Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
by simultaneously advancing a parallel narrative in which this term denotes
a historical order. This hierarchical “place,” since it is built upon the term's
more primary signification in evolutionary theory, has a share in the scien-
tific authority of the first. The two meanings run together metaphorically
to found a myth.
Although the interaction of these two narratives becomes most visible
in the second of the topic's three chapters, it is prefigured in Huxley's open-
ing essay, “The Natural History of the Man-like Apes.” The scientific pur-
pose of this chapter is to summarize the current state of knowledge about
the great apes as a prelude to exploring evidence of their common ancestry
with human beings. However, a striking oddity in its content and narrative
form belies this merely technical purpose. Laid over the chapter's lessons on
primate biology is a second message about science's own evolution. Rather
than merely recounting what anatomists and field biologists then knew
about chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, Huxley opens with a narrative
on the emergence of primate science itself, one that seems to parallel the
biological history which is his professed subject. Just as human beings have
descended from primate ancestors, we discover that primate science has
evolved
from certain prescientific antecedents—those mixtures of truth and
legend that were part of the cargo unloaded in European ports as sailors
returned from early excursions into the African continent in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. His story about how we came to our current
reliable knowledge of the great apes, in other words, has a developmental
theme all its own that runs in metaphorical parallel with the narrative of
biological evolution.
By his own admission, these accounts have little scientific relevance.
Early explorers were so inclined to exaggerate the human attributes of apes
as to create the impression of organisms like the centaurs and satyrs of
antiquity, a kind of “mythical compound” of human and animal traits. But
Huxley mentions this scientific prehistory, as he explains in his prefatory
comments, to make a historical point. “Ancient traditions, when tested by
the severe processes of modern investigation, commonly enough fade away
into mere dreams: but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have
been a half-waking one, presaging a reality.”
48
In the end there is some con-
tinuity between the prescientific past and the scientific present that Huxley
wishes to have his readers recognize.
But why? The answer to this question goes back to the historical sup-
positions that Huxley shared with the positivists. He was as anxious as they
were to show that science was the end of a natural evolutionary process,
