Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [5]
—And yet, side by side with this ancient and primordial feeling of cousinship with animals (even while we hunted them down or enslaved them) there is, in Western thought at least, the consciousness of an impassable gulf between human beings and other animals.
In the Biblical account of creation, the human being is created by God through an act different from that which created the rest of the animals. The human being is described as created in God’s image and as being given dominion over the rest of creation.
This difference can be interpreted as meaning that the human being has a soul and that other animals do not; that there is a spark of divinity and immortality in human beings that is not present in other animals; that there is in human beings something that will survive death, while nothing of the sort is present in other animals.
All this falls outside the purview of science and can be disregarded. The influence of such religious views, however, makes it easier to believe that human beings alone are reasoning entities and that no other animal is. This, at least, is something that can be tested and observed by the usual methods of science.
Nevertheless, human beings have not been secure enough in the uniqueness of our species to be willing to let it stand the test of scientific investigation. There has even been a certain nervousness about the tendency of those biologists with a strong concept of order to classify living things into species, genera, orders, families, and so on.
By grouping animals according to greater and lesser resemblances, one develops a kind of tree of life with different species occupying different twigs of different branches. What starts out as an inescapable metaphor suggests only too clearly the possibility that the tree grew; that the branches developed.
In short, the mere classification of species leads inexorably to the suspicion that life evolved; that more intelligent species, for instance, developed from less intelligent ones; and that, in particular, human beings developed from primitive species that lacked the capacities we now consider peculiarly human.
Indeed, when Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, there was an outburst of anger against it, even though Darwin carefully avoided discussing human evolution. (It was to be another decade before he dared publish The Descent of Man.)
To this day, many people find it difficult to accept the fact of evolution. They don’t, apparently, find the suggestion offensive that there are human characteristics in animals such as mice (who can be more lovable than Mickey?), but they do find it offensive that we ourselves may be descended from subhuman ancestors.
PRIMATES
In the classification of animals there is an order called Primates, which includes those popularly known as monkeys and apes. In their appearance the primates resemble the human being more than any other animals do, and from that appearance it is natural to deduce that they are more closely related to human beings than other animals are. In fact, the human being must be included as a primate, if any sense at all is to be made of animal classification.
Once evolution is accepted, one must come to the inevitable conclusion that the various primates, including the human being, have developed from some single ancestral stem and that all are to varying degrees cousins, so to speak.
The resemblance of other primates to human beings is both endearing and repulsive. The monkey house is always the most popular exhibit in a zoo, and people will watch anthropoid apes (which most closely resemble the human being) with fascination.
The English dramatist William Congreve wrote in 1695, however, “I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.” It is not hard to guess that those “mortifying reflections” must have been to the effect that human beings might be described as large and somewhat more intelligent monkeys.
Those who oppose the idea of evolution are often particularly hard