What did folks think about apes before Darwin?

[Colibri]

@Johanna

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.

Actually, the two images are quite similar in the shape of the head if you look at them carefully. The first one differs mostly in the smaller head compared to the body, smaller ears, and proportionately longer, thinner legs. Both have projecting jaws like apes and opposable big toes. In basic anatomy the two are essentially the same.

The first Neanderthal remains were described scientifically in 1858. They consisted of the top of a skull (lacking face or jaws), some limb bones without hands or feet, and a few other bones. I don’t see any evidence that the find influenced the differences in Boitard’s images. In particular, the projecting jaws and opposable big toes are not based on the Neanderthal skeleton (in which these parts are missing) but by analogy to apes.

[dreamregent]

@md2000

The religious concept of souls is challenged by the question - at what point under this theory would a man have a soul? Did a soulless mother give birth to a man with a soul? Would Christ have died to “redeem” this person but not his mother?

It’s pretty easy to see why this sort of question must have driven the religious people to anger and denial over the theory,

Indeed, it still is… and not just to the strictly religious either. I’m not sure if you know who Mortimer J. Adler was but he spent decades indoctrinating people with a version of intelligent design. The material for his book How To Think About The Great Ideas was created for a TV show he hosted in 1953 and 1954 but the text/transcript was not published until 2000. In it, he conceded that man’s body evolved along with apes. However, he attempted to rationalize the idea man’s conscience or soul was a supernatural creation which was inserted into man’s body at some point along way. His books contain a lot of doublespeak about religious dogma so it’s hard to pin him down but this view is certainly a “supernatural” theory, and he advanced it for decades. In his 1990 book, Intellect: Mind Over Matter, he was still pushing the idea of what he called immaterialism. Basically, he said the mind depended on the brain to function but the mind wasn’t actually contained by the brain and had some sort of non-material existence.

@Blake

What the hell does *any *of of that have to do with the topic of this thread? The question was whether people pre-Darwin acknowledged the close relationship between apes and humans. As has been shown in multiple posts, they certainly did. That is completely contradictory to your claim that people didn’t care about the resemblances.

Your last post just seems to just be an an attempt to witness in GQ. I can’t see how it has any bearing at all on the question.

Huh?

@JordanC

what did people think about our similarities to apes and primates in general?

Is the phrase “in general” not sufficiently vague that it could include comment about religious thinking on the issue?

@Leo_Bloom

but not for outright secular apologetics and witnessing.

What is considered “secular apologetics and witnessing” here?

[md2000]

Just as it was the general hostility of the (Catholic) church to heliocentric ideas in the Renaissance, it seems the biggest hostility to the idea of evolution came from some strongly and fundamentalist religious groups.

The original Judeo-Christian doctrine (since I’m not too familiar with other major religions) is that the world was created “as is”. Presumably, since much of the educated elite were clergy until the renaissance, this spread the general view that all species looked the same as they always looked since creation. Logically, since large species did not visibly change over the span of human memory, i.e. a few generations, this view was probably not challenged until serious scientific curiosity started to accumulate evidence of the true history of the world. Fossils, for example, were often considered to be the giants mentioned in the Bible, or dragons of legend, etc. Or they were the animals lost in Noah’s flood, which also accounted for sedimentary rock formations.

So there’s a whole series of challenges to orthodoxy as science progressed - heliocentrism which best explained celestial motion (along with Newton’s theory of gravity), various aspects of geology pointing out the incredible age of the earth, and then evolution, pointing to the common tree of life.

In each case science took something mystical and degraded it to something mundane and mechanical - also contradicting the literal truth (supposedly) of the Bible. Is it any wonder the establishment elite, who depended on doctrine such as the divine right of kings and the “natural order” where they were the rulers - were hostile to simple scientific explanations that implied nothing was special and their dogma was possibly mistaken?

This isn’t witnessing(???) of a point of view - I’m just trying to point out where the level of hostility came from, that started as early as some clergy who looked through Galileo’s telescope at Jupiter and supposedly denied what their own eyes saw.

[Johanna]

Nasīr al-Dīn Tūsī wrote on evolution in Akhlāq-e Nasīrī in AD 1236 (AH 633), things like: “The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable. As a result, they gain advantages over other creatures” and “The bodies change as a result of the internal and external interactions.” He also speculated that humans are derived from advanced animals and that anthropoid apes are midway between monkeys and humans.

Ibn Khaldūn wrote in the Muqaddimah in AD 1377 (AH 779) that “humans developed from the world of the monkeys” in a process by which “species became more numerous.”