[Last night New Brunswick was buried under several inches of snow, shutting down the university and giving me the day off. I have been using my free time to get some reading done and work on a few projects but I did not want to neglect this blog. Here are the first several pages of the chapter on human evolution from Life's Splendid Riddle, the book in-progress I have so often mentioned here. I still do not have an agent and am unsure whether this book will ever make it to shelves, but I could not resist sharing this sample with you. Enjoy.]
Not long after the earth had been given form, when the young sun shone in the heavens and the beasts of the field grazed on the first plants, God fashioned humans to worship him. They were His beloved children, earthly reflections of the Divine Image, and they were given rule over the rest of nature's magnificent abundance. This order and tranquility did not last long, however; it was shattered when Adam & Eve disregarded God's command by gaining divine knowledge. They were cast out of the Garden into the fallen world beyond its borders.
Despite the transgression of the first couple those who claimed the heritage of Adam & Eve thought them to be the crowning glory of all earthly things. The consequences of original sin were inescapable, but God's faithfulness in our capacity for good placed us just above all other earthly creatures and just below the heavenly angels. But what was the purpose of the rest of Creation? Generations of philosophers and scholars closely scrutinized the Book of Nature in search of moral and spiritual lessons woven into the universe by Providence.
Place was of primary importance. For the Medieval scholars of Europe all of Creation could be ranked, from the dullest rock to the Almighty, in a Great Chain of Being. Rooted in Greek and Roman philosophy the Chain revealed an immutable natural order; just as peasants could not change their station in life, there could be no transmogrification of a "lower" form into a "higher" one or vice versa. Large-scale divisions were made by determining the attributes of different organisms and minerals, each step representing a significant addition to the one before. Rocks had existence, but plants were superior to rocks as they had life and existence. Humans, embodying the struggle between the flesh and spirit, reigned above everything else on earth.
The sheer diversity of life showed that God was fond of a full creation where there could not be yawning chasms between one type and another. God would not allow a gap in nature, yet such an interstice existed between our kind and the lower animals. Could our species have undiscovered cousins stooping in the shadowy place between human and animal? As explorers traversed the seas to reach new parts of the globe, stories of bizarre, human-like beasts filtered their way back to European nations. Among the plethora of reported "monstrous races" were the Cynocephali, creatures with human bodies and dog-like heads, and the Belmmye, headless beings that wore their faces on their chests. These rude, half-human monsters lacked the one true hallmark of humanity, the soul, but they were good candidates for "missing links" that both connected us to animals and emphasized our ordained position.
Descriptions of these bestial races were included in encyclopedic texts and descriptions of untamed far-away lands, but there was virtually no physical proof that they existed. Monkeys, by contrast, were undeniably real creatures common to Asia and Africa that became more familiar to Europeans during the 11th and 12th centuries. At first they were regarded as demonic, but eventually this condemnation softened. Lewd and foolish, monkeys represented a coarser part of our nature intended to repulse us into changing our wicked ways. In one popular fable a mother monkey is trying to flee from hunters while carrying two babies on her back. She adored one and despised the other, but to escape with her life she had to leave her beloved child behind. This unfortunate child represented sinful and sexual habits, and the one she hated was virtue. Only by likewise shedding their fleshly desires could people escape the eternal torment of Hell.
Despite the lack of tangible evidence for them tales of human-like monsters continued to filter back to Europe well into the 1600's. Around the turn of the 17th century the Englishman Andrew Battell was held as a prisoner of war in Angola. While imprisoned there, he learned that the local people were terrified of two humanoid monsters that lived in the forest. One, called the "Engeco", was not described by Battell, but the second, the "Pongo" was portrayed in vivid detail;
This Pongo is in all proportion like a man, but that he is more like a Giant in stature, then a man: for he is very tall, and hath a mans face, hollow eyed, with long haire vpon his browes. His face and eares are without haire, and his hands also. His bodie is full of haire, but not very thicke, and it is of a dunnish colour. ... They sleepe in the trees, and build shelters from the raine. They feed vpon Fruit that they find in the Woods, and vpon Nuts, for they eate no kind of flesh. They cannot speake, and have to vnderstanding more than a beast. The People of the Countrie, when the trauaile in the Woods, make fires where they sleepe in the night; and in the morning, when they are gone, the Pongoes will come and sit about the fire, till it goeth out: for they have no vnderstanding to lay the wood together. They goe many together, and kill many Negroes to trauaile in the Woods. Many times they fall vpon the Elephants, which come to feed where they be, and so beate them with their clubbed fists, and pieces of wood, that they will runne roaring away from them. Those Pongoes are neuer taken aliue, because they are so strong, that ten men cannot hold one of them: but yet they take many of their young ones with poisoned Arrowes.
Battell's account of the Pongo was published in 1625, but at this time there were more tales of "wild men of the woods" than evidence confirming their existence. It seemed that such creatures, like the bizarre members of the monstrous races, were based on the credulous reporting of folklore by early explorers and tradesmen. Yet many myths have unexpected roots in reality. In 1641 the Dutch physician Nicolaes Tulp observed a human-like creature in the zoological menagerie of the Duke of Orange. It was a creature in limbo between human and animal, and its discomforting appearance led Tulp to suggest that accounts of fantastic demi-human had been based on encounters with just such a creature. Aware of accounts of a similar creature from Indonesia called the "Orang-Outang", Tulp applied the same name to the captive creature.
A sick "Orang-Outang" arrived in England over five decades later in 1698. It was ill from an infected wound sustained in transit from Angola, and soon after it arrived in London it perished. Such a rare specimen would not go to waste. The physician Edward Tyson, who had observed the animal shortly before its death, was awarded the precious and macabre opportunity of dissecting the "wild man." The conclusions of his anatomical investigation were published the following year in his monograph Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris, or the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man in which he concluded "Our Pygmie is no man, nor yet the common ape; but a sort of animal between both." It was a creature equipped with the anatomical prerequisites for thought and speech, yet Tyson affirmed that it was not actually capable of either. Practically human anatomically, but lacking human virtues, the "pygmie" was a missing link that confirmed the fullness of God's creation.
[The chapter does not end here, of course, but traces ideas about human origins all the way to the present. I do not wish to give the impression that Tyson's monograph was the last word on the subject, but neither do I desire to reproduce the entire chapter here.]
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Your writing style is a bit disjointed. I realize this is only a first draft, but it needs tightening.
Also, your opening paragraphs are poorly executed. They come across as overly flowery (and by that I mean flowery, not ornate or elaborate). If your intention is to cover early mythology, then you should do so. If you intention is simply to give some historical context to past beliefs, then tangential comments such as "earthly reflections of the Divine Image" are unnecessary. I don't think you need to be reverent, but at the same time you should place those past beliefs into context given the evidence available at the time.
I don't mean to throw stones, but considering some of your past criticisms of other texts on failure to cover topics in a forthright and comprehensive manner, you really need to polish this to a higher standard.
Phil; All I can say is "Thanks, but not thanks" for your critical comments. Given your previous comments here it seems clear to me that your intent was to "put me in my place" for being "overly harsh" to other authors like Coyne. What I have written is not perfect by any means but I don't believe that I have fallen so far from the "higher standard" of which you speak. I have sent the three completed chapters to a group of people who I trust; I believe they are in a better position to judge my work than someone who feels they have a score to settle.
Heh, good to see you sticking to your guns, Brian.
You're telling the story, the story of a progression of understanding. It's fine that your language reflects the understanding of the people of whom you are speaking, in that time and place. That's an acceptable storytelling device, not unfamiliar to many readers.
I liked it, and want to read the rest when it comes out.
I thought this was great, Brian. The writing flows well, and each paragraph links to the previous one nicely. You do a great job of starting way back at the "beginning" and moving the reader very quickly into Medieval European thought and philosophy. I like this approach, because it's very different from the standard introduction to human evolution, which usually starts with Raymond Dart or early discoveries of Homo erectus, etc. This is much more like reading a narrative than simply being told the facts about human evolution. Anyone can do the latter, but I think it takes real skill to do the former, and I think you've got it. If you have the finished chapter, I'd love to see it.
First, on the copy-editing level, "Adam & Eve" should be "Adam and Eve". No point in looking less than professional, right? :-)
Second, since the function of the introductory paragraphs is to illustrate how people saw the natural world back in the "good old days", it may be beside the point to note the differing orders of events in Genesis 1 and 2. If you find yourself spending a significant amount of time on the idea of pre-Adamite peoples, it might be worth mentioning. Given the chronological style of your writing, an excursus on higher biblical criticism might fit nicely into the latter half of the 19th century.
I know you're not writing a book on the Documentary Hypothesis, and I don't want to impose on anybody just because I personally find this stuff really darn cool. (I would never have expected anyone to propose that Adam was originally a hermaphrodite!) However, if you're considering the question of what was acceptable to think and when, and of the social climate in which scientific advances were made, it might be worth commenting on.
(I'd have more comments if my laptop's power supply weren't on the fritz and its replacement accidentally left at a friend's house. . . .)