in the primate family tree to the imagination. The frontispiece was the now-famous illustration of a Homo sapiens skeleton walking tall at the head of an evolutionary line, followed by various anthropoid skeletons, with a skeletal gibbon last in line. Critical as it was of previous ethnological, paleontological, and biological scientists, the appearance of Huxley’s little book forced the pace of professionalization in the sciences and brought to light the full implications of Darwin’s theory: that humans, too, are animals, in the same family tree as the apes and with no pretensions to a separate creation. According to Huxley, “The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature’s power over us; to what goal we are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world.”7 Huxley’s pugnacious attitude was especially useful in terms of primatology, in its rudimentary stages an extremely contested discipline, as it is still today. Indeed, primatology is a conflictive disciplinary zone probably for the reason Huxley himself gives: that our relation to nature is the fundamental question and that investigations of nonhuman primates more powerfully (and more viscerally) suggest answers than the pursuit of any other knowledge.
Not only was the taxonomic relationship between humans and other primates contested, but even basic data about apes and monkeys was difficult to collect and unreliable. The great apes, especially, occupied territories almost impossible for Europeans to reach, and the apes feared humans as much as humans feared them, with better reason. Like other field studies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primatology usually consisted of tracking, shooting, dissection, preservation in kegs of alcohol, and skeletal reconstruction—or killing adult apes in order to capture infants, who usually died in adolescence even if they survived the ocean voyage back to a European zoo. There were a few exceptions among naturalists, but it is worth remembering that, in order to paint them, even John James Audubon killed, mounted, and stuffed the birds he loved. In spite of the tireless collecting done during this period, primate taxonomy remained difficult because the transportation of large specimens, such as the cadavers of great apes, was so challenging that few whole specimens were available. Behavioral studies were next to impossible: few naturalistic primate groupings could be observed in zoos, so data about intraspecies social behavior had to come from field studies, and field biologists had to contend against great obstacles, without well-defined scientific protocols. Scientists relied on whatever lore they could dredge up from missionaries and explorers, their own fragmentary observations of apes fleeing for their lives, or stories they heard from the locals, many of which turned out to be tales for children! Tall tales mistaken for true accounts, misidentifications of specimens, and profound disagreements were inevitable. And, in fact, the taxonomic record is still under construction as new species of monkeys continue to be found and known species are reclassified after closer study.
In the first section of his book, Huxley did his best to sort through the available information about apes from Ovid onward, distinguishing myth from fact, explaining the sources of confusion, composing clear and well-organized descriptions of anthropoids, and suggesting future directions for scientists. In the second chapter, Huxley argues that if humans are more like gorillas than gorillas are like gibbons, then we must accept our place in the ape family tree. He follows this thesis with every comparison he can make among the specimens available: he takes skeletal measurements; counts and categorizes teeth; describes nostrils, eyes, hands, and feet in detail; records information on fetal development; and observes configurations of preserved human and anthropoid brains. Finally, Huxley calculates brain weights by filling braincases with millet seed, substituting and weighing an equal volume of water, and, since brain tissue weighs 10 percent more than water, multiplying the water weight by 1.1.
For Huxley, the evidence for claiming kin to other primates is overwhelming. He recommends a thought experiment, in which the reader might imagine the puzzlement of a space explorer from Mars who attempts to classify earth species and understand how humans can logically justify placing themselves in their own category. (Darwin would return to this idea in The Descent of Man, citing Huxley and pointing out that “if man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.”)8 Not only does Huxley insist that humans are apes; since evidence for biological distinctions among races is inconsequential in comparison to the rest of the data he has collected for his study, he posits an early version of what we now call the cultural construction of race, arguing that racial divisions are based on flimsy or nonexistent science. Cuvier might have contributed a few facts to the study of fossils and primate skeletons—and to the detective stories of Poe—but he was not one of Huxley’s heroes.
Now the war between religious conservatives and scientific professionals began in earnest, the battles so bitter that they still loom large in our cultural awareness. In England, the famous 1860 debate on evolution between Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (who accused Huxley of having apes for ancestors) was a source of hilarity in the press and hard feelings for the contestants. Sixty-five years later, in the United States, the “Monkey Trial” of the Tennessee high school biology teacher John Scopes was so notorious that it has affected public perception of scientific education in the United States ever since. And if the U.K. has finally put Darwin on its money, in the United States, only about half the general population believes that Darwin had it right, and school districts remain torn about the appropriateness of teaching “Darwinism” without a religious counterweight, currently called “intelligent design.” Today, even among those who take Darwin seriously, the extent to which Darwinism can be applied to human psychology and society continues to be a topic of sharp debate. Both social Darwinism (which cannot justifiably be called “Darwinism” at all) and evolutionary psychology are still anathema to many social scientists and humanists.9
In any case, after Huxley was seconded by other prominent scientists of the day (notably the feisty German Ernst Haeckel, whose search for fossil evidence of “the missing link” was even more provocative than the projects of British evolutionists), Darwin finally had to take charge of the argument about our place in the great tree of life.10 As usual, his concern was to preserve not only the reality but also the appearance of scientific objectivity—a challenging task under the circumstances. The Descent of Man, published as two heavy volumes in 1871, begins with barely concealed exasperation: “During many years I collected notes on the origin or descent of man without any intention of publishing on the subject, but rather with the determination not to publish, as I thought that I should thus only add to the prejudices against my views.”11 This book provided the same kind of scholarly underpinning to the theory about human origins and our kinship with other simians that The Origin of Species had supplied for the general theory of evolution and speciation. True to form, Darwin had more to say than he anticipated. The two best-selling volumes of The Descent of Man were not enough, and the following year he added a third, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which was even more appealing to the public because readers could test Darwin’s conclusions against their own observations and the generous illustrations.
Once committed to the struggle, Darwin drew upon all his resources—the notes he had collected for years; the texts he read voraciously; the specimens now pouring into museums and private collections from the edges of the expanding British Empire; a voluminous correspondence with scientists, explorers, missionaries, and nabobs all over the world; and conversations with impresarios of animals shows and, especially, zookeepers. In a series of somewhat domesticated adventures, Darwin spent as much time as he could at zoos, which at that time were repositories for both preserved specimens and live animals.
In Primate Visions, Donna Haraway describes Jane Goodall’s account of her adventures in Tanzania as a “first contact” narrative.12 In a way, Darwin’s zoo excursions might also be considered first contacts, since he undertook them in order to understand kinship rather than estrangement—in other words, to see these primates as embodied beings, not as they had been presented in myths and
