- Good evening and welcome to this, the second of my lectures about Darwin. I've called the series "Darwin's Descent," and tonight's episode is called "Making a Monkey Out of Darwin." Images like this, this is a
French one, are very familiar. We often see them when
Darwin's being discussed. Pictured as an ape,
swinging from tree to tree. In this case, the tree
is actually labeled, (speaking foreign language) the tree of science,
the tree of knowledge. What I wanted to tease
out are some of the things that these images mean, what they tell us about
Darwin and about his times, and I think rather unexpectedly,
about some of the ways in which people found evolution consoling, or reassuring, which
helps us to understand its comparatively rapid acceptance in some parts of the world
at least in its own time. But I want to start by
raising the question of the monkey in the room. Why is Darwin depicted in this way? These images have become so familiar to us that they seem quite
natural and quite normal, but they are the products
of quite a specific set of historic circumstances
and coincidences. Darwin's face, his beard,
his beetle brow, and so on, are an absolute gift to caricaturists. But sticking them on an
ape's body is a product, as I said, of a particular time and place. I have a kind of passion for these images so there are rather lots
of them in my collection. This one is rather nicely
the kind of reference to Hamlet, the chimp
contemplating the human skull sitting on a volume of Darwin. I've heard that Lenin had a copy of this statue on his desk. I've not been able to confirm it. Darwin has been the longtime favorite of advertisers of all kinds. One of the earliest examples
here for gargling oil, with the Chimp telling him proudly that he was Darwin's grandpa, "what is good for man or
beast is doubly good for me." And evolution continues to be
used regularly by advertisers, particularly in the sense of progress. Darwin was picked up by
caricaturists in his own day. Each new book would be greeted
by an image like this one. The caption here, "That
Troubles Our Monkey Again." This was apropos of his
book on the expression of the emotions in man, and
the young lady is saying, "Really, Mr. Darwin say
what you like about men, "but leave my emotions alone." And his similarity to a monkey is played on over and over again by caricaturists. This one here referencing
"The Descent of Man," the anniversary of which falls
in just a few months time. And of course, he's become a stalwart of t-shirts of all kinds, pro and anti Darwin t-shirts,
creationist ones, and so on. So, the association is there
and it keeps being recycled. And as I say, I have quite
a collection of these. We could be here all night if I started showing you every single one. I'll spare you that. But it's interesting to
see the different ways dominance deployed, and
way that the ape motif is always there whether
the people are being pro or anti Darwin, references to apes, jokes about apes, keep getting made in different contexts. And yet, this is not
as obvious as it seems because actually Darwin doesn't
say anything about apes. The idea that Darwin said,
we're all descended from monkeys actually isn't really very accurate. What he actually said, rather if we bring it up
to date in modern terms, is that we shared a common ancestor with the great apes millions of years ago. But in "The Origin of
Species" he doesn't touch on the subject at all,
apes aren't even mentioned. There's only one sentence
about human evolution in "The Origin of Species." Famously all he said was,
"light will be thrown "on the origin of man and his history "once my views have been accepted," once the idea of evolution by natural selection has been accepted. I've searched the book in vain and I have to say it is a much easier job now that it's online than it was when I first started studying Darwin. The word monkey appears just
three times in the whole book. And there's no hint of any connection to human beings in any of
those three references. The word ape doesn't appear
anywhere in the book. None of the species of great apes appears. There are no chimps,
no gorillas, no orangs. So, how and why does this link get made? Well, one of the contexts
for thinking about Darwin, as I mentioned in the first lecture, is thinking about the context of Victorian industrialization, and particularly the
industrialization of print, that linking of steam-powered printing and cheap machine-made paper, which makes printed matter so common, allows for the bestseller,
really, to be invented. It allows for a new kind of person, the man of letters to come into existence. And of course, the woman of letters, too, but it also allows for
celebrity in the modern sense. And Darwin is really the first
ever scientific celebrity because of the circumstances,
the times in which he lived, and the ways his ideas
and those images of him are reproduced and printed and sold. So a gigantic printing press
like this is my kind of favorite image of the Victorian period. And it's just a reminder
of this vast proliferation of printed materials of every kind, magazine upon magazine,
evangelical magazines, religious ones, magazines for children, magazines for experts, elite gentry, all kinds of things. Darwinism spreads through
all of these different kinds of publications in the
English speaking world, in Britain and America particularly, but is translated and
spreads around the world. There really is a kind
of global Darwinism. And one of the consequences
of that is that Darwin's face becomes a kind of trademark, a trademark for something
called Darwinism. Sticking him on an ape's body
makes the link more explicit, but Darwinism means many different things to different people. And for some people it
embodies an idea of progress, an idea of celebration of secularism, of doing away with old
superstitions and old ideas, hurling ourselves towards modernity, into futurity as one
of Darwin's disciples, HG Wells would say. But of course, it has
very different meanings for different audience. For some people Darwin, of course, is almost the devil incarnate
for his destruction, as they see it, of traditional values and traditional religious
values in particular. In some senses, these reactions to Darwin are all products of the
way that he was read. And, I want to stress
that Darwin is not read, as it were, completely afresh. He's read in the light of various texts that have come before of different kinds. One of which, of course, is
the Judeo-Christian Bible and the expectations
about humanity's place in the world of nature, and so on. But many other books and
the images are going to shape the expectations
people have when they pick up "The Origin" and Darwin's other books. So, one of the most
important contexts is this, "The Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation" published in 1844. This is the big evolutionary bestseller of the Victorian period. It published well before Darwin, and it carries on selling
very well in cheap editions all around the world for many, many years after Darwin publishes
a great many references to ideas about evolution in
Victorian literature, and so on, are really, when you look at them closely, references to "The Vestiges." And "The Vestiges" set up a picture of what I call progressive development, very much an onward and upward story of improvement through life's history. And that expectation, that
evolution means progress, is one of the things
readers would bring to bear when they come to read Darwin's ideas. So, there is a web of texts
that relate to each other that give a set of expectations. They create a kind of genre
that one of my friends, the historian Bernie Lightman, has called the evolutionary epic,
these kind of grand tales of progress, this grand history of life that begins way back with the
formation of the earth itself and goes on perhaps
into the distant future. But as part of that web of texts, which shape the way Darwin is read, I think all kinds of ideas about apes are even more important in shaping the way people are going to react. Now, lots of cultures have
quite positive views of apes. There are wise monkey gods in
various cultures, and so on, but the Judeo-Christian tradition tends to be rather negative. These are marginalia
drawings in the margins of medieval manuscripts done
by a bored monks, I think. But they often express the idea that monkeys embody the
lowest parts of humans. So in this case, the monkeys
here are getting drunk. Something which is, in
fact, a purely human vice, but is here ascribed to the apes. They represent something
bestial and low in ourselves. Apes and monkeys are
often depicted as lustful. I think in this picture,
there's more than a hint that both these apes may be male. In some of these margins
that is made very explicit, in a way that I think
is not quite suitable for Gresham lecture,
but you can see again, aspects of ourselves that
are sometimes called bestial. Our animal nature has been
brought out in these images. And this one, I particularly like, it's really hard not to
see this monkey as wicked, mischievous, scheming,
untrustworthy, almost demonic. And there is one tradition
in Christian thinking that actually argues that
apes were made by Satan as a mockery of God's creation, that they are a caricature
of human beings. And the similarities between us, of course, have been something
authors have been aware of going right back to pre-Christian times. And one of the things monkeys
are often credited with is an ability to imitate humans, but they're not that good at it. So, it's rather a reassuring
comparison in some ways, they're like us, but worse
than us in some ways. And the way that apes
are put to use in adverts and in circus shows and things like that. I grew up in an age where Brooke Bond tea was still being advertised
with chimps' tea parties, chimps dressed up as humans
on television, and so on. So, that imitation of humanity, but a pale imperfect laughable imitation is one of the things that gives us a reassuring sense of our own superiority. When it comes to the great apes, though, the story brings us a little
bit closer to Darwin's time, and we start to get slightly
more specific associations. There are hundreds and hundreds of writers I could talk about here, but I'm just gonna pick
out a couple of themes. Let's think about the
orangutan, for example. A particular word that becomes applied, now to one species of ape, but was originally used much more broadly to mean any of the great apes. One of the places we
first come across this is in Jacob de Bondt, or Bontius as he's known in the Latin form. He's a Dutch physician and naturalist working for the Dutch East India company. And he reports various
indigenous beliefs about the apes including the fact that the apes were, in fact, people who could speak, but they refused to speak
because if they did, people would recognize
that they could be enslaved and put to work. And the apes preferred the
life of ease in the forest, avoiding the necessity of work. And de Bondt is also the first person to actually use the Malay words, Orangutan, borrows them
from Malay into Dutch, and then eventually into English. And he explains in his book that "Ourang Outang, quod
hominem silvae significat," which means man of the
woods or man of the forest. Modern linguists actually
think this is probably a slight misunderstanding
or mistranslation. It doesn't actually seem to
have been a particular name for the species that we now call orangs, but it became attached
to them in this process of translation and export
to wider speaking worlds. When we look at de Bondt's
picture of an orangutan you have the strong suspicion that he may never have actually seen one. And there is definitely a confusion in these stories between
various myths and legends, or savage or primitive
human beings and the apes. And so, the question of
where the boundary lies that signifies man of the
forest, are they people? Are they degenerate people, people who've reverted back
to an earlier animal state? Or are they a simpler
purer kind of people, something which the philosopher Rousseau is going to speculate
about in later times. As I say, the term orangutan
is used quite promiscuously interchangeably with other
words like Pongo, and so on. And it's unclear in many cases in these ancient, early modern texts, what kind of ape is
actually being discussed. One of the first rigorous
scientific descriptions of an ape is the responsibility of
this man, Edward Tyson, who is an early member
of the Royal Society, which came into existence
at Gresham, or as a result of conversations among them,
the gentleman aggression, so he has a kind of link
to the college itself, which is rather nice. And he wrote the first accurate
description of a great ape, which he called orangutan,
or the anatomy of a pygmy compared with that of a monkey and a ape and a man right at the
end of the 17th century. And this is his picture. Now, to modern eyes, I
think this is immediately and very obviously a
picture of a juvenile Chimp, but as I say, he uses
these words orangutan, and other writers at the
time, use them interchangeably with one species for another. And it's interesting that he assumes that this creature is
pygmy, is he calls it, is a human being, because
as you may well know, the chimps are actually
much more human-like when they're juveniles
than as they at age. A mature chimp begins to
develop a pronounced muzzle, big canine teeth, features that are much different to human ones. A juvenile like this
one has a flatter face, rounder eyes, no protruding jaw, no big canine teeth,
looks much more human. And I'm not sure that
Tyson immediately realized how young the ape that
he was dissecting was. This one, the poor thing
was brought to Britain as a curiosity alive,
died soon afterwards, which is how Tyson got to dissect it. Now, my interest in this topic, the whole topic of Darwinism
and evolution, and so on, really began with this
man, Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard historian of
science and a geologist, evolutionary biologist, as
well an extraordinary polymath. And one of the many things
he did was he wrote these popular essays for the
magazine, "Natural History," which he collected into a series of books, and this one has an essay
about Tyson and his pygmy, which is where I first came across him. And Gould argues that Tyson's
description of his pygmy is deeply shaped by a very
ancient tradition in thought known as the great chain of being. This goes right back to classical authors long before the Christian era,
but then gets reinterpreted in Christian times and
reinvented and refined over many, many successive
authors over many years. But the idea very briefly
is that everything is connected into a continuous series, from the least perfect
to the most perfect, so you have minerals, rocks,
mud at the bottom of the chain, and then you go up gradually
through the tiniest, simplest organisms, up
through plants to animals to increasingly sophisticated animals, to humans, to angels, and then to God, right at the top of the chain, the most perfect thing
that can be imagined. And this idea is very much a static idea. It embodies the idea
that creation had a place for everything and
everything was in its place. Nothing could move up or down the chain. And that's quite an
important point about it. I did my first degree when
I, after reading Gould and getting excited about this at the University of New
South Wales in Australia, and not long before I arrived there and they created a new
School of Humanities, and one of my teachers
told me that they decided that each department in the new school would put on a party for the other people to introduce them to their
discipline and what they did, it sort of bond them
together into a school, which was kind of a nice idea. So, the school of Spanish
and Latin American Studies put on an evening of flamenco
dancing and served tapas, which was lovely. Next up was history and
philosophy of science, my department, who were
struggling to think what on earth they were going to do. There are in fact no
traditional history of science folk dancers, for example. And they hit on the idea of doing a great chain of being party. So, when you came in
there was a long table and at one end it was salt,
which represented minerals, and then it went up
through different kinds of fruits and vegetables
and animals, and so on, and ended with a bottle of vodka, which represented pure
spirits at the other end. So it's the most easy way to remember the great chain of being. Anyway, Gould argues
very clearly that Tyson made use of this idea in
interpreting what he was seeing when he dissected the chimp. "Our pygmy is no man,
nor yet a common ape, "but a sort of animal between both." Now, some people have read that I think rather anachronistically, as saying that Tyson was a
kind of pro to evolutionists, that he recognized these links, that the chain was perhaps
a developmental chain a chain of ancestry. But as I said, that's really
not how the chain works. And it's actually quite clear
when you read Tyson carefully, and Gould brings this out very clearly, that that's not what he's implying. "Our pygmy has many
advantages above the rest "of its species, yet I still think it "but a sort of ape and a mere brute." And issues around language
are one of the things that he used to distinguish this. So, this debate about where
the apes could speak or not, is one of the many things
that becomes a focus of how closely linked to us are they. And Tyson goes on, "as the proverb has it, "an ape is an ape, though finely clad," which reminds me of the
chimps' tea party again. The other question about
the apes is not just how like us they are, how
similar they are to us, whether they represent a
necessary intermediate step, I think the idea that
the chain is God's design for the universe means it must be perfect, so if there are gaps in it,
then they need to be filled. And in fact, the notion of a missing link is an idea that is much,
much older than evolution. And it represents the idea
of a gap in the chain. So, making the chimp into a gap between the animal and the human kingdoms fills out the perfection of divine design. It doesn't imply an evolutionary lineage. But as people got to
see apes more commonly, it's interesting to see
how they were described and how those early ideas
that they talked about, the idea of apes as mischievous, bestial, representing the lowest in humans, get recycled and attached to the apes even as the science begins to develop. So another Dutch writer, Willem Bosman, mentions the West African apes. So these would be chimps and gorillas in his "New and Accurate Description "of the Coast of Guinea." And I would mention in passing here that the subtitle is,
in the English edition, "Divided Into the Gold, the
Slave, and the Ivory Coasts." And the question of not just how like humans apes are, but whether
Africans are closer to apes than they are to white Europeans
is one of the many things that sort of work here, when people start to write about them, describe them, and try to make these distinctions. And Bosman in his book,
interestingly, says that "they are a terrible
pernicious sort of brutes, "which seem to be made only for mischief, "and some of the Negroes
believe, as an undoubted truth, "that these apes can speak but will not, "so that they may not be set to work, "which they do not well love. "This is their opinion of them." And the retelling of
supposedly indigenous stories about apes, and then a
certain amount of skepticism, again reinforces a sense
of European superiority over the indigenous
reporters in this case. And we'll see that as we look
to the more immediate context that shapes the Darwin ape connection. So this is, as it were,
some of the early history. Let's turn now to
gorillas who actually play a very important part in the story. And one of the gorilla
experts I want to talk about is this man, Richard Owen. Worked at the Royal College of Surgeons, the Hunterian Museum here in London, and then later become superintendent of the natural history
departments at the British Museum. And it is largely due to
Owen that the British Museum eventually builds a purpose-built museum for natural history, this
extraordinary palace, the temple, the modern
Museum of Natural History, South Kensington here in London. Until relatively recently,
poor old Owen's statue was removed from the grand central nave and Darwin's was put there instead. And in fact, Owen and
Darwin, as you may know, were quite strong rivals, and
it was quite nice actually, I think, to see Owen back in his place given his rightful role, his central role in the creation of this
extraordinary, beautiful museum. Let's go back to Owen before
he clashes with Darwin. One of the things is interesting, he comes from quite a humble background, but he becomes an adept politician within the scientific world at this time. And he cultivates a patronage network, particularly among Britain's
Anglican establishment. So the most respectable church men, politicians, influential people in London. He gets to know them and he
helps them in various ways, and they, of course, become
important sources of support when he needs the vast amounts of money that parliament has to make available to build the Natural History Museum. He's also Britain's leading
comparative anatomist and has a particular
expertise in apes and monkeys. So, very important to this story. But it's interesting, and
I think not surprising given his Anglican patronage network, that he actually uses his expertise to dispute the whole idea of transformism, as evolution is sometimes
called at this time. Transformism, in fact, it
would sometimes be called transformism because it is
very much a French idea, associated in particular with this man, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine
de Chevalier de Lamarck, who historians, I think
mostly to save time, always refer to simply as Lamarck. He worked at the Museum
d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and is amongst other things the man who coins the word biology,
biologie originally. And Lamarck publishes this
idea over several books, but particularly in this one,
the "Philosophie Zoologique," that species had not all been
created at the same time. That in fact, over time,
they change, they develop, they become more perfect
over time through a process as it say that he calls transformism. And this of course is a
disturbing idea to many people. First of all, the British
have a great suspicion of all things French,
particularly at this time when the French Revolution
is still very recent in people's memories. The Napoleonic Wars are still recent. So anything French is liberty, equality, fraternity, transformism, coffee you could actually drink. This is all viewed with
great suspicion in England. And I think there's a particular issue which is that some political
radicals pick up on these ideas and use them to argue that
perhaps this whole place for everything and
everything in its place idea is one of the tricks the ruling class use to keep the workers in their place. And that in fact, nature's
law is about evolution, development, progress, lower
things becoming higher things. And that because Lamarck
places so much emphasis on the environment as a
power that transforms, working class radicals
in Britain and elsewhere begin to argue that
given proper education, given proper housing, given a decent diet, the working class can evolve
to become the ruling class. So, you can imagine Owen's
posh Anglican patrons are not at all keen on this. And so, they're very happy
to see their favorite comparative anatomist take up the controls or the scalpel against
these kinds of ideas. So this is an example from 1855. Owen publishes many papers like this, but the date is significant. This is well before Darwin, all right? He concludes his paper by arguing that 90% of the difference,
which distinguishes "the great chimpanzee," as the gorilla was mostly called then,
"from the human species, "must stand in contravention
to the hypothesis "of transmutation and to
progressive development." Progressive development
being, as you recall, the term that "The Vestiges"
use to describe this idea. And of course, the differences
between humans and apes, and between varieties of human beings, human races as they would
have been called at the time, is something that he focuses on as well. So this is an earlier
paper, 1853, the Hottentots, the people that we now
call Khoikhoi or Khoisan, the people of Southern Africa,
and the Papuans of Australia, who were considered in Victorian times to be the most backward,
primitive people on the earth, but even those who have the
smallest cranial capacity among the human races,
still had twice as much brain as a gorilla. And so, diagrams like this
showing the comparative sizes supposedly the European,
of a Papuan, of a gorilla, and then an orang indicate a hierarchy, which is both a natural
hierarchy of human superiority to it, but obviously also
a racial hierarchy as well. And so, we're opening up that
very dangerous can of worms of the relationship between
Darwinism and racism, which is something I'm
gonna leave for today and come back to in the final lecture. But you can see there are elements of that very clearly in these accounts. In focusing on the brain
as perhaps the most important difference
between humans and apes, Owen doesn't just talk about size. Size does matter. But he actually gets into the nitty-gritty of the anatomy of the brain. So there are various
things that he picks up, but in particular, he
argues that human brains have unique features. One of which, the hippocampus minor, becomes a particular kind of core celeb in arguments about the relationship
between humans and apes. And in fact, in his classification, Owen actually creates a taxonomic group of class of scientific
classificatory group called the archencephala,
the ruling brain, which only contains one
species, Homo sapiens. And when he publishes that classification under the pithy title, "The Classification "and Geographical
Distribution of the Mammalia" to which is added an
appendix, "On the Gorilla," 1859, kind of a key date
in the history here, he concludes "that the
unique human posture, "the hand and the brain together, "were the means by which man,
humans, fulfills his destiny "as the master of this earth,
and of the lowest creation. "Such are the dominating
powers with which we, "and we alone, are gifted. "And I say gifted, for the
surpassing organization "was no work of ours. "It is He that has made
us, not we ourselves." And this is a speech that he
gives at Cambridge University, the heart of the Victorian Anglican scientific establishment. And he is saying very much
what his patrons want to hear. It has to be said that
Owen on a personal level was in an awkward position doing this. And because he's not the
kind of hidebound reactionary that he's sometimes made out to be, you know, the old saying
that the history is written by the winners applies quite strongly here because it was the Darwinians
who wrote the history and they tended to misrepresent
Owen when they did. Owen was actually an incredibly
advanced scientific thinker, very much in touch with
the leading current and European work, particularly in German transcendental anatomy, as it was known. And it's clear that he
was reaching towards some kind of evolutionary
theory of his own, almost certainly with some
kind of divine direction built into it. But he's no biblical
literalist, no clock stopper, not a young earth creationist
or anything like that, which is how he's sometimes depicted. And the reason that he
got depicted like that is because he clashes very famously with Thomas Henry Huxley,
one of the most famous, certainly the most belligerent, of Darwin's Victorian supporters. And you can see Huxley here with a drawing of what is very obviously
a gorilla's skull. And Huxley sets himself up
as an expert on gorillas in direct competition with Owen, with a particular ax to grind,
which is to rubbish Owen but also to attack the whole notion of the Anglican patronage network. He has had to rely himself
on Owen's patronage to get his start in life, coming from an even more humble
background than Owen did, and he resented it. He wanted to push for scientific careers based only on merit, on the
quality of your research. So showing that Owen's
research wasn't any good was a good way of saying that the whole patronage network was corrupt. And so, he argues very
clearly that the hippocampus is a common feature of all primate brains, including apes and ours. There is no sharp
difference in the anatomy that allows us to draw the
kind of sharp dividing line that Owen wants to draw. And again, just to go
back to what I was saying about print culture and the
kind of burgeoning mass media that's been created as a
result of the industrialization of communications, Huxley
uses newly founded, kind of young upstart-y,
slightly radical magazines like "The Natural History
Review" to push his ideas. Owen stays with more established, more conservative journals, and there's clearly a
hope that we're going to keep this whole debate, at
least within scientific circles. And it's not going to
spill out for the unwashed and the kind of red Lamarckians and people like that, to
get their dirty paws on. It has to be said that
may have been a strategy. It failed spectacularly. So this is one of the many places where the debate breaks
out from scientific circles into the mass media. This is from "Punch," the well-known Victorian scientific journal. And the gorilla here is
holding a sign that says, "Am I a man and a brother?"
the very famous slogan, of course, of the anti-slavery movement. And there is a touch of Darwin in this. Obviously 1861 is just a couple
of years after "The Origin," the Darwin-Wedgwood family
very much associated with the anti-slavery cause, and Darwin gets a passing mention here in the poem that accompanies this drawing. But it's one line because Darwin actually doesn't say very much about gorillas. There's much more detail
paid to Owen and Huxley. So, this is a verse from the poem, "Monkey Honors," it's called. "Then Huxley and Owen, "with rivalry glowing, "with pen and ink rushed to the scratch, "'tis brain versus brain "till one of them's slain, "by Jove, it'll be a good match. "Says Owen, you can see "the brain of chimpanzee "is always exceedingly small, "with the hindermost horn "of extremity shorn, "and no hippocampus at all." So, the details of this
really quite abstruse and strange technical anatomical argument are sufficiently well-known to actually be brought into "Punch"
and sent up in this way. And I mentioned how earlier
texts shape expectations and shape the way that
evolutionary debates are going to be read, and how
Darwin is going to be read, and sure enough "Monkeyana"
makes an explicit reference to earlier evolutionary ideas. "The Vestiges taught "that all came from naught "by development, "so called progressive." So, "The Vestiges" is an earlier chapter in the story of which Huxley and Owen, whose debate begins before Darwin, the debate about apes and
nature, a very old debate that becomes another chapter. Darwin becomes another
chapter in this longer story, the story of the evolutionary epic. Now, among the differences,
which the poet emphasizes between apes and humans is the fact that, "They can't stand upright "unless to show fight "with Du Chaillu, "that chivalrous knight." Now, who was Du Chaillu and what has he got to do with this story? It turns out rather a lot. He's actually quite an important part of turning the gorilla into a very popular and well understood
icon that becomes linked to Darwin and to evolutionary ideas. So, I want to talk a little bit about him. This is a one of many very gripping and exciting illustrations from his books that tell of his adventures
in the African jungle, very much an image of himself
as the great white hunter facing down the great apes. Gorillas are very new to science. Almost nobody has seen one to show claims to be the first white man
ever to have hunted one. And so, this is a real novelty
when he tells these stories. Paul Belloni Du Chaillu
was a French American. There is a question mark about his dates. There is a question mark
about a great many things about Du Chaillu and in his own time, and since various people
have suggested that he was more of a writer of fiction than an accurate scientific reporter. But as I say, that only emerged gradually. He is sent in the mid 1850s by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to West Africa to explore what were then really relatively unknown areas. He spends a couple of
years there, three years, in and around Gabon and areas like that. And as I say, he claims there to have seen gorillas in the wild, to have hunted them, and to have been the first
European to have done so. And he publishes this book
straight after he gets back, "Explorations and Adventures
in Equatorial Africa," with gorilla emblazoned
all over the title page. I mentioned there's certain
doubts about the accuracy of Du Chaillu's work, and
those doubts were prompted almost immediately by the
famous frontispiece to his book, supposedly based on eyewitness
accounts of gorillas. People noticed an eerie
similarity to this picture, which appeared in
Geoffroy's book, the gorilla in the French book a
couple of years earlier. And this was one of a number of points that people picked up on and said, "Hmm, we're not convinced you've actually "done all the things you've done." And in fact, other
explorers retraced his steps and cast all kinds of doubts
over what he'd actually seen. But as I say, that process takes time and he remains a scientific
celebrity for quite a while. One of the things that he emphasizes very strongly in the
book is how human-like the gorillas are, how
like people they look, and it's actually quite touching to read where he talks about a kind of guilt at having murdered them
when he shoots them, and how human they look as they run away in terror from the hunters, and so on. It's a more complicated image than perhaps the kind of great white hunter
picture immediately depicts. But it's particularly this
image of the male gorilla, the dominant male standing
up, beating his chest, standing down the hunter,
which "Punch" picks up on, which becomes the kind
of, the selling point, the great image of the book. Gorillas are ferocious and dangerous and you need considerable courage to face one in the wild. It's Du Chaillu in later years, but he comes to London very soon after the book is published. And he comes as the guest of Owen, very much with Owen's
patronage and support and all the gorilla skulls and skeletons, which Du Chaillu collected in Africa become part of Owen's
Natural History Museum. And they're still there. And interestingly, the famous picture here of "My First Gorilla" of Du
Chaillu facing down a gorilla, shooting him at point
blank range in the chest, that actual skin is in the British Museum and apparently the bullet
holes are all in the back. So there are all kinds of
doubts about Du Chaillu's story. Nevertheless, he parlays this fame into an endless series of books. This is a kind of
children's version of this. And again, this is a
famous story of the gorilla killing the native hunter. The African is not brave
enough or strong enough to face down the gorilla,
takes his gun and breaks it. So you can see the whole
lineage of King Kong and the big, scary gorilla
of Hollywood, and so on, have their origins here
in this Victorian book. And Du Chaillu is a very popular figure. This is a much later
picture of him lecturing in America to the young people in Boston, but you can see there, the
picture you can just see there's the gorilla snapping the gun. That story gets told and retold. And apparently when Du
Chaillu came to London he lectured with a kind of array of stuffed gorillas behind him, big pictures, and so
on, audio visual aids. He really told a good yarn and really gripped the audience
and got them very excited. And this gets picked up on
in the media of all kinds. Du Chaillu's gorillas become a sensation over the year or two immediately
after Darwin has published. So this is another "Punch"
story about photography, but there you can see
that there's that story of the broken gun with
the gorilla here lecturing the hunter about being so naughty. That's dangerous to play
with firearms, and so on. The gorilla is so lionized by literary society, such a popular figure that he appears here in
"Punch" in evening dress as "The Lion of the Season," being introduced by a rather
terrified looking flunky as he walks in. So the gorilla's human
qualities are emphasized. The celebrity is emphasized, and so on, but so are other aspects of the gorilla. This is "Punch" once
again, "Agitated tailor "to foreign-looking gentleman, "you're rather long in the arm, sir, "but I'll do my best to fit you." Foreign-looking gentlemen, again, it's just one of those
little subtle hints about the idea that there is a
kind of racial hierarchy at work here, and Du Chaillu tells less than flattering
stories about the Africans, their superstitions,
their primitive beliefs, their cannibalism, and so on. All the old lies are peddled yet again. And the racial hierarchy becomes explicit in this famous drawing from "Punch," which is about Fenianism,
Irish nationalism. A recent statement by the Irish is sent up here by reproducing the
statement underneath it they say, "And here is a
picture of the author," who is identified as Mr. G. O'Rilla. And the idea that the
Irish are an inferior race, not as civilized, not as progressive, not as evolved as the English, is a common trope of English
thought in the 19th century and unfortunately well beyond that. So the ideas of savagery and brutality get attached to the Irish. So you can see, very
complicated set of stories by which gorillas, Darwin
kind of gets attached to the gorilla stories, and
then the gorillas have a life of their own that takes Darwinism with it in its wake into all kinds
of unexpected places. And one of the unexpected places where Darwin and the gorillas end up is in what I call the
consolations of evolution, which I wanna talk about by way of bringing this to a close. So, this is a famous
picture of Huxley and Owen, caricatured here, and they are examining a specimen in spirits, a bottled
natural history specimen, which in this case is a water baby. You may well be familiar with this. "The Water Babies" is a children's story written by Charles Kingsley, here in 1863. And one of the things
it does is it rehashes the hippocampus debate
and mocks the arguments between Huxley and Owen as it goes along. And so, at one point in the
book the narrator says that, "if water babies really existed, "they would have been
caught, they would have been "put in spirits and cut in half, "one half sent to Professor Owen "and one to Professor Huxley to see what "they would say about it." So, the scientific men get drawn into the children's story here. And there's a character in the book called Professor Ptthmllnsprts, who is the learned professor, who is very much a caricature
of Huxley, I think. And he had argued that apes, like humans, "have hippopotamus majors in
their brains just as men have." The narrator goes on, "Which
was a shocking thing to say, "for if it were so, what would become "of the faith, hope, and
charity of immortal millions? "Now you may think that there
are more important differences "between you and an ape,
such as being able to speak, "and make machines, and
know right from wrong, "and say your prayers." The narrator addresses the
child reader, and it goes on, "but that is all the
child's fancy, my dear. "Nothing is to be depended on "but the great hippopotamus test. "If you have a hippopotamus
major in your brain, "you are no ape." Now you might think that, of course, Kingsley, the author, is the
Reverend Charles Kingsley, a devout if rather radical Christian. And you might think that
he is mocking Huxley mocking the claims of evolution, making a clear distinction
between humans and apes. And to some extent he is, but he's more complicated than that
because "The Water Babies" is an evolutionary fairy tale. Tom, who's the main character,
is a poor chimney sweep, a dirty little pagan,
hasn't read the Bible, doesn't know anything about religion. And the book really tells
the story of his evolution, and Darwin's ideas, and the
idea of natural selection are among the many ideas that
are brought into this satire, his evolution from this
grubby, little, dirty pagan into a good Christian. And, this is an example,
I think, of the way that that earlier tradition,
the evolutionary epic, the kind of tradition that
is there in "The Vestiges," remains part of the way in
which people read Darwin when he comes along, that evolution is a tale of progress,
inevitable progress. And for Kingsley, it means progress to ever higher spiritual and moral states. So, it's not just about better bodies, better brains, but better
morals, better souls. And Kingston is a really
interesting character in Darwin's story. He was quite a well-known
naturalist in his own right. He wrote a lovely book called "Glaucus, or, the Wonders of the Shore," which is part of the kind of
natural historical tradition, sometimes known as natural theology, of examining the wonders of nature as a way of seeing God's
handiwork in the natural world. And as I say, he's also
a religious writer. He's the Reverend Charles
Kingsley, and so on. So, he's kind of an interesting person, and it's not entirely
surprising given those interests and given his progressive views, that he's on Darwin's mailing list for advanced copies of "The Origin." He sends out these to selected people, mostly gentlemen of science,
very much in the hope of kind of softening the blow, getting some favorable responses. He really hits pay dirt when
he sends this to Kingsley, because Kingsley wrote back
thanking Darwin for the book, and said that he had
"gradually learned to see "that it is just as noble
a conception of Deity "to believe that he created primal forms "capable of self-development
into all forms "as to believe that he required
a fresh act of intervention "to supply the lacunas," the gaps, "which he had himself made." So, the idea is here that
God is such a great God that He can create living
matter imbued, as it were, with foresight, that it can evolve and develop and progress,
and keep adapting to the changing
circumstances of the world. And this is an idea again, which is echoed very clearly in "The Water Babies" where creatures make
themselves through evolution. And this idea that a natural war of evolution that leads to inevitable progress was sufficiently acceptable for Darwin, that he actually got Kingsley's permission to quote those words in the introduction to the second edition of "The Origin." And so, it's very clear that
Darwin is perfectly happy for people to read "The Origin" the way that Kingsley chose to
read it, if they wanted to. Darwin also makes in the second edition, a small change to the book's conclusion. So, this is the very famous end to the "The Origin of
Species" as it appeared in the first edition. He says here that "From the war of nature, "from famine and death,
the most exalted object "which we are capable
of conceiving, namely, "the production of the higher
animals, directly follows. "There is a grandeur in this view of life, "with its several powers
having been originally breathed "into a few forms or into one. "And that whilst this
planet has gone cycling on, "according to the fixed law of gravity, "from so simple a beginning, endless forms "most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, "and are being, evolved." I love this passage and there is so much we could say about it, but
luckily for you, time is short. I just point out, breathed, has a definite biblical resonance to it. That the planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, the evocation of Newton, the
greatest English scientist as he was regarded in the 19th century. He of course was interpreted
in the 19th century as saying that God was
like a perfect clockmaker. He had designed a universe so beautifully, wound the mechanism so perfectly, that it just ran forever
without any maintenance on the part of its maker, never needed oiling, never needed winding. And so, that notion of
a God who can create through law is seen, as Kingsley put it, as a more exalted
conception of the divinity than a God who has to step in and kind of hand design every new species of slug when one has gone extinct, and so on. So, there are all those
kinds of evocations of law and nature, and so on. But I think the tense
of the final sentence is particularly interesting, beautiful, wonderful, exalted, all this kind of biblical
rather religious language, but it ends, "have been
and are being evolved." The idea that evolution is not over, evolution is continuing
forward and that perhaps better things are still to come. Now, I mentioned that
Darwin made a small change to this conclusion in the second edition. The second edition is only a
few months after the first. He's added three words here. You can see this is a little bit longer. Three words, "by the Creator." "Originally breathed by the Creator." So that theistic reading of evolution, that idea that evolution
is perhaps designed and managed by God, intended by God, is made more plausible by
Darwin in later editions. Now, it's a complicated picture 'cause elsewhere in the
book he takes out references to the Creator and regrets having used that kind of language in places, but he adds it here. The book goes through five
more editions in his lifetime, and he leaves it there
for those five editions. Now, I am personally not very interested in what Darwin really believed
or what he really thought. I don't think historically that's the most interesting question to ask. The more interesting
question is to think about how people read Darwin. And I mentioned in the last lecture that some people could
find evolution consoling. This is a famous passage with which Darwin ends the chapter on
the struggle for existence. "When we reflect on the struggle "we may console ourselves." Again, a phrase with biblical resonance. I said the Judeo-Christian
Bible is one of the books that shaped the way
people read "The Origin," console the consolations of religion, that idea would have been there. "We may console ourselves
with the full belief "that the war of nature is not incessant, "that no fear is felt, that
death is generally prompt, "and that the vigorous, the healthy, "and the happy survive and multiply." Now, that is of course a very different consolation to conventional Christianity. There's no two ways about it. This is a kind of statistical consolation that on average the good, the healthy, the happy survive and multiply, things work out for the
best, generally speaking. It doesn't give you a
sense of individual purpose or meaning, an explanation for what has just happened in your life. But perhaps that's part of the strength. I also mentioned in the last lecture that the Darwins, Emma and Charles, lost three of their children in infancy, and infant mortality is frighteningly high in Victorian times,
higher, much, much higher than it is now, 25 times higher. And there is some evidence to suggest it might actually have been rising, possibly because of urbanization and the spread of contagious diseases, poor sanitation, and things like that. But, even wealthy people like the Darwins with the best medical care money can buy, lose three children in infancy. Now, if you think about traditional conventional Christianity, the idea that God is imminent,
present in the world, He oversees and directs everything, that not a sparrow falls
without him willing it, this is hard stuff to handle
from that perspective. God has personally stepped
in and killed your child. Why? Theologically, it's a very complex issue, one I'm not qualified to judge, and we certainly don't have time for, but many Victorians found it difficult to accept conventional Christianity. And so, this more diffuse
picture of progress that generally works out for
the best in the long run, is one form of consolation
for some people. So the fact that the
evolution of humans from apes means that there's nothing
distinctive or special, no mortal soul, no distinct
act of creation that made us, undermines traditional Christianity. But as I say, for some
people that's actually perhaps a good thing. And that "have been,
and are being evolved," I always come back to
that as thinking about the notion of a better future to come. And it's something that clearly
struck people straight away. So one of the very first
reviews of "The Origin" appeared in the "Athenaeum,"
very prestigious, posh literary journal at the time, just a few days after the book itself. And I'll leave you with
this quote from that review. The reviewer commented that "an unbroken, "sure, though slow, living progress "towards animal perfection
is a delightful vision. "Natural and gradual
optimism is a welcome fancy. "What need of distinct creation?" This is perhaps a little tongue in cheek, but it is one way in
which you could choose to read "The Origin,"
a slow gradual movement up towards perfection. And with the tense of
Darwin's conclusion in mind, the reviewer continued, "If a monkey has become a man, "what may not a man become?" Thank you very much for listening.
