The Art of Science by Richard Hamblyn

Author:Richard Hamblyn [Hamblyn, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9781447204152
Google: 1xKFSqsDj0MC
Amazon: B005NAG78Q
Goodreads: 16126917
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2011-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

13. Following the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin grew used to seeing cartoons that depicted him as an ape. This example appeared in the Hornet magazine in 1871.

There was, at first, a great deal of opposition to Darwin’s ideas, particularly when The Descent of Man was published in 1871, for it was in that volume that Darwin introduced the idea – obliquely hinted at in The Origin of Species – that mankind was also part of the great evolutionary story, and that we are likely to have shared a common ancestor with other higher primates. The claim that ‘man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits’ proved a godsend to cartoonists, and Darwin grew wearily familiar with seeing himself depicted as a bearded monkey up a tree (see fig. 13). The following verses, from a long and vigorously argued anti-evolutionary poem entitled Our Modern Philosophers (1884) by an anonymous author writing under the pen-name ‘Psychosis’, adopt a more subtle form of attack by summing up the argument in a mock-heroic style:

Miasma dense spread o’er the earth;

The sun’s fierce rays pierced stagnant pools,

Which by degrees brought forth the birth

Of life from molecules.

Low marshes and deep quagmires dank

Were filled with every loathsome thing,

Which wriggled up each slimy bank.

Amazed with life, and wondering

Whence they all came, and what they were,

They licked their dirty sides, nor asked what brought them there.

“Natural Selection” then began.

Now mark the process, as I trace

The wondrous origin of man

And descent of the human race.

The vertebrated genus then

(Thou hast been shown its slimy source)

Was the first generant of men,

And centrifugal lineal force

That procreated, stage by stage,

And improved mammal life in each succeeding age.

It took two million years before

Mankind became a perfect breed.

My science says it took e’en more –

On this wise men are all agreed.

The human germ was in a trout,

A toad, a tadpole, or an eel;

And as the germ was changed about

Natural selection fixed its seal;

Through vertebrated life it ran,

And after many years the germ became a man.

And thus by graduation came

The creatures that now rule the earth.

Mammalia held the germ the same,

Thou oft she changed in form at birth.

Arrived at monkey-hood, ’twas then

Nature had little more to do –

She moulded monkeys into men,

Which by analogy is true.

No scientist will ever doubt it;

Nor would the simple bard, if he knew more about it.

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