The Great Chain of Being
Aug. 31st, 2005 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThere's apparently an issue of Nature out now that has a lot of stuff in it about chimpanzees, including a paper on the sequencing of the chimp genome, which is 96% identical to that of humans. (Which is no big surprise, in itself; I remember reading that the number was 97% many years ago.)
(Update: 99%? Well, I guess it depends on how you count; three-quarters of the 4% difference is in non-coding DNA, but it seems odd to then count those base pairs as if they were identical instead of just leaving out the non-coding DNA. And I'm not sure what anyone means by "what makes us uniquely human"; it's not as if they're going to isolate the I Am Not A Chimp Gene. But I digress.)
Anyway, some people in PZ Myers' thread on the subject remarked that the information is inconvenient for creationists. Maybe it is for modern-style creationists, but historically it isn't the case that creationists downplayed similarities between humans and apes. In fact, in the 18th and early 19th century, many biologists (who were nearly all creationists at the time) actually exaggerated the similarities. (Stephen Jay Gould was particularly fond of pointing this out.)
That was because they believed in something called "The Great Chain of Being": a linear sequence of of all things filling an essentially continuous chain from "lower" to "higher", from rocks to God with people somewhere between apes and angels. Everything in the Chain existed at the same time; it wasn't a time sequence. Big gaps in the chain—"missing links"—were problems for this theory, since they didn't have deep time as the home of long-dead evolutionary ancestors.
Also, these were all white guys in Europe and America and they were generally pretty racist, and they thought black and brown people were the intermediate subspecies (or, for some, intermediate species) between white people and apes. So they often tended to see chimps, gorillas and orangutans as closer to humans (specifically, to the kinds of people they thought were "lower") than they actually are.
This explains some things. It's why poorly researched popular accounts of human evolution often go on about "the Missing Link" even though you usually don't hear scientists use this term; it's a holdover from the old Great Chain theory, which suggested that there might be some modern or nearly modern species in between humans and apes, something that evolutionary theory does not require. Lots of people have an intuitive, incorrect idea of evolution that is just the Great Chain transformed into a time sequence; this is why they ask questions like "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?"
It also reveals that the people who blame Darwin for giving scientific justification to racism are talking hooey. Evolutionary theory has been, and still is, twisted to justify racism and eugenics, but what preceded it was way better for the purpose. Many scientists before Darwin thought the different races had been separately created, or they thought of ethnic groups they didn't like as degenerate forms of the Adamic ideal, as if every species had an ideal form like breeds of show dogs.
The teaching of evolution was banned in South African schools under apartheid; I think that's telling. Some people don't like being reminded who their cousins are, and I'm not talking about chimpanzees.
(Update: 99%? Well, I guess it depends on how you count; three-quarters of the 4% difference is in non-coding DNA, but it seems odd to then count those base pairs as if they were identical instead of just leaving out the non-coding DNA. And I'm not sure what anyone means by "what makes us uniquely human"; it's not as if they're going to isolate the I Am Not A Chimp Gene. But I digress.)
Anyway, some people in PZ Myers' thread on the subject remarked that the information is inconvenient for creationists. Maybe it is for modern-style creationists, but historically it isn't the case that creationists downplayed similarities between humans and apes. In fact, in the 18th and early 19th century, many biologists (who were nearly all creationists at the time) actually exaggerated the similarities. (Stephen Jay Gould was particularly fond of pointing this out.)
That was because they believed in something called "The Great Chain of Being": a linear sequence of of all things filling an essentially continuous chain from "lower" to "higher", from rocks to God with people somewhere between apes and angels. Everything in the Chain existed at the same time; it wasn't a time sequence. Big gaps in the chain—"missing links"—were problems for this theory, since they didn't have deep time as the home of long-dead evolutionary ancestors.
Also, these were all white guys in Europe and America and they were generally pretty racist, and they thought black and brown people were the intermediate subspecies (or, for some, intermediate species) between white people and apes. So they often tended to see chimps, gorillas and orangutans as closer to humans (specifically, to the kinds of people they thought were "lower") than they actually are.
This explains some things. It's why poorly researched popular accounts of human evolution often go on about "the Missing Link" even though you usually don't hear scientists use this term; it's a holdover from the old Great Chain theory, which suggested that there might be some modern or nearly modern species in between humans and apes, something that evolutionary theory does not require. Lots of people have an intuitive, incorrect idea of evolution that is just the Great Chain transformed into a time sequence; this is why they ask questions like "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?"
It also reveals that the people who blame Darwin for giving scientific justification to racism are talking hooey. Evolutionary theory has been, and still is, twisted to justify racism and eugenics, but what preceded it was way better for the purpose. Many scientists before Darwin thought the different races had been separately created, or they thought of ethnic groups they didn't like as degenerate forms of the Adamic ideal, as if every species had an ideal form like breeds of show dogs.
The teaching of evolution was banned in South African schools under apartheid; I think that's telling. Some people don't like being reminded who their cousins are, and I'm not talking about chimpanzees.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 09:50 pm (UTC)As I wrote in that editorial for my mother's newspaper though, I have been suspecting that it's the human/ape relation that bugs modern creationists. You suppose it's racial thinking too?
It seems to me that there are enough other conflicts between a literal reading of the Bible and modern science that there should be a special reason to single out the origin of species. Fundamentalists don't make as much noise about plate tectonics or the existence of an ice age. And I don't think creationists would care as much about the evolution of, say, horses.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 09:58 pm (UTC)As for modern creationists, I think they're all over the map. Some of them aren't racist at all, and the prominent young-earth types tend to stress that all people are descended from Adam and Eve, and say it's those nasty evolutionists who are the racists. But I'm pretty sure there are also modern Americans who dislike evolution because it says they're closely related to black people and descended from Africans. There are some scary neo-Nazi types who endorse polygenist theories of humanity, that the races were separately created.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 10:11 pm (UTC)pre-Adamites
Date: 2005-09-01 07:52 am (UTC)Actually, Biblical literalists are pretty much forced to believe in pre-Adamites: In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain flees after killing Abel, and eventually settles in the land of Nod and takes a wife. Where did that wife come from?
When I was a kid, I saw a pamphlet from a racist religious group (I think they called themselves the "Southern Methodists", no affiliation with SMU that I know of). The pamphlet showed drawings of skeletons of a black person and a gorilla and suggested that black people were not decended from Adam, but were a subspecies of gorillas. So these particular idiots had no problem reconciling creation and evolution: White people were created, black people evolved. Maybe Cain's wife evolved?
Re: pre-Adamites
Date: 2005-09-01 04:18 pm (UTC)Policies about anonymous comments vary from journal to journal at the discretion of the owner. I'm supposed to have my journal set to "screen anonymous comments", so that only you and I can see them until I "unscreen" them, like a moderated forum. (I hate doing it, but whenever I turn it off I start getting comment spam on the old posts.) You should see a page explaining that and allowing you to see the posted comment, but it may not be clearly worded.
But there don't seem to be any screened comments here.
Re: pre-Adamites
Date: 2005-09-02 09:57 am (UTC)Daryl McCullough
Re: pre-Adamites
Date: 2005-09-02 06:00 pm (UTC)