Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and he was equally impatient to show that modern humans had a primate
ancestry. By placing the flawed inquiries of past travelers within a develop-
mental progression leading up to the certainties of contemporary science,
he could show that modern science was itself the product of a natural devel-
opment—and thus the heir to all former enterprises of discovery. Implicitly,
then, Huxley constructs an evolutionary analogy or metaphor that mytholo-
gizes the unfolding world of human knowledge by identifying it with the
model of biological evolution. Biological evolution has become the window
through which the reader sees the history of learning. The fact that the
untrained and misguided observors of past generations got something right
when they recognized human-like features in the great apes signals their
social evolutionary connection to the positive science of the present day.
All paths of inquiry lead to modern science, and through it back to nature.
Much as with the cycles of myth or literary fiction, the topic's central
drama of biological evolution is recapitulated in the gradual evolution of
primate biology out of crude travelers' tales. To use an analogy offered by
Claude Lévi-Strauss, each such evolutionary iteration, much like the varia-
tions on a single theme that unify a musical composition, finds some con-
nection with every other similar statement.
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For Huxley this means that
just as these ancestral “dreams” presaged the primate science that Darwin
had awakened, they also reflected the evolutionary rhythms of the natural
world itself. Intellectual evolution recapitulated biological evolution and
thus resonated with its natural overtones.
An example of one such recapitulation in the Bible and its derivative
literature will give us a better idea of what Huxley is doing. Each of the six
days that are recounted in the Genesis narrative of creation (1:1-31) also coin-
cides with an act of separation. On the first day, God created light and also
“separated the light from the darkness”: and on the second day he made the
firmament, which “separated the waters which were under the firmament
from the waters which were above the firmament.” This pattern reaches its
climax on the sixth day when Adam and Eve are made in God's own image
and then
separated
from all other living things by being given dominion over
the creation. To the extent that each primordial act of creation gives way to
an ordering act of separation, it makes sense that this pattern would also
manifest in the Bible's subsequent narratives of redemption, since these are
themselves secondary acts of divine creativity, albeit creative acts now per-
formed to repair a fallen order. These echoes of the primordial creation, we
might suppose, serve to remind the reader that the work performed by bib-
lical heroes is still God's work more primarily. The symbolism of creation
