Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Bearing in mind Congreve’s role as daring social critic of sexual manners, now consider this excerpt from a 1695 letter he wrote to the critic John Dennis:I can never care for seeing things that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature. I don’t know how it is with others, but I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey without very Mortifying Reflections; tho I never heard any thing to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species.¹⁰

Somehow, the sexual imbroglios of upper-class twits that he chronicled did not generate as many Mortifying Reflections as a visit to the zoo. Plays such as Congreve’s were themselves being criticized as breaking down “the Distinctions between Man and Beast. Goats and Monkeys, if they could speak, would express their Brutality in such Language as This.”¹¹ Monkeys were beginning to bother Europeans. And Congreve put his finger on the problem: What does it say about us if monkeys are our close relatives?

From the earliest encounters that history records between apes and men, to parents hurrying their children past the monkey cages before awkward questions are posed, we’ve felt an unease—and the unease has been greater the more puritanical the observer. “The body of an ape is ridiculous … by reason of an indecent likeness and imitation of man,” wrote the cleric Edward Topsell in his 1607 work Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts

. Charles Gore, “a man of rock-like faith” and a successor of Samuel Wilberforce as Anglican Bishop of Oxford, was a conflicted habitué of the London Zoo: “I always return an agnostic. I cannot comprehend how God can fit those curious beasts into his moral order.” He once shook his finger at a chimpanzee and rebuked it aloud, in the presence of an attentive small crowd of which he was wholly unaware: “When I contemplate you, you turn me into a complete atheist, because I cannot possibly believe that there is a Divine Being that could create anything so monstrous.”¹² If, say, ducks or rabbits with a penchant for sexual excess were under review, people would not have been nearly so bothered. But it’s impossible to look at a monkey or ape without ruefully recognizing something of ourselves.

Simians have facial expressions, social organization, a system of mutually understood calls, and a style of intelligence that’s familiar. They have opposable thumbs and five fingers on each hand which they use as we do. Some walk upright on two legs, at least occasionally. They are awfully, uncomfortably, like us. Might their mores suggest alternative sexual arrangements that might be erosive of the social fabric?* And other ruminations about human affairs might be roused by close attention to monkeys and apes—on the prevalence of coercion and violence, for example, or about public sanctions on sexual intimidation, rape, and incest. These are weighty and sensitive matters. The behavior of monkeys and apes—particularly the ones that look most like us—is an awkward business. Better to put it aside, better to ignore it, better to study something else. Many people would rather not know.

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Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century biologist, founded the science of taxonomy—the goal of which is to classify every organism on Earth.¹⁴ He set himself the task of recording the similarities and differences of all the plants and animals then known, and arranging them all into a web—or, better, a tree—of relatedness. It was he who introduced many elements of the now-standard classification scheme: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom, moving from less to more inclusive categories. Each of these categories is called a “taxon” (plural, “taxa”). So we humans, for example, are of the animal kingdom, the vertebrate phylum, the class of mammals, the order of primates, the family of Hominidae, the genus Homo, and the species Homo sapiens. In other words, we’re animals, not plants or fungi or bacteria; we have backbones, so we’re not invertebrates such as worms or clams; we have breasts to supply milk to the young, so we’re not reptiles or birds; we’re primates, not rats or gazelles or raccoons; and we’re Hominidae, not orangutans or vervet monkeys or lemurs. We are of the genus Homo, in which taxon there is but one species (although once there were others—maybe many others). This is how we classify ourselves today. And it’s almost the same as what Linnaeus proposed.