Your vehemence is startling and counterproductive to the history of ideas. You say the "question was whether people … acknowledged … " something or other.
Many people, to put it mildly, “care,” as you say, about these issues, far more of how “cared” in the ways suggested by ideas of “soul” and “Christ” at the time of those apparently GQ-appropriate cites you approve of, and for whom, scientists, intellectuals, and thread participants as focused as you, were not and could not be as quick to dispense with how people actually conceive the world as you seem to be.
Live chimpanzees began to be sent to Europe in 1640, but they would have been rare in captivity or as specimens. Orangutans also became known to Europeans in the 1600s, and were scientifically described by the mid 1700s. Both were included in Linnaeus’s works. Gorillas did not become known to science until the mid-1800s. As has been mentioned, bonobos weren’t recognized as a separate species from chimps until the 1900s.
Since apes weren’t distinguished from monkeys in the 1700s then a lot of people would have opinions formed based on their exposure to monkeys which weren’t that rare outside of their habitat and quite abundant within it.
That’s plain to see. The picture looks like a donkey’s head set atop an ordinary but gracile H. sapiens body.
That picture is much more like Australopithecus compared to the earlier one. Anatomically, it seems they were beginning to get the idea, since by then the Neander Valley had yielded morphologically older human fossils.
From Spanish mon(o)- + the Flemish diminutive -ke.
The Spanish word originated as a clipped form of Arabic مَيْمون maymūn, which literally means ‘fortunate’ (derived from the root y-m-n like the word يُمْن yumn ‘good fortune, auspiciousness’). Why “fortunate”? Because, contrarily, monkeys were regarded as unlucky, so they called them the opposite for apotropaic (warding off evil) reasons. To this day the Turkish word for monkey is also maymun. The actual Arabic word covering the meaning of both monkey and ape is qird. Another Arabic epithet for ape is سَعْدان sa‘dān (the happy one), from the root of sa‘d ‘happiness’, similar to the use of “maymun.”
Yeah, I know it looks funny to gloss “sa‘d” as “happiness,” but there it is. For that matter, the Turkish word for happy is “şad,” but derived from Persian شاد shād with no relation to the Arabic.
I can’t argue but I got that from a native Spanish speaker. She’s Argentinian, if that matters. But I didn’t just toss it off. And I asked native speakers of the other languages I mentioned.
I didn’t realize how recently that distinction was made in English. Thanks, Colibri.
Considering I’m an atheist, I guess that means people read into things what they want to see.
The logic about evolution and souls is (I think) from James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience” (it’s been decades since I read it) and numerous other discussions I’ve seen about why (some) religions are hostile to evolution. If a soul is a manifestation of something inherently human, the mind and awareness, then does that mean a person born no brain does not have one, is therefore not human? Where does a soul come from? You can follow that logic down the rabbit hole to see that there are some serious questions if humans came from non-humans. We won’t even get into “do aliens have souls? Does original sin apply to aliens? How can they be saved if they didn’t know about Jesus?”
Fortunately, I don’t have any religious beliefs and those questions just seem like angels-on-pinheads or vice versa details to me.
To get back to the OP - of course people noticed similarities. They were not all stupid. The OP point would be, what did they think about those similarities before the theory was current that similarity did not mean “looks a bit like” but rather “common ancestor”?
Even today when millions, billions, and trillions are tossed about in the news, people have trouble grasping what an incredible timeline evolution works through. A 10 million years of evolution means half a million generations or more… could most people even understand that number in the 1800’s? There were a lot of comments that seem to have been tossed about back then to the effect “Darwin’s grandfather may have been a monkey but mine weren’t.”
I can’t recall where I read it, but haven’t we found that, in certain narrow esoteric circumstances, something similar to Lamarckian evolution can rarely happen? I think it may have been endocrine rather than genetics related (or at least related to the expression of genes rather than the genes themselves per se), but I heard there are tiny strange ways in which animals needing to use certain “dormant” features a distant or not-so-distant ancestor had (due to, e.g., a change in climate) can result in those old genes “turning on” and being expressed in their offspring.
“Witnessing” is used on these boards to describe any gratuitous testimony for one’s personal beliefs of any sort, not just religious ones. I think it was pretty clear to everybody that you (like me) are an atheist.
Including atheistic witnessing, it seems to me; I am not saying you have excluded that, however.
Although it would be one of the more profound topics for ATMB, this forum would be an important discussion point, and I think I may be allowed the following comment.
Despite what is so often the (self) examined or unexamined assumptions of some posters in GQ on scientific issues, statements of fact, in the hands of some are statements of secular apologetics, often as heartfelt, and unfortunately vituperative, as the most classically religious apologetics.
When gathered as such explicitly and “applied,” so to speak, to a lesser degree (“that doesn’t belong in GQ”) or greater one (“this sounds like it’s coming from someone who believes in Christian nonsense”) these sentiments are often non-sequiturs.
Non-goofy non-hijack non-sequiturs are usually pounced on here, rightly so…but not for outright secular apologetics and witnessing.
“Being annoyed” is almost a definition of how scientists deal with new empirical and experimental results.
Physicists were hugely annoyed recently when it seemed there was evidence of a faster-than-light particle. In fact, they must walk around constantly annoyed about dark matter, dark energy, and all sorts of stuff.
Meaning it’s always a bad time to borrow money from them.
None of the non-human ape species are very common or widely distributed. Sure, the range has probably decreased a lot since the 1700s, but even then when the ape population was higher, I’d suspect the majority of Africans had never seen a live chimpanzee or gorilla. They don’t share habitat with humans very easily.
Jefferson’s quote doesn’t indicate that black women willingly had sex with apes. In fact, among orangutans many matings are by rape by young males. According to legend, male apes would try to mate with human females by force. (King King is a modern variation of this legend.) Saying male apes were attracted to human females doesn’t cast aspersions on the women.
Interesting - but Lord Monboddo’s views were very advanced and non-mainstream, according to the link. Evolution (and selection) can be inferred from animal breeding - but even species like dogs or horses, you have to wonder how much divergne was visible over a lifetime and whether accurate enough records were kept to track serious “evolution”. Dogs have a huge number of varied breeds- did anyone remark how the changes had been forced, or did hundreds of years of selection mean nobody noticed?
As I keep saying is - the problem wasn’t that apes looked like humans. Lots of animals and plants looked like other ones. Cats and dogs had 4 paws and a tail, and nobody considered then “related”. The thing about evolution that created the controversy was telling people they were “descended from monkeys”.
Then of course, some religions take the Bible as literal truth, meaning that anything that disagrees with doctrine is incorrect.
I don’t think I was pushing any point of view and I have no idea how that would even be apparent - I was just explaining why some religions have a problem with evolution. By contrast, a religion without a doctrinal creation story or one which considers every animal has a “soul” or could be a human’s re-incarnation probably does not have a problem with the theory.
