| In 1863 Charles Darwin’s friend and champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, published a landmark book, titled Evidences as to Man’s Place in Nature. The book, which appeared a little more than three years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, was based principally on evidence from comparative anatomy and embryology among apes and humans. (There was essentially no fossil evidence of early humans available at that time, apart from the early Neanderthal finds, which were not yet accepted as early humans by most anthropologists) Huxley’s conclusion that humans share a close evolutionary relationship with the great apes, particularly the African apes was a key element in a revolution in the history of Western philosophy: humans were to be seen as being a part of nature, no longer as apart from nature. Although Huxley was committed to the idea of the evolution of Homo sapiens from some type of ancestral ape, he nevertheless considered humans to be a very special kind of animal. “No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between. . . man and the brutes,” wrote Huxley, “for, he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech [and] . . . stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.” The explanation of this “gap” between humans and the rest of animate nature has always exercised the minds of Western intellectuals, in both pre- and post-evolutionary eras. One difference between the two eras was that, after Darwin, naturalistic explanations had to account not only for the human physical form but also for humans’ exceptional intellectual, spiritual, and moral qualities. Previously, these qualities had been regarded as God-given. ...In 1958, Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry, suggested that mankind’s special intellectual and social qualities should be recognized formally by assigning Homo sapiens to a new grade, the Psychozoan. “The new grade is of very large extent, at least equal in magnitude to all the rest of the animal Kingdom,” he wrote, “though I prefer to regard it as covering an entirely new sector of the evolutionary process, the psychosocial, as against the entire non-human biological sector.” The ultimate issue is “the long-held view that humans are unique, a totally new type of organism,” as Cambridge University’s Robert Foley points out. This type of thinking leads to the notion that human origin therefore “requires a special type of explanation, different from that used in understanding the rest of the biological world.” That, of course, is untrue, but it has been only since the latter part of the twentieth century that paleoanthropology has become fully committed to finding purely biological explanations for the origin of the undoubtedly special features possessed by Homo sapiens. | —Roger Lewin, Human Evolution - An Illustrated Introduction | Indexes/06 |
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"No one is more convinced that than I am between the vastness of the Persian Gulf. Men and brutes," wrote Huxley
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