The Evolution of Man

by Ernst Haeckel

Darwin’s Origin of Species had an extraordinary influence, though not at first on the experts of the science. It took zoologists and botanists several years to recover from the astonishment into which they had been thrown through the revolutionary idea of the work. But its influence on the special sciences with which we zoologists and botanists are concerned has increased from year to year; it has introduced a most healthy fermentation in every branch of biology, especially in comparative anatomy and ontogeny, and in zoological and botanical classification. In this way it has brought about almost a revolution in the prevailing views.

However, the point which chiefly concerns us here—the extension of the theory to man—was not touched at all in Darwin’s first work in 1859. It was believed for several years that he had no thought of applying his principles to man, but that he shared the current idea of man holding a special position in the universe. Not only ignorant laymen (especially several theologians), but also a number of men of science, said very naively that Darwinism in itself was not to be opposed; that it was quite right to use it to explain the origin of the various species of plants and animals, but that it was totally inapplicable to man.

In the meantime, however, it seemed to a good many thoughtful people, laymen as well as scientists, that this was wrong; that the descent of man from some other animal species, and immediately from some ape-like mammal, followed logically and necessarily from Darwin’s reformed theory of evolution. Many of the acuter opponents of the theory saw at once the justice of this position, and, as this consequence was intolerable, they wanted to get rid of the whole theory.

The first scientific application of the Darwinian theory to man was made by Huxley, the greatest zoologist in England. This able and learned scientist, to whom zoology owes much of its progress, published in 1863 a small work entitled Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. In the extremely important and interesting lectures which made up this work he proved clearly that the descent of man from the ape followed necessarily from the theory of descent. If that theory is true, we are bound to conceive the animals which most closely resemble man as those from which humanity has been gradually evolved. About the same time Carl Vogt published a larger work on the same subject. We must also mention Gustav Jaeger and Friedrich Rolle among the zoologists who accepted and taught the theory of evolution immediately after the publication of Darwin’s book, and maintained that the descent of man from the lower animals logically followed from it. The latter published, in 1866, a work on the origin and position of man.

About the same time I attempted, in the second volume of my General Morphology (1866), to apply the theory of evolution to the whole organic kingdom, including man.[^[11]] I endeavoured to sketch the probable ancestral trees of the various classes of the animal world, the protists, and the plants, as it seemed necessary to do on Darwinian principles, and as we can actually do now with a high degree of confidence. If the theory of descent, which Lamarck first clearly formulated and Darwin thoroughly established, is true, we should be able to draw up a natural classification of plants and animals in the light of their genealogy, and to conceive the large and small divisions of the system as the branches and twigs of an ancestral tree. The eight genealogical tables which I inserted in the second volume of the General Morphology are the first sketches of their kind. In Chapter 27, particularly, I trace the chief stages in man’s ancestry, as far as it is possible to follow it through the vertebrate stem. I tried especially to determine, as well as one could at that time, the position of man in the classification of the mammals and its genealogical significance. I have greatly improved this attempt, and treated it in a more popular form, in chaps. xxvi–xxviii of my History of Creation (1868).[^[12]]

[11] Huxley spoke of this “as one of the greatest scientific works ever published.”—Translator.

[12] Of which Darwin said that the Descent of Man would probably never have been written if he had seen it earlier.—Translator.

It was not until 1871, twelve years after the appearance of The Origin of Species, that Darwin published the famous work which made the much-contested application of his theory to man, and crowned the splendid structure of his system. This important work was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this Darwin expressly drew the conclusion, with rigorous logic, that man also must have been developed out of lower species, and described the important part played by sexual selection in the elevation of man and the other higher animals. He showed that the careful selection which the sexes exercise on each other in regard to sexual relations and procreation, and the æsthetic feeling which the higher animals develop through this, are of the utmost importance in the progressive development of forms and the differentiation of the sexes. The males choosing the handsomest females in one class of animals, and the females choosing only the finest-looking males in another, the special features and the sexual characteristics are increasingly accentuated. In fact, some of the higher animals develop in this connection a finer taste and judgment than man himself. But, even as regards man, it is to this sexual selection that we owe the family-life, which is the chief foundation of civilisation. The rise of the human race is due for the most part to the advanced sexual selection which our ancestors exercised in choosing their mates.

Darwin accepted in the main the general outlines of man’s ancestral tree, as I gave it in the General Morphology and the History of Creation, and admitted that his studies led him to the same conclusion. That he did not at once apply the theory to man in his first work was a commendable piece of discretion; such a sequel was bound to excite the strongest opposition to the whole theory. The first thing to do was to establish it as regards the animal and plant worlds. The subsequent extension to man was bound to be made sooner or later.

It is important to understand this very clearly. If all living things come from a common root, man must be included in the general scheme of evolution. On the other hand, if the various species were separately created, man, too, must have been created, and not evolved. We have to choose between these two alternatives. This cannot be too frequently or too strongly emphasised. Either all the species of animals and plants are of supernatural origin—created, not evolved—and in that case man also is the outcome of a creative act, as religion teaches, or the different species have been evolved from a few common, simple ancestral forms, and in that case man is the highest fruit of the tree of evolution.