observed how similar we are to the monkey, the most horrid of beasts (“Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis”), a saying preserved by Cicero and repeated in the foundational scientific works of Francis Bacon and Carl Linnaeus. Disraeli could hardly deny the similarity of human and ape, but what vexed him was its meaning – a question that had indeed long vexed scholars. What is the meaning of a creature who matches us physically bone for bone, muscle for muscle, organ for organ, and yet is not human? That, in fact, had been the question initially posed by the anatomist Edward Tyson back in 1699. Knowing that walking and talking served to distinguish us from the animals, Tyson was fascinated by a creature recently brought back from Africa. Its position could readily be established by its lack of language, which was intimately connected to thought, morality, and spirit. This creature – which we now know to have been a chimpanzee – lacked the power of speech, and thereby lacked the connection to God that all humans have.
On the other hand, there did not seem to be any obvious anatomical reason (for the state of knowledge in 1699) why the creature should not be able to walk like us. Its body corresponded eerily to our own, and yet Tyson had not actually seen the creature walk. Rather, it used the knuckles of its hands to bear its weight. That must have been, reasoned Tyson, because it was mortally ill (which it was), so Tyson compromised and had the creature drawn standing up, with the aid of a cane. The chimpanzee was thus anatomically continuous with people, but intellectually (and presumably spiritually) a gulf away.
This anatomical proximity between human and ape became increasingly familiar over the course of the eighteenth century, but remained difficult to explain. By the mid-1700s, the naturalist Count de Buffon had recognized that the most obvious meaning of this similarity, indeed of patterns of physical similarity in the animal kingdom generally, was that it signified a trail of descent. But once you saw it like that, where would such a trail end?
After all, Buffon reasoned, if you argued that the donkey is built so much like a horse that it should be considered part of a horse “family,” and is thus some sort of transformed primordial horse, then two things followed. First, you could say exactly the same thing about human and ape; and second, you couldn’t stop there, because you could make precisely the same argument for equids and hominids being transformed variations of a mammalian “family,” or mammals and birds being transformed variations of a vertebrate “family.” The only clear stopping point would be the origin of life itself. By the same argument that God made a primordial feline, from which lions, ocelots, and panthers are all descended, one could argue just as readily that God made a primordial mammal, from which lions, ocelots, panthers, bears, giraffes, monkeys, and beavers are all descended; or a primordial vertebrate, from which lions, ocelots, panthers, bears, giraffes, monkeys, beavers, eagles, frogs, and tunas are all descended. This was a scary intellectual place – in which all life might be genealogically related by virtue of common descent, as indicated by their nested patterns of anatomical correspondence – and Buffon retreated from it. A century later, Darwin eventually proved him right.
Notes
1 1. J. Hutton, “Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe,” Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1, 1788, pp. 209–304.
2 2. C. Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Capt. FitzRoy, R. N., 2nd ed., London: John Murray, 1845, p. 173. (This work is more popularly known as The Voyage of the Beagle, and Darwin added this sentence in the revised edition.)
3 3. Likewise the “catastrophism” of the French anatomist/paleontologist Georges Cuvier presupposed the origins of new species at different times in earth history.
4 4. H. Gee, The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 105.
5 5. R. Song, “Play It Again, But This Time With Ontological Conviction,” Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences, 3, 2016, pp. 175–82, quotation from pp. 196–7.
6 6. J. F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, 2nd ed., Boulder: Westview Press, 2007, p. xx, italics in original.
7 7. J. W. Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006, p. xviii.
8 8. R. Dawkins, River Out of Eden, New York: Basic Books, 1995, p. 131.
9 9. B. Latour, “Will Non-Humans be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15, 2007, p. 470.
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