Darwin's Pictures by Julia Voss

Author:Julia Voss [Voss, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16310-0
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 53. Frontispiece to Haeckel’s 1874 Anthropogenie, oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (Anthropogenie, Or the Evolution of Man)

4 THE LAUGHING MONKEY

The Human Animal

ON April 21, 1868, Darwin sketched a family tree in brown ink on a white sheet of paper—a spindly image measuring less than five inches (Figure 54 [Color Plate 4b]). At the bottom of the sheet he noted that it was part of the “primates” family tree—in other words, the division of the animal kingdom to which humans also belong. The image evokes the feeling of being witness to a mighty mental struggle. Deletions and corrections overlap one another; the sketch is composed of multiple layers, the fragments of discarded ideas. In the upper forks of the diagram the first draft shows through in tentative broken lines, which were later copied over with solid strokes. Darwin hesitantly indicated a number of branches as if they were questions and then painted over them with thick lines. He drew other branches that trail off into oblivion and remained unnamed. Where a name is present, it is often preceded by an earlier one that has been crossed out.

Despite this struggle, Darwin apparently arrived at a conclusion. Read from the bottom to the top, the family tree tells the following story: the earliest branch of the primates in the history of evolution is the Lemuridae, a kind of half-ape whose descendants live today on the African island of Madagascar. Then the family of the apes splits into the lines of the “new world monkey” and “old world monkey.” An unnamed lineage at the very left trails off and dies out. This dead end is followed by three major branches: humans on the left; the great apes with the genera of gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons in the middle; and the lesser apes on the right, represented by the two genera of semnopithecus. The evolutionary diagram thus makes two statements about human beings: first, that gorillas and chimpanzees are our closest living relatives; and second, that humans represent just one part of the primate family. Darwin grants humans a position that is neither central nor exceptional. As a result, his scheme clearly differs from that of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose 1874 Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (Anthropogenic, Or the Evolution of Man) would give humans a central place at the very top of the family tree, banishing the gorilla and chimpanzee to the lower branches (see Figure 35). Darwin’s plan also differs from Haeckel’s in that it remained unpublished. He neglected to include the 1868 drawing three years later in The Descent of Man, four years later in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, or in the revised editions of On the Origin of Species that appeared during the 1870s. He continued to observe the lesson he had learned from his reading of Chambers: to avoid speculating about genealogies in his own work. The abstract chart of evolution, bound into On the Origin of Species as a fold-out table

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