Calling Humans 'Apes' Is Just Razzle Dazzle
by Asa Boxer
I’m at the local, two pints in. That’s usually my limit. It’s a little past my bedtime, but it’s been a pleasant evening. Hank and I have been exchanging thoughts on Darwin and evolutionary theory. He’s a committed and proud atheist. Since 2003 or somewhere thereabouts, such folk call themselves New Atheists, a term first used by Sam Harris (if I’m not mistaken) to describe an outspoken atheist, sometimes militantly anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Hank will high five a fellow who says something like “I hate religion. Can’t stand the smell of a church.” I’m no fan of fundamentalism or dogmatic religious types, but I have an undergraduate degree in history and I’ve continued reading over the years, and I also have a graduate degree in literature, so I have an appreciation for texts like the Bible and the writings of Saint Augustine, not as gospel but for their literary, historical and spiritual value.
Hank however has no such appreciation. He believes in The Science. To my mind, to believe in anything is a religious position. Science, in contrast to The Science, is all about scepticism and questioning. It’s about hesitating before a conclusion and being satisfied with saying, “That’s an interesting hypothesis or theory. Very compelling. But you know what? We’re unsure. We don’t know. The evidence is still not conclusive.”
So we’re exchanging ideas, and I’m sharing some recent reading on Darwin, especially from that book no one seems to read, The Descent of Man. I explained that I was surprised to discover that although Darwin was a slavery abolitionist, he was an elitist, racist, and eugenicist who stood against universal suffrage, thought the poor shouldn’t have kids and that workhouses were a good thing. I’d always thought Darwin was a true Liberal. For those who don’t know, Darwin is the Saint of New Atheism. He’s their Jesus. So Hank jumped to Darwin’s defence, saying he wasn’t any more bigoted than the average of his time. Depends what one means by “average”—average elite, sure, but not average disenfranchised, working class majority.
Anyway, two pints in, the frontal lobe of my brain numbs out and I lose intellectual endurance. My response to Hank was that Darwin called the Irish a bunch of apes who shouldn’t have voting rights. Hank then rejoined with the canned statement that we are all apes. It was besides the point, and I needed to see a man about a horse, as the expression goes. So I shrugged my shoulders and stood up and said, “I believe the jury is still out on that one.” And with that I walked away and the subject was closed.
Next morning I’m chatting on the phone with my buddy Eric. He grew up among carnies, and every once in a while shares some piece of wisdom (or trauma) from those good old days. We came round to our usual topic: the complete corruption of our world and how you can’t trust anything you see or read or hear. And he says, “Yeah. Bullshit baffles brains. That’s a carnie saying.” (Don’t miss my piece on Ketman for a deep, entertaining dive on this topic.)
“Tell me more,” I say.
“Okay. I’ll explain the Razzle Dazzle.”
“I’m all ears.”
So he tells me about this time when he was a teenager, hanging out with a buddy, when they noticed a Razzle Dazzle board in the house, and he asked his dad if they could play the game. His dad said, “Naw. You don’t want to play this game.” But Eric and his friend insisted despite repeated rebuffs, like “No son. Trust me. You don’t want to play this game.” Persistence won out, and his dad eventually gave in.
The classic board consists of a pocked wooden surface meant to capture marbles tossed onto it from a cup. Numbers are inscribed above and below each hole. (The game can also be played with dice.) So essentially it’s a counting game, the object of which is to collect 10 points. The con is achieved by layering the results so that the total for each roll actually represents a number that awards either 1 point or 5 or 8 or 1/2 a point or earns you an “H.P.”—variously interpreted as House Prize or Half Points (halving your score). The H.P. is flexible and used to double the price per roll, while often adding prizes to the pot. The catch is that it’s impossible to win the game unless the operator miscounts in your favour.
Psychological incentives include juicy prizes like a Rolex or a car or fancy electronics. Heck, a carnie will even promise the punter his cash back when he hits 10 points. The line is, “You only lose if you quit playing.” Logically, after all, if you keep playing, you will eventually reach 10 points. So it’s just a matter of time. A carnie may even “show pity” and let you leave the table to get more cash, promising to hold your score. You’re only 1 point away, “Wouldn’t it be a shame to lose now?”
So part of the scam is psychological manipulation. But an important part is the layering of the count. Unlike craps, you don’t just count a total. You count a total and that total represents a number that represents your score. That layering hides the fact that you will never score 10 points and introduces a useful flexibility so that the carnie can demonstrate that the game is legit and winnable by awarding points and allowing winners to walk away with valueless prizes.
Eric’s dad played the two kids up to 9 points and held them there until they’d blown all their money and then “took pity” and lent them 80 bucks, but they just couldn’t get that last point. The moral of the story was “Bullshit baffles brains.” As Eric explained it, the false counting (when awarding a point) went something like this:
“You’re a smart guy. You went to school. You know how to count. Six plus one is seven, plus five is thirteen.”
And if you are indeed smart, you know it’s a miscount, but you won’t say anything because you just won a point or five or whatever. So now you’re playing against a guy who isn’t so good at counting and you’ll let him count for you most of the time… and when you don’t, you’ll never earn any points, though you don’t know that. Heads I win; tails you lose. Bullshit baffles brains.
So what’s all this have to do with Darwin and the fact that we’re all a bunch of apes? You’re smart. You went to school. Everybody knows that humankind is descended from apes… indeed that we are just a kind of primate. Some people even say we’re monkeys. It’s scientific fact!
None of this is true. A lot of people seem to be aware that monkeys and primates are not the same thing and that we are not monkeys. They will admit that it’s false to call ourselves monkeys, but the point is made and the distinction for pub banter is academic and even pedantic. Monkeys… apes… whatever. But New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris will often refer to themselves and humanity in general as apes. These representatives of popular atheism, however, are not making a scientific claim when they make the statement. They’re just saying it to ruffle the feathers of creationists who insist that God made Man in His own image out of clay just like it says in Genesis.
The fact is that the actual scientific hypothesis proposed by Darwin was that primates and humans are descended from a common ancestor.1 Not the same at all as claiming that humans are apes. This is not splitting hairs. Evolutionary theories, supported by the palaeontological record, demonstrate a development of more differentiated from less differentiated origins. But that descent does not make all living creatures the same. Far from it. We are no more apes than we are amoebas. We are a different species altogether from apes. I’ve never tried this personally, but one way of making this determination is by trying to cross breed with the species in question. And as far as I know, we can’t breed with chimps and gorillas. (Try it and let me know! Apparently this guy tried it.)
Another fact is that what really helped popularise the idea that human beings are a kind of monkey was a public debate on The Origin of Species held in 1860 in which Bishop Samuel Wilberforce scoffed at the idea of monkey ancestry and personally insulted Thomas Huxley (nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog”) by asking which of his grandparents were monkeys. Quick on his feet, Huxley turned the insult around, and responded with, “I’d rather be an ape than a bishop.”2
Like the Razzle Dazzle, there are layers here that hide the truth, and the public is duped into believing that The Science is settled and that we’re a bunch of monkeys. This is modern day myth and superstition resulting from a game of broken telephone.
Worse, is that strictly speaking, Darwin’s hypothesis (or “theory,” if you want to make it sound like more than it is) remains unconfirmed. It’s been 160 years since The Origin of Species and 150 years since The Descent of Man appeared, and despite tremendous developments in palaeontology and the technologies employed—not to mention a relentless effort to confirm the theory—we still have not identified that common ancestor.
This is not to say that the creationists are right and that we ought to read the Genesis tale of the creation of Adam and Eve as literal rather than metaphorical. In fact, Genesis indicates that the Adam and Eve story is meant to be read metaphorically by making it clear that outside the Garden of Eden cities full of people abounded.
Layers upon layers of misreadings of all manner inform the opinions of my good friends at the pub. It’s like a roast beef sandwich with baloney slipped in. The whole thing is a Razzle Dazzle: The Science… the religion… Bullshit does indeed baffle brains.
What do you think? Leave a comment below.
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[original publication date: February 12, 2023]
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
True enough, Darwin himself liked to make the analogy to insult his enemies. It’s unclear to me however when he began to use it publicly. So far as I can tell, he kept this heretical correlation to his private notebooks and private conversation until the famous 1860 blowout between Huxley and Wilberforce and even then he was chary—resisting the publication of his Descent of Man until 1871. Darwin was a member of the gentry and did not wish to risk public scorn among his fellows. He left the bulldogging to Huxley.
See Barton, Ruth. The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, pp. 174-5.
Huxley’s exact words are unknown, but Barton tells us how Huxley later formulated his response for posterity: “would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, & yet who employs these faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing a ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape” (175). The provocation apparently came when Wilberforce asked “whether Huxley would prefer a monkey ‘for his grandfather or his grandmother’” (174). Barton explains that the exact words spoken have been lost and that “perhaps there was no mention of gender.” But we get the gist of what went down.
There’s more. According to science historians James Moore and Adrian Desmond, “Polite society was probably first alerted to the prospect of its bestial ape ancestry by the public brawl between Huxley and Owen in 1861.” The reference is to Richard Owen (1804-1892), who was the star of evolutionary biology at the time, and opposed Darwin’s idea of undirected, externally driven transmutation by natural selection. Owen viciously attacked The Origin of Species, earning Huxley’s undying enmity. Moore and Desmond explain:
News of a new ape, the gorilla, had not reached the West until the later 1840s, and it was not until 1858 that the Zoological Society received its first preserved specimen. The conservative Cambridge clergy. . .feared that a bestial evolution would cause a loss of faith and the collapse of Anglican authority.
Owen came to the rescue claiming for humanity “anatomical singularity” that ensured that human beings “alone were built to house a ‘responsible soul’, and the unique human brain warranted a new zoological sub-class for mankind.” Huxley responded, saying “that humans differed little more from gorillas than gorillas did from baboons, anatomically speaking.” (See Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. Edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond. London: Penguin Classic, Penguin Random House, 2004, p. xxxv.)
Significant to this discussion, too, is that Huxley had already been teaching this scientific good news to the English working classes in 1859 as part of science education efforts begun in 1853 under the newly dubbed Department of Science and Art. Between 1858 and 1868, this science program, which was aimed at the skilled working classes, tradesmen and shopkeepers, had established 800 schools. (See Barton’s X Club, p. 301.)
In short, the idea of humans as monkeys is tied to the British class system and efforts to wrest authority from the upper classes, who were for the most part aligned with the Church of England, whereas many of those employed in the sciences, and dependent for their incomes on their scientific work, were Church dissenters—some Catholic, some Unitarians, some free-thinkers, among others. Huxley was part of this class that wished to tear down the hierarchy and obtain authority for science, which at that time was looked down upon as less intellectual and of no moral value compared with training in Classical Greek and Roman Literature and History. (See Barton’s X Club, pp. 315-22.)