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MAN GORILLA CHIMPANZEE ORANG GIBBON
(Homo) (Anthropithecus) (Satyrus) (Hylobates)
CHAPTER II
THE STRUGGLE OVER OUR GENEALOGICAL TREE
OUR APE-RELATIVES AND THE VERTEBRATE-STEM
In the previous chapter I tried to give you a general idea of the present state of the controversy in regard to evolution. Comparing the various branches of thought we found that the older mythological ideas of the creation of the world were driven long ago out of the province of inorganic science, but that they did not yield to the rational conception of natural development until a much later date in the field of organic nature. Here the idea of evolution did not prove completely victorious until the beginning of the twentieth century, when its most zealous and dangerous opponent, the Church, was forced to admit it. Hence the open acknowledgment of the Jesuit, Father Wasmann, deserves careful attention, and we may look forward to a further development. If his force of conviction and his moral courage are strong enough, he will go on to draw the normal conclusions from his high scientific attainments and leave the Catholic Church, as the prominent Jesuits, Count Hoensbroech and the able geologist, Professor Renard of Ghent, one of the workers on the deep-sea deposits in the Challenger expedition, have lately done. But even if this does not happen, his recognition of Darwinism, in the name of Christian belief, will remain a landmark in the history of evolution. His ingenious and very Jesuitical attempt to bring together the opposite poles will have no very mischievous effect; it will rather tend to hasten the victory of the scientific conception of evolution over the mystic beliefs of the Churches.
You will see this more clearly if we go on to consider the important special problem of the "descent of man from the ape," and its irreconcilability with the conventional belief that God made man according to His own image. That this ape or pithecoid theory is an irresistible deduction from the general principle of evolution was clearly recognised forty-five years ago, when Darwin's work appeared, by the shrewd and vigilant theologians; it was precisely in this fact that they found their strongest motive for vigorous resistance. It is quite clear. Either man was brought into existence, like the other animals, by a special creative act, as Moses and Linné taught (an "embodied idea of the Creator," as the famous Agassiz put it so late as 1858); or he has been developed naturally from a series of mammal ancestors, as is claimed by the systems of Lamarck and Darwin.
In view of the very great importance of this pithecoid theory, we will first cast a brief glance at its founders and then summarise the proofs in support of it. The famous French biologist, Jean Lamarck, was the first scientist definitely to affirm the descent of man from the ape and seek to give scientific proof of it. In his splendid work, fifty years in advance of his time, the Philosophie Zoologique (1809), he clearly traced the modifications and advances that must have taken place in the transformation of the man-like apes (the primate forms similar to the orang and the chimpanzee); the adaptation to walking upright, the consequent modification of the hands and feet, and later, the formation of speech and the attainment of a higher degree of intelligence. Lamarck's remarkable theory, and this important consequence of it, soon fell into oblivion. When Darwin brought evolution to the front again fifty years afterwards, he paid no attention to the special conclusion. He was content to make the following brief prophetic observation in his work: "Light will be thrown on the origin and the history of man." Even this innocent remark seemed so momentous to the first German translator of the work, Bronn, that he suppressed it. When Darwin was asked by Wallace whether he would not go more fully into it, he replied: "I think of avoiding the whole subject, as it is so much involved in prejudice; though I quite admit that it is the highest and most interesting problem for the thinker."
The first thorough works of importance on the subject appeared in 1863. Thomas Huxley in England, and Carl Vogt in Germany, endeavoured to show that the descent of man from the ape was a necessary consequence of Darwinism, and to provide an empirical base for the theory by every available argument. Huxley's work on Man's Place in Nature was particularly valuable. He first gave convincingly, in three lectures, the empirical evidence on the subject—the natural history of the anthropoid apes, the anatomical and embryological relations of man to the next lowest animals, and the recently discovered fossil human remains. I then (1866) made the first attempt to establish the theory of evolution comprehensively by research in anatomy and embryology, and to determine the chief stages in the natural classification of the vertebrates that must have been passed through by our earlier vertebrate ancestors. Anthropology thus becomes a part of zoology. In my History of Creation I further developed these early evolutionary sketches, and improvements were made in the successive editions.