The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder by David Quammen

Author:David Quammen [Quammen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B009R44PC4
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2012-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

IV

NEAR SIGHT

BEAST IN THE MIRROR

Science Uncovers Another Chimpanzee

In 1699, more than a century before the birth of Charles Darwin, a London physician named Edward Tyson dissected a chimpanzee. The conclusion to which this exercise brought him was curiously foresightful. Probing in cold flesh with his seventeenth-century scalpel and his seventeenth-century frame of mind, Tyson anticipated not just The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man but also some of the most profoundly provocative work to appear in the Journal of Molecular Evolution during the late years of your century and mine.

The chimp in question had been taken alive and shipped from what is now Angola to England, where after just a few months it succumbed to English weather and other forms of desolation. It reached Edward Tyson as a cadaver. It wasn’t the first of its species to be abducted by European explorers (a chimpanzee had been presented in 1640 to the prince of Orange), but it was among the earliest few. Other species of ape—the gorilla in Africa, the orangutan in Sumatra and Borneo—were still known only through breathless, inaccurate hearsay. Peeling away the skin and the muscles of the chimpanzee on his table, Tyson made elaborate, textured drawings in the ghoulishly beautiful style of Vesalius. He spackled those drawings with numerical labels. He compared certain features that were manifest in his specimen with the anatomical particulars of humans, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of monkeys. He counted thirty-four features in which the chimpanzee resembled monkeys more closely than it resembled humans; balanced against those, he found forty-eight other features in which it matched more closely to humans. (For instance, its brain was much larger in proportion to body size than the brain of any known monkey.) Tyson could only conclude that this beast fell somewhere between. Although it wasn’t human, it appeared to be more like a human than like any other creature that he’d ever seen. Gropingly, without guidance from a theory of evolution by common descent, Tyson judged that an animal so similar deserved to be welcomed to the human genus, Homo. He wasn’t making any revolutionary assertion about shared ancestry. He was just trying to give an orderly, logical name to a piece of God’s creation as he found it. He called the chimp Homo sylvestris. Translated: man of the forest.

Nowadays, after decades of field study and museum work in comparative anatomy, the common chimpanzee goes by a different name: Pan troglodytes. In conventional textbooks and taxonomic encyclopedias, it’s placed in the family Pongidae, which includes also the pygmy chimpanzee (a smaller species, formerly unrecognized but now designated as Pan paniscus, and sometimes known as the bonobo), the gorilla, and the orangutan. To understand the significance of that placement—and of striking new data that challenge it—you might need to know just a nickel’s worth of taxonomy.

Pongidae is a family of apes, as distinct from monkeys; the gibbons, which are apes too but somewhat smaller and more gracile, comprise a closely

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