and possibly psychological similarities between humans and apes.
So “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” serves as a good starting place to examine the powerful images of nonhuman primates in Western culture. The apes and Africans in the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the monkeys and native Indian villagers in Kipling’s Jungle Books, and the fierce tribesmen and monstrous gorilla in King Kong have both created and reinforced fears of the simian within. Although this book will focus on Western attitudes, the possibility that apes embody our own brutal selves is not just a Western idea. For the moment, one example, I hope, will suffice. Thomas Savage, an early explorer and natural scientist working in west Africa, made the following observation, quoted by Thomas Henry Huxley in Man’s Place in Nature: “It is a tradition with the natives generally here, that [gorillas] were once members of their own tribe: that for their depraved habits they were expelled from all human society, and, that through an obstinate indulgence of their vile propensities, they have degenerated into their present state and organization.”6 Although these beliefs about nonhuman primates are not a cultural universal, they have been widely shared by humans all over the world—and swept into a vicious circle of racism, anthropocentrism, imperial exploitation, abuse of monkeys and apes, and destruction of their habitats.
II
The slipperiness of taxonomy—how the physical bodies of various life-forms are described, distinguished, and classified—contributes to political and scientific confusion in discussions about primates, human and otherwise. The eighteenth-century Swedish biologist Charles Linnaeus revolutionized biology by creating a logical classification system that accounted for all known species and allowed for the systematic naming of newly discovered species. Partly as a result of Linnaeus’s work, fossil collecting was all the rage in nineteenth-century Europe, and as paleontologists worked their way through successive geological strata, they discovered a fossil record of changes in species over geological time—though some, like Cuvier, managed to find a way to dismiss the possibility of speciation.
In any case, Charles Darwin was not the first to entertain the idea of evolution. Of the numerous pre-Darwinian attempts to account for apparent evolutionary changes in life-forms, the Philosophie zoologique, published in 1809 by Cuvier’s rival Jean Baptiste Lamarck, is the best known. Lamarck suggests that organisms develop traits in order to take better advantage of their surroundings: over time, orangutans would have developed long, strong arms and short legs in order to thrive in the jungle treetops, from which they rarely descend. The teleological perspective of Lamarck’s theory is still tempting today, and even scientists sometimes fall into Lamarckian language. Certainly, an individual orangutan uses its long arms in order to swing from tree to tree or branch to branch, but orangutans as a species did not develop those arms for the purpose of brachiation. Instead, as Darwin would later have it, by imperceptible gradations, it happened that longer-armed orangutans were more successful at getting food where they lived, avoiding enemies, and finding mates in their jungle environment. Hence, they passed on these traits to more offspring until, over the course of innumerable generations, orangutans evolved very long arms. Although many found Lamarck’s account of biological transmutation compelling, it remained controversial for fifty years before Darwin’s competing story of evolution took center stage.
In 1858, in great excitement, Darwin’s acquaintance Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay on evolution that accurately summarized the ideas Darwin had been working out privately for twenty years. Darwin had been developing his theories ever since an 1831–36 voyage of scientific discovery on the Beagle, which famously culminated with the young man’s astonished observations of the unique wildlife of the Galapagos Islands. (His adventures became a best-selling travel narrative right away.) Although he was reluctant to publish before building the strongest possible case for his theory of evolution, Darwin quickly decided to present the theory before the Linnean Society in London, giving due credit to Wallace. The theory was out and Darwin put forth a Herculean effort, so that by the following year The Origin of Species appeared in print. This work established Darwin’s scientific trajectory from then on and inspired a controversy that continues to this day.
Certainly, the idea of evolution was “in the air” at midcentury, and it has been a historical truism to say that Darwin’s success was due to the timeliness rather than the originality of his discoveries. But Darwin’s case for evolution became dominant because it was supported by profound scholarship, attention to the best scientific methods known at the time, and voluminous evidence from fossils and live specimens (his membership in an intellectual elite also helped by opening access to these specimens). Darwin asserted that minute variations in a species are “selected” by nature if they are advantageous to individuals in ways that allow them to reproduce more successfully than their fellows. Thus, the new trait is passed on, and over eons a species may accumulate so many of these variations that it transmutes into a new species. A variety or species that does not change will likely die out because the conditions of life inevitably do change.
Darwin refers to a special form of natural selection as “sexual selection,” a process whereby individuals select as reproductive partners other individuals who indicate special fitness, whether through strength, weapons, or ornaments. These attributes enable some individuals (usually males) to win contests for mates (usually females) by appealing to them rather than just relying on brute force. Evolutionary biologists since Darwin have been fascinated by this insight and pursued it from the female’s point of view: a boy lightning bug who flashes more often gets the girl, and the peacock with the most dramatic plumes gets the peahen, in both cases because the female surmises that the extravagant male really does have more stamina and therefore better survival chances and better genes. In Darwin’s scheme, developed at much greater length in The Descent of Man, sexual selection is one aspect of natural selection. Furthermore, such choices might, Darwin suggests, indicate that humans are not the only animals to have an aesthetic sense. However that may be, multiply these natural and sexual selection processes by the millions, and the result is an almost unfathomably long history during which myriads of species arise and then pass away.
A current myth about Darwin is that he delayed publication of The Origin of Species until 1859 because of his personal struggle between the scientific evidence he saw with his own eyes and a commitment to Christian teachings. In his youth, Darwin did prepare for the ministry because he knew that country living would afford him the leisure and setting to pursue his studies in natural history (especially collecting insects). But in matters of religious faith, he had already tended toward agnosticism in the 1830s, while sorting out the implications of the impressive collections he had made, the life-forms he had observed, and the geology he had studied during his five years on the Beagle. After marrying Emma Wedgwood in 1839, Darwin became a dedicated family man, and he regretted differing from his wife on religious matters. But he delayed publishing his findings because he wanted credibility within the tough and increasingly professional scientific community as much as he dreaded giving offense against religious orthodoxy.
Thus, when he published The Origin of Species the year after presenting his and Wallace’s findings before the Linnean Society, Darwin said next to nothing about our fellow simians and left the history of human evolution to be filled in by attentive readers. Darwin was an animal lover, and he was especially fascinated by apes and monkeys, but he wanted his theory to be taken seriously and saw no reason to roil the waters by placing Homo sapiens in the middle of the argument and openly claiming kin with other primates. On the other hand, Darwin’s friend and tenacious defender Thomas Henry Huxley had no such reservations. To this day, many of those who are nervous about evolutionary theory speak of a “Darwinian conspiracy,” a perception that can be attributed to Huxley as the organizer and center of the X Club, which was dedicated to publicizing and popularizing Darwin’s theories and discrediting those who disagreed, especially on religious grounds.
Huxley was a righteous bulldog. In 1863, four years after the appearance of The Origin of Species and somewhat to Darwin’s dismay, he published Man’s Place in Nature, a series of ethnological lectures he had given at the Royal
