protocols. Scientists relied on whatever lore they could dredge up from missionaries and explorers, their own fragmentary observations of apes fleeing for their lives, or stories they heard from the locals, many of which turned out to be tales for children! Tall tales mistaken for true accounts, misidentifications of specimens, and profound disagreements were inevitable. And, in fact, the taxonomic record is still under construction as new species of monkeys continue to be found and known species are reclassified after closer study.
In the first section of his book, Huxley did his best to sort through the available information about apes from Ovid onward, distinguishing myth from fact, explaining the sources of confusion, composing clear and well-organized descriptions of anthropoids, and suggesting future directions for scientists. In the second chapter, Huxley argues that if humans are more like gorillas than gorillas are like gibbons, then we must accept our place in the ape family tree. He follows this thesis with every comparison he can make among the specimens available: he takes skeletal measurements; counts and categorizes teeth; describes nostrils, eyes, hands, and feet in detail; records information on fetal development; and observes configurations of preserved human and anthropoid brains. Finally, Huxley calculates brain weights by filling braincases with millet seed, substituting and weighing an equal volume of water, and, since brain tissue weighs 10 percent more than water, multiplying the water weight by 1.1.
For Huxley, the evidence for claiming kin to other primates is overwhelming. He recommends a thought experiment, in which the reader might imagine the puzzlement of a space explorer from Mars who attempts to classify earth species and understand how humans can logically justify placing themselves in their own category. (Darwin would return to this idea in The Descent of Man, citing Huxley and pointing out that “if man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.”)8 Not only does Huxley insist that humans are apes; since evidence for biological distinctions among races is inconsequential in comparison to the rest of the data he has collected for his study, he posits an early version of what we now call the cultural construction of race, arguing that racial divisions are based on flimsy or nonexistent science. Cuvier might have contributed a few facts to the study of fossils and primate skeletons—and to the detective stories of Poe—but he was not one of Huxley’s heroes.
Now the war between religious conservatives and scientific professionals began in earnest, the battles so bitter that they still loom large in our cultural awareness. In England, the famous 1860 debate on evolution between Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (who accused Huxley of having apes for ancestors) was a source of hilarity in the press and hard feelings for the contestants. Sixty-five years later, in the United States, the “Monkey Trial” of the Tennessee high school biology teacher John Scopes was so notorious that it has affected public perception of scientific education in the United States ever since. And if the U.K. has finally put Darwin on its money, in the United States, only about half the general population believes that Darwin had it right, and school districts remain torn about the appropriateness of teaching “Darwinism” without a religious counterweight, currently called “intelligent design.” Today, even among those who take Darwin seriously, the extent to which Darwinism can be applied to human psychology and society continues to be a topic of sharp debate. Both social Darwinism (which cannot justifiably be called “Darwinism” at all) and evolutionary psychology are still anathema to many social scientists and humanists.9
In any case, after Huxley was seconded by other prominent scientists of the day (notably the feisty German Ernst Haeckel, whose search for fossil evidence of “the missing link” was even more provocative than the projects of British evolutionists), Darwin finally had to take charge of the argument about our place in the great tree of life.10 As usual, his concern was to preserve not only the reality but also the appearance of scientific objectivity—a challenging task under the circumstances. The Descent of Man, published as two heavy volumes in 1871, begins with barely concealed exasperation: “During many years I collected notes on the origin or descent of man without any intention of publishing on the subject, but rather with the determination not to publish, as I thought that I should thus only add to the prejudices against my views.”11 This book provided the same kind of scholarly underpinning to the theory about human origins and our kinship with other simians that The Origin of Species had supplied for the general theory of evolution and speciation. True to form, Darwin had more to say than he anticipated. The two best-selling volumes of The Descent of Man were not enough, and the following year he added a third, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which was even more appealing to the public because readers could test Darwin’s conclusions against their own observations and the generous illustrations.
Once committed to the struggle, Darwin drew upon all his resources—the notes he had collected for years; the texts he read voraciously; the specimens now pouring into museums and private collections from the edges of the expanding British Empire; a voluminous correspondence with scientists, explorers, missionaries, and nabobs all over the world; and conversations with impresarios of animals shows and, especially, zookeepers. In a series of somewhat domesticated adventures, Darwin spent as much time as he could at zoos, which at that time were repositories for both preserved specimens and live animals.
In Primate Visions, Donna Haraway describes Jane Goodall’s account of her adventures in Tanzania as a “first contact” narrative.12 In a way, Darwin’s zoo excursions might also be considered first contacts, since he undertook them in order to understand kinship rather than estrangement—in other words, to see these primates as embodied beings, not as they had been presented in myths and tall tales. Since he had donated many of his own collections to the London Zoo, Darwin enjoyed the cooperation of administrators and keepers in conducting numerous experiments. He presented various yarns to weaver birds to test their color preferences for nest building and tried to make elephants weep. He provoked monkeys to test their reactions; he gave a doll to one individual to gauge its surprise and snuff to another to see if it would close its eyes when it sneezed (it did not). He presented a mirror to orangutan adolescents, watching them caper and pose before scampering away in alarm.
Darwin’s first encounter with an ape, in fact, had been in 1838 at the London Zoo. Jenny, an infant orangutan who wore a dress and lived in the heated giraffe house, impressed him with her human-like emotions, her understanding, and her ladylike deportment (she had been presented to the Duchess of Cambridge). Contrary to the descriptions of Cuvier and his predecessors, whose assessments of primate aggression were weighted with value judgments, Darwin noted in a letter to his sister Susan that when Jenny’s keeper teased her by showing her an apple and then taking it away,
she threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child.—She then looked very sulky & after two or three fits of pashion, the keeper said, ‘Jenny if you will stop bawling & be a good girl, I will give you the apple.[’]—She certainly understood every word of his, &, though like a child, she had great work to stop whining, she at last succeeded, & then got the apple, with which she jumped into an arm chair & began eating it, with the most contented countenance imaginable. 13
Orangutans would come under Darwin’s scrutiny again almost twenty years later, when he read four articles on the apes by Wallace in the Annual Magazine of Natural History, published soon after Wallace’s return from the Dutch East Indies. Darwin’s younger colleague had observed adult orangutans in the wild, and once, after his companions shot a mother orangutan, he kept the baby in his camp. She eventually died from malnutrition, but not before impressing him with her intelligence and her emotional similarity to human children, including a tendency toward tantrums. (These accounts by Darwin and Wallace coincide almost exactly with Galdikas’s descriptions of infant orangutan tantrums, affection, dependency, and intelligence.)
In his later volumes, Darwin seized the opportunity to argue for sexual selection, which his colleagues had greeted with skepticism and he had thus minimized in The Origin of Species. In Darwin’s view, the evolution of any species, including humans, depends largely on sexual selection. Although his original genetic research had to be conducted with rapidly reproducing nonhuman species (especially mollusks and pigeons), in the Origin of Species, Darwin explained the mechanics