Michael A. Cremo
Yalta
December 14, 2002
NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY: In Human Devolution I spell Sanskrit words phonetically for ease of pronunciation by readers not familiar with the scholarly system of diacritics.
Ascended Apes or Fallen Angels?
“By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys,” wrote Thomas Henry Huxley to his wife Henrietta (WgTdt 1972, p. 71). The year was 1860, and on June 30, Huxley would confront Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in one of history’s most famous debates. The topic was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Samuel Wilberforce despised Darwin’s theory, published the previous year in The Origin of Species, and he was determined to demonstrate its shortcomings. Although a bishop of the Church of England, Wilberforce knew something of science. He was a lifelong student of natural history, and he served as a vice president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He had also been on the governing council of the Geological Society of London, and he knew well several leading scientists of his day, such as geologist Charles Lyell, one of Darwin’s chief supporters, and biologist Richard Owen, one of Darwin’s chief opponents.
At the invitation of the editor of the influential Quarterly Review, Wilberforce had written a negative critique of The Origin of Species. It was not printed until after the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, but when it finally did appear, Darwin himself called it “uncommonly clever” (F. Darwin 1887, p. 324).
In his review, Wilberforce (1860) first attacked Darwin on scientific grounds. In The Origin of Species, Darwin had argued that living things tend to vary slightly in the course of reproduction. After giving examples from bird and animal breeding, Darwin contended that over vast periods of time, aided by natural selection, such variation could lead to the origin of new species. But Wilberforce noted that the variations obtained in breeding pigeons, dogs, and horses were not changes in the basic physical structure of these creatures, such as required for the production of new kinds of organisms. Pigeons remained pigeons, dogs remained dogs, and horses remained horses. Turning to metaphysics, Wilberforce argued that such human qualities as free will and reason were “equally and utterly irreconciliable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God.”
Huxley’s Triumph
On June 30, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Oxford, Dr. J. W. Draper of New York read a paper titled “Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin.” Expecting fireworks, seven hundred attentive hearers had packed the lecture hall. After Draper finished his talk, several persons offered comments. Finally, Wilberforce spoke, attacking Darwin’s theory. His confident words mirrored those that would later appear in his Quarterly Review article on The Origin of Species. Attempting to draw a laugh, he wondered “if any one were willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?” (Meacham 1970, p. 216)
Huxley leaned toward one of his companions and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands” (Meacham 1970, p. 216). When he was called to speak, Huxley delivered his famous retort, quoted in many books about evolution. Declaring that he felt no shame in having an ape for an ancestor, he added, “If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice” (Meacham 1970, p. 216).The audience, won over by Huxley, broke into loud applause. In their opening skirmish, the apes had prevailed over the angels.
The angels, however, still had some highly placed advocates. On November 25, 1864, Benjamin Disraeli, then chancellor of the exchequer and soon to be prime minister, said at a speech at the Sheldon Theater in Oxford: “The question is this—Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence the contrary view, which is, I believe, foreign to the conscience of humanity: more than that, even in the strictest intellectual point of view, I believe the severest metaphysical analysis is opposed to such a conclusion. But what does the Church teach us? What is its interpretation of the highest nature? It teaches us that man is made in the image of his Creator—a source of inspiration and of solace from which only can flow every right principle and every Divine truth . . . It is between these two contending interpretations of the nature of man [ape or angel], and their consequences, that society will have to decide” (Monypenny and Buckle 1929, p. 108). But Oxford University had already decided. Disraeli’s remarks, especially the one about being on the side of the angels, met with loud disapproving laughter that today still echoes with increased volume in the halls of academia.
Disraeli’s unsympathetic university audience had two components. First, there were theologians who had given up a literal reading of the Bible. Second, there were scientists who were also rejecting Biblical literalism, from the standpoint of Darwinism. They both reacted with dislike to Disraeli’s talk of angels (Monypenny and Buckle 1929, pp. 104–109). Indeed, it was the unwitting alliance between these two groups that insured the relatively quick triumph of Darwinism over the Wilberforces and Disraelis of Victorian England. Within a few decades, most of the educated persons of England, and the world, whatever their religious or cultural heritages, would accept that human bodies were not direct creations of God in His image but were instead the modified bodies of apes. Disraeli’s statement that he was “on the side of the angels” is often inserted, as an amusement, into books on evolution, and so is a satirical Punch cartoon of Disraeli dressed as an angel (Ruse 1982, p. 54).
But what exactly did Disraeli mean when he spoke of being on the side of the angels? Was this merely a metaphor, pointing to some vague involvement of God in the origin of the human species? Given the intellectual climate of his times, one is tempted to answer the question positively. For most intellectuals, God had already retreated from the visible universe, taking the role of a detached clockmaker who set a strictly material machine in motion and left it running. But a deeper study of Disraeli’s writings lends support to a more literal reading of his remarks.
In lord George Bentinck: a Political Biography, Disraeli (1852, pp.
495–496) spoke fondly of “the early ages of the world, when the relations of the Creator with the created were more intimate than in these days, when angels visited the earth, and God Himself even spoke with man.”