"Ape to Man"

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths is to begin as heresies and end as superstitions.
Thomas Henry Huxley, 1880

Even though I’ve taken well over a 2 years of college biology, especially genetics and evolution, I have yet to be convinced by the “evidence”. Despite my education, I am still hardily skeptical about evolution. Honestly, I’d rather just believe in evolution and call it a day—it certainly would be easier—but I find that the common portrayal of it leaving me with too many questions.

Sunday night, the History Channel aired it’s much lauded “Ape to Man” program and, as per usual, I spent most of the two hours asking: “Now, how in the world do they know that?” There are reasons for their assertions (aren’t there?). Unfortunately, the program never even attempted to explain HOW evolution worked; Evolution was merely assumed to be true. How did the scientists know whether or not H. habilis had hair, whether it had “evolved” sweat glands? In the end, the biology in the show was great story-telling, filled with drama and plausibility. I personally enjoyed it, but I recognized it for what it was: fiction.

OK granted the show was not an attempt to teach biology but rather it was designed to teach history (while masking as an attempt to teach biology). One of my main concern along these lines is that the show spent no time at all on Charles Darwin. The narrator made several statements to the effect that Darwin had nothing to say about human origins. Umm did someone forget his 1871 book entitled, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex? Maybe the book wasn’t as exciting as the 1856 discovery of Neanderthal bones, but that’s no reason to misrepresent Darwin’s contribution to anthropology. Unless the authors didn’t want to expose Darwin’s “social” agenda. I’ll leave you with a couple choice quote from that book:

With savages, the weak in body and mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would have formerly succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 168, vol. I.)

Hmm so there are "worse breeds" of people, people who should be allowed to die off because they are "weak". Vaccination is bad because it lets weak people live when they should not!

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphus apes, as Professor Schaffhausen [one of many German social Darwinists] has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
(Darwin, Descent, p. 201, vol. I.)

Sounds familiar, no? You thought that was something Hitler would say, right?

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same motives as are the lower animals who left to their free choice, though he is in so far superior to them that he highly values mental charms and virtues. On the other hand he is strongly-attracted by mere wealth or rank. Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. All do good service who aid towards this end. When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man.
(Darwin, Descent, pp. 402-403, vol. II.)

I can't wait until we understand all the "principles of breeding and of inheritance", then life will be grand! Oh wait, the History Channel just said we now know all . . . hrmm.