Asimov on - A long look at the monkey

Asimov repays all those who argue against evolution as their reward in an article from the early seventies. From Fantasy, 2000 Issue No. 10, 1980 Asimov's arguments are still true today, and the arguments of the opponents of evolution are even more disproved today

Considering the fact that I try so hard to establish my image as a person who appreciates and cherishes himself, I am sometimes ridiculously sensitive to the fact that occasionally people who do not know me make a mistake and replace the image with me.

I was once interviewed by a journalist who was very nice, but it was clear that he knew next to nothing about me. That's why I was intrigued to ask them why he decided to interview me.

He explained without hesitation. "My boss asked me to interview you," he said. Then he added, "He has strong ambivalent feelings about you." I said, "You mean he likes my writing but thinks I'm cocky and arrogant."

"Yes," he said, clearly surprised. "how did you know ? "

"Lucky guess," I replied with a sigh.

You see, this is not arrogance; This is somewhat exaggerated self-esteem, and anyone who knows me has no trouble seeing the difference. Of course, I could have saved myself the trouble if I had chosen a different image, of feigned modesty, and learned how to dig my feet into the ground and bring a blush to my cheeks to hear every tiny word of praise. But no, thanks. I write about almost anything and for every age, and while I started to behave with charming humility I might doubt my ability to do so, and that was devastating.

Therefore, I will continue to walk the path that you promised me and tolerate the two-valued feelings towards me, so that I will have the self-confidence to write my various articles in 'Fantasia -' 2000 and this time about evolution. I suspect that if it were possible not to generalize man in this matter, there would never have been any problem in accepting the theory of biological evolution.

Anyone can see, for example, that certain animals are very similar to other animals. Who can deny that a dog and a wolf resemble each other in many important respects; Or tiger and cheetah, or crab and crayfish? Twenty-two hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle grouped different living species together and built the 'ladder of life', in which he arranged all types of life, starting from the simplest plants, to the most complex animals, with man (inevitably) at the top.

Today, as sages after the fact, we can say that it was bound by reality for the people to understand that one species of animals evolved into another species; that the more complex evolved from the less complex; And that in short it is not just a 'ladder of life' but a system in which the forms of life climb up the same ladder.

But neither Aristotle nor all those who followed him for two thousand years, replaced the ladder of life as a static model, with another - dynamic and developmental. The various animal species, they believed, were fixed and permanent. Although they knew that there were families and hierarchies of different animal species, they thought that this was how life was created from Genesis. The similarity between different species existed from the beginning, so they believed, and no species changed over time.

My feeling was that the insistence on the same permanence of the species stemmed, at least in part, from the unacknowledged feeling that if mutations were allowed to exist, man would lose his uniqueness and become 'just another animal'.

When Christianity took over the Western world, the views on gender constancy became doubly harsh. Chapter 26 of Genesis not only clearly describes the creation of the various species as separate from the beginning and in their current form, but also describes how man was created separately from all the rest. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness..." (Genesis, XNUMX:XNUMX)

Not a single living creature was created in God's image, and this placed an impassable barrier between man and all other animals. Any view that led to the belief that the barriers between the various animal species were not impassable tended to undermine the foundations of that very important barrier that protected man. It would be nice if all life forms on Earth were infinitely different from man, so that this impassable barrier would be clearly and tangibly seen. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean world, even in ancient times, knew certain animals that we now call 'monkeys'.

The various monkeys with which the people of ancient times came into contact had faces which, in some cases, looked like the faces of small, shrunken people. They had hands that clearly resembled human hands, and they grasped objects with their fingers like a human, and did so with curiosity and alertness. But they had tails, and this fact saved the situation a little. A human being is so clearly tailless, and most beings are so clearly tail-possessed, that this fact alone was seen as a symbol of that impassable barrier that stood between man and ape.

Admittedly, there are some animals without tails, or with very short tails, such as frogs, guinea pigs, or bears - but these, even without tails, do not threaten man's status. And yet - in the Bible there is a reference to monkeys, a reference for which the translators of the Bible used a special word. In the chapter that discusses King Solomon's trading business, it is said (2 Kings, chapter 22, verse XNUMX). "Once every three years I will come, Tarshish, carrying gold and silver, ivory, monkeys and parrots."

Tarshish is frequently identified as Tarsus, a city on the coast of Spain west of the Straits of Gibraltar; A flourishing commercial center from the days of Solomon, which was destroyed by the warriors of Carthage in 480 BC. In North-West Africa, near Tarsus, there was then (and still is today) a species of monkey from the cockroach family. This monkey was given a special name in European languages ​​(in English: APE as opposed to MONKEY), and in a later period, when Northwest Africa became part of the 'land of the barbarians' for Europeans, this monkey was called the barbarian monkey. It is a tailless ape, and therefore more similar to man than other apes, Aristotle, in his 'scale of life', placed it at the top of the ape group, just below man. Glenn, the Roman physician from the end of the second century AD, analyzed the bodies of these monkeys and showed that the resemblance to man is not only external, but also internal.

The simile of the 'barbarian ape' to man seemed to the ancients both amusing and disturbing. The Roman poet Ennius is quoted as saying, "The ape, the least of the wild beasts, how similar is he to us?" Is this the 'wild animals' ease'? Objectively, of course not. His likeness to man, and therefore his threat to man's lofty uniqueness, is what made him vulnerable. In the Middle Ages, when the uniqueness and superiority of man became a cultivated example, the existence of the monkey was even more disturbing. That's why the monkeys were associated with the devil. Satan was, after all, a degraded and deformed angel, and just as man was created in the image of God, so the monkey was created in the image of Satan.

But the explanations did not help in removing the discomfort. The English dramatist William Congreve wrote in 1695: "I could never look long at a monkey, without pondering painful reflections." It is not difficult to guess that those agonizing reflections were on the fact that man can be described as a large and slightly more intelligent ape.

The modern age made the situation worse, by introducing the proud European in the image of God to him, with animals that were unknown until now and that resembled him even more than the 'barbarian ape'. In 1641, a description of an animal brought from Africa and kept in Holland was published in the Prince of Orange's Beaver of Animals. According to the descriptions, it seems that it was a chimpanzee. There were also reports of a large human-like animal found in Borneo, an animal we now call an orangutan. Both the chimpanzee and the orangutan were found to be tailless. In later years, when it became clear that they were more like humans and less like other monkey species, they were called 'anthropoid monkeys' (human-like). In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carlos Linnaeus made the first systematic attempt to classify all species.

He firmly believed in the permanence of species, and was not troubled by the fact that certain species of animals closely resembled man. He believed that this was simply how they were created from Genesis. Therefore, he did not hesitate to group together the different species of monkeys, together with man himself, and called the entire first group by the name of 'primates', from the Latin word 'first', since man was included in the group. To this day we use this term. Linnaeus placed the monkeys in a subgroup of the primates and called it 'simia', which in Latin means - 'monkey'. For human beings, Linnaeus invented a subgroup called 'homo' which means human in Latin. Linnaeus used two names for each species (the so-called 'double nomenclature') with the first name being the family name. This is how humans earned the nickname Homo sapiens (wise man).

But Linnaeus added another member to the same group. Acknowledging the theories of the Borneo orangutan, he gave it the name Homo troglodytes (man, cave-dweller'). The name orangutan comes from the Malay word meaning man of the forest. The Malays, knowing the monkey closely, were more precise in their description, since the orangutan is a forest-dweller and not a cave-dweller, but in no way should it be attributed so close to man as to justify the prefix 'homo'.

The French naturalist George de Buffon was the first to describe, in the middle of the 18th century, gibbon monkeys, which represent the third type of anthropoid monkeys. The gibbons of sorts are the smallest apes. and their imagination to a very small person. Because of this reason, it is sometimes customary to classify them separately from all other anthropoids, known as the 'great apes'.

As the classification of species became more detailed, the temptation for nature lovers to break down the barriers between them grew stronger. Certain species of life were so close to other species that it was not clear whether they could be separated at all by any line of demarcation. In addition, more and more companies have shown signs that they have been 'caught' in the middle of the exchange process. Thus, for example, Buffon noticed in the horse's legs a structure of degenerated bones that indicated that the horse once had three cloven hooves on each leg. Buffon claimed that if bones and hooves can degenerate - this can also happen to whole species. God may have created only certain species, and each of them degenerated to a certain degree and created additional species. If the horses could lose some of their hooves, why not assume that some of them degenerated and went until they became donkeys?

Since Buffon had to come up with hypotheses that would explain the great innovation in the theory of natural history with man at the center, he suggested that the apes are nothing but degenerate humans. Buffon was the first to propose the idea of ​​the change of sexes. It was a hypothesis that bypassed the worst danger of all - the assumption that man created in the image of God was once something else - but she said that man could have become something else. Even this was too much, since since the boundary leakage was allowed in one direction, it was difficult to seal it in the opposite direction. Heavy pressure was put on Buffon to retract his version - and he did.

But the idea of ​​the changing of the sexes did not die out. A British doctor named Erasmus Darwin had a habit of writing long poems, in which he presented his interesting scientific ideas in his last book 'Zoonomy' which was published in 1796. He developed Buffon's idea and stated that animals underwent transformations as a result of the direct influence of environmental conditions on them. He was followed by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck who in 1809 published the 'zoological philosophy', and was the first scientist worthy of his name, who formulated the theory of evolution; A comprehensive description of the mechanism by which the antelope, for example, could slowly change generation after generation until it became a giraffe. (Both Darwin and Lamarck were denounced by the scientific and non-scientific establishment of the day.)

Lamarck was wrong in his version of the mechanism of development, but his book spread the idea of ​​evolution among the scientific world and urged others to search for a more practical mechanism.

The man who breathed new life into the matter was the English naturalist, Charles Robert Darwin (grandson of Erasmus Darwin), who spent almost twenty years collecting data and polishing his arguments. He did this, first and foremost, because he was a strict man by nature. Second, he knew what had become of all those who promoted the developmental theory, and wanted to disarm the enemy by forging his arguments.

When he published in 1859 his book 'On the origin of species through natural selection' he was careful not to discuss within its framework man himself. It didn't help, of course. He was a decent and gentle man, almost a saint, no less than all the priests of the kingdom, but even if he had beaten his mother to death, he would not have received more vicious condemnations and attacks.

But the evidence in favor of evolution continued to accumulate. In 1847, the largest ape-man, the gorilla, was finally brought into the light of the European sun, and this was the most dramatic proof of all. In his size, at least, he looks almost human, or even superhuman. In addition to this, in 1856 fossilized remains of a living creature were discovered that was more developed than all living anthropoids, yet more primitive than any human being. Was it 'Neanderthal man.' Not only that the proof of evolution was becoming more and more established, but also the proof of human evolution.

In 1863, the Scottish geologist Charles Lyall published his book 'The Antiquity of Man' in which he relied on ancient stone tools to claim that humanity was much older than the 6000 years assigned to it (and the universe) by the Bible. He also passionately supported Darwin's view of evolution. In 1871 Darwin finally applied his theory to man as well, in his book 'The Descent of Man'. The fools of evolution are with us to this very day, of course, zealous and firm in their opinion.

I receive more letters from them than on any other subject, so I am well acquainted with their reasoning. They focus on one point, and one point only - the origins of man. I have never received a letter that passionately asserted that the beaver is not related to the mouse, or that the whale did not evolve from a terrestrial mammal. Sometimes it seems to me that they don't even understand that evolution applies to all species. They only insist that man did not, no, did not evolve from the apes, and is not related to them at all.

Some advocates of evolution try to deny this by saying that Darwin never claimed that man descended from apes, and that no multi-mammal animal alive today is the ancestor of man. But this is nonsense and nothing else. The evolutionary view is that man and monkeys had a common ancestor, who is not alive today but looked like a monkey in the days when he lived. If we go far back, we will see that his ancestors. Man's various features had a clear ape-like appearance - at least to a non-zoologist.

As an advocate of evolution, I beg to point out that man did indeed evolve from the ape to further emphasize my belief that evolution is an existing fact. And we must stick to monkeys in another way as well. Advocates of evolution may talk about the early hominids, the 'Homo erectus' (the upright man), the Australopithecus and so on. We can use this as evidence of the development of man and the development of the type of organism he came from. None of this, I'm afraid, is meant to impress the fools of evolution, nor does it bother them at all. Their view seems to be that if a gang of infidels who call themselves 'scientists' find a tooth here, a thigh bone there, and a piece of skull somewhere else, and lump them together into some ape-man - it means nothing.

Based on the amount of mail I receive, and the books I've seen, it seems to me that the ardor of the fringes of evolution is limited to man and ape. There are two ways, in my opinion, that an evolutionist can handle the human and ape issue. He can stick to the Bible, declare that the Holy Scriptures were written under divine inspiration, which say that man was created from the dust of the earth by God and in his image about six thousand years ago, and that's it. If this is his position, then his views are not debatable at all, and there is no point in trying to discuss them. I am willing to discuss the weather with such a person, not evolution.

A second way open to the fools of evolution is to raise some rational justification for his position; The justification that is not based on authority, but can be examined through observation or experiment, and logical reasoning. He can claim, for example, that the differences between man and other animals are so fundamental that it is inconceivable that they can be bridged, and that no animal can develop and become a man solely as a result of the operation of the laws of nature - and that supernatural intervention is necessary for this.

An example of such an unbridgeable gap is the claim that man has a soul that does not exist in animals, and that a soul cannot develop in any evolutionary process. Unfortunately, there is no way to measure or discover the existence of a soul, except by reference to some kind of mystical authority. Therefore this matter goes beyond the scope of observation or experiment.

On a less lofty level, one can falsify evolution to claim that man has a sense of distinguishing between good and evil; that he is blessed with the appreciation of justice, that he is, in short, a moral organism - while animals are not like that, and cannot be like that.

This matter, in my opinion, leaves room for debate. There are animals who behave as if they love their children, and who sometimes sacrifice their lives for their sake. There are animals that cooperate and protect each other in times of danger. Such behavior has existential value, and this is exactly what evolutionists would expect to develop step by step, up to the level found in humans.

If you claim that such seemingly 'human' behavior in animals is purely mechanical, which is done without understanding, then we return to the debate about casual announcements, since we do not know what is happening inside the mind of an animal, and in fact, it is not at all certain that our own behavior is not precisely mechanical Like that of the animals - but one degree more complex and multifaceted.

There were times when things were easier than today, when comparative anatomy was in its infancy, and when it was possible to assume that there was some great physiological difference between man and other animals. In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes believed that the istoral gland is a dwelling place for the soul, accepting the opinion that prevailed at the time that the gland exists only in humans and not in any other animal.
But it is not so. The isturbal gland is found in all vertebrates and is highly developed in a certain primitive reptile called Twatra. In fact, there is not a single body part that is exclusive to humans, nor does it appear in any other species.

Let us be more thorough and refer to the biochemistry of the organisms. Here the differences are much less noticeable than in the physical structure of the body and appearance. Indeed, there is so much similarity in the biochemical activity of all organisms (not only if we compare people to monkeys, but also if we compare people to bacteria), that if it were not for the prejudices and the feeling of superiority, the fact of evolution would be considered self-evident.
We must really dig deep and explore the fine chemical structure of the endlessly versatile protein molecule to discover something unique to each species. In this way, based on the subtle differences in the same chemical structure, it is possible to get a rough estimate of the time that has passed since two different organisms branched off from a common ancestor.

In the study of the protein structure, we do not find large gaps; No difference between one species and all others is so great as to point to a common ancestor so long ago that in all the history of the earth there has not been enough time for such a branching. If there was such a large gap between one species and all the others, the conclusion could be established that that species was formed from a different nucleus of primitive life, different from the one responsible for all the others. The same species was still the result of its development from simpler species, but it was not related to any other form of life. But I repeat that no such gap will be found, nor is it expected to be found. All earthly life is interrelated.

Certainly man does not differ from all other forms of life by any great biochemical gap. Biochemically, it belongs to the group of large mammals and is not particularly different from any other species. Actually he looks quite close to a chimpanzee. According to the protein structure test, the chimpanzee is closer to man than to gorilla or orangutan. Yes, especially from the chimpanzee, we should be protected by the evolutionists, for sure, if facilitated by the evolutionary development - especially in light of the fact that the human-like fossils that were discovered had brains of intermediate size between that of the chimpanzee and that of the modern man.

But an evolutionist may dismiss the fossils as unworthy of discussion, and insist that what matters is not the size of the brain but the quality of its intelligence. It can be argued that human intelligence surpasses that of the chimpanzee to such a large extent that any reflection about a relationship between the two species is out of the question, for example, the chimpanzee is unable to speak. All the patient, sophisticated and prolonged efforts to teach young chimpanzees to speak have always failed. And in the absence of the ability to speak, the chimpanzee remains in a hedge and nothing; Although wise, but still alive. With the help of the ability to speak, a person qualifies to the heights of Plato, Beethoven and Einstein.

But are we confusing communication with speech? It is accepted that speech is the most efficient and refined form of communication ever invented. (Our modern equipment, from books to television sets, replaces speech in other forms, but it is still speech.) - But is speech everything?

Human speech depends on the human ability to control fast and delicate movements of the throat, mouth, tongue and lips, and all of these are apparently under the control of a part of the brain called 'Broca's convolution'. If the 'Broca's convolution' is damaged by a tumor or a blow, the person suffers from aphasia - the loss of the ability to speak - and cannot speak or understand speech. However, man still maintains his understanding and is able to express himself through movements, for example. The area in the chimpanzee's brain corresponding to 'Broca's convolution' is not large and complex enough to allow speech at a human level, but what about movements? In nature, chimpanzees use movements to communicate with each other.

That's why in 1966 Beatrice and Alan Gardner from the University of Nevada chose a one and a half year old female chimpanzee, named Wushu, and decided to try to teach her the language of the deaf - Elmis. The results amazed them and the world. Wushu willingly learned dozens of movements, and used them properly to express wishes and even abstract concepts. She invented and developed new movements as well.

used correctly. She also tried to teach other chimpanzees the language, and clearly enjoyed the communication. Other chimpanzees underwent similar training. Some of them learned to arrange magnetized objects on a board, in different shapes. By doing so, they demonstrated an ability to consider grammar and punctuation, and were not fooled even when their teachers created nonsense sentences on purpose.

This is not a matter of conditioned reflexes. All the evidence indicates that the chimpanzees know what they are doing, in the same sense that human beings understand what they are doing when they walk. In fact, chimpanzee language is very simple compared to human language. Man is still vastly more intelligent. But Wushu's exploits make even our ability to speak differ only in degree, and not in essence, from that of the chimpanzee.

Give a 'long look at the monkey.' There are no valid arguments, except those based on mystical authority, that may disprove the kinship between chimpanzees and man, or the evolutionary development of the 'intelligent man' from the 'unintelligent non-man'.