosophie Zoologique • Principles of Geology • Vestiges of Creation • The Origin of Species • "Experiments on Plant Hybridization" • The Descent of Man • "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance" • What is Life? • Genetics and the Origin of Species • "Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids" Influential figures Aristotle • Andreas Vesalius • William Harvey • Antonie van Leeuwenhoek • Carolus Linnaeus • Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon • Jean-Baptiste Lamarck • Alexander von Humboldt • Charles Lyell • Charles Darwin • Alfred Russel Wallace • Gregor Mendel • Louis Pasteur • Robert Koch • Ernst Haeckel • Ivan Pavlov • Hugo de Vries • E. B. Wilson • Thomas Hunt Morgan • Aleksandr Oparin • Alexander Fleming • J. B. S. Haldane • Sewall Wright • R. A. Fisher • Konrad Lorenz • Barbara McClintock • Theodosius Dobzhansky • Ernst Mayr • George Beadle • Seymour Benzer • Rosalind Franklin • James D. Watson • Francis Crick • Fred Sanger • Max Perutz • John Kendrew • Sydney Brenner • Joshua Lederberg • Walter Gilbert • Kary Mullis • Stephen Jay Gould • Lynn Margulis • Carl Woese • Jane Goodall Related topics History of science • History of medicine • Philosophy of biology • Timeline of biology and organic chemistry • Natural philosophy • Natural theology • Humboldtian science • Relationship between religion and science • Eugenics • Human Genome Project • Darwin Day • History of creationism • History of the creation-evolution controversy