i 48 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
more of a reflection on the Almighty than is an undeveloped child who is
incapable of self-government. The opinions of men who in this enlight-
ened day believe that the Filipinos are capable of self-government because
everybody is, are not worth considering.
Even Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of imperialism, used
the recapitulationist argument in the first stanza of his most famous
apology for white supremacy:
Take up the White Man's Burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go, bind your sons to exile
to serve the captive's need:
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.Teddy Roosevelt, whose judgment was not always so keen,
wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge that the verse "was very poor poetry
but made good sense from the expansion point of view" (in Wes-
ton, 1972, p. 35).
And so the story might stand, a testimony to nineteenth-
century folly and prejudice, if an interesting twist had not been
added during our own century. By 1920 the theory of recapitula-
tion had collapsed (Gould, 1977, pp. 167-206). Not long after, the
Dutch anatomist Louis Bolk proposed a theory of exactly opposite
meaning. Recapitulation required that adult traits of ancestors
develop more rapidly in descendants to become juvenile features—
hence, traits of modern children are primitive characters of ances-
tral adults. But suppose that the reverse process occurs as it often
does in evolution. Suppose that juvenile traits of ancestors develop
so slowly in descendants that they become adult features. This phe-
nomenon of retarded development is common in nature; it is
called neoteny (literally, "holding on to youth"). Bolk argued that
humans are essentially neotenous. He listed an impressive set of
features shared by adult humans and fetal or juvenile apes, but lost
in adult apes: vaulted cranium and large brain in relation to body
size; small face; hair confined largely to head, armpits, and pubic
regions; unrotated big toe. I have already discussed one of the most
important signs of human neoteny in another context (pp. 13 2-"