I want to know the answer to the following question:
What did the theorists suspect these patterns were the result of?
All the background I'm provided with is that "Theorists in such diverse fields as anatomy, linguistics, and Ethnology, making feature-by-feature comparisons of their subject matters, were beginning to suspect that similarities between animals, languages, and folkways were the result of processes or laws unknown to them then.". Is that enough to answer the question?