Creating Connections: Humans, Apes and Missing Links

Abstract

By the year AD820.701, humankind will have evolved into two distinct species: ethereal, childish, androgynous beings and ape-like, nocturnal cannibals who feed on their co-descendants from a common ancestor. Some millions of years later, the only remaining life form on earth will be a gigantic crab, soon to be extinct by the approaching burn-out of the sun. These two end-of-time scenarios in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895) epitomize ‘anthropological anxiety’: an insecurity about the continuity of man’s dominant status in the natural world, a new awareness of the precariousness, indeed the dissolution of the demarcation line between humans and animals, a growing fear about humankind’s future which could no longer be imagined as a never-ending upward progression. Scientific postulates like Darwin’s evolution theory and William Thomson’s (the later Lord Kelvin’s) Second Law of Thermodynamics accorded to man only a relatively humble role in the natural order and in the universe. Darwin claimed that all living species, certainly all mammals including Homo sapiens, were descended from a common ancestor; Thomson’s calculations limited the remaining lifespan of the sun - and consequently, life on earth - to five or six million years.³ Both the past and the future of humankind were accordingly less glorious than the traditional theological narrative suggested: a slow descent from amoebas instead of a special creation in God’s image, a slow expiration in entropy instead of the more dramatic resurrection and the Last Judgement – humankind had its beginnings in slime and would go out with a whimper.

I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‖tendency to progression‗, ‖adaptations from the slow willing of animals‗, etc.! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so.

I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

Charles Darwin, Letter to Joseph Hooker (1844)¹

By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the varieties of the same species at the present day; and these parent-species, now generally extinct, have in their turn been similarly connected with more ancient species; and so on backwards, always converging to the common ancestor of each great class. So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon this earth.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)²