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Charles Darwin's hypothesis "On the Descent of Man" and the ape
2025-11-12 19:40:56 / JETË
Between the deceiver and the monkey, I would choose the latter, my friend Selim Kurti writes in his post, drawing attention to one of the topics that still remains after nearly 200 years of controversy and cause, not only for opposition but also for the grotesque.
In 1871, when Charles Darwin’s essay “On the Descent of Man” was published, the satirical magazine “Hornet” published a scathing cartoon: it depicted Darwin with the body of an ape, a bitter play on humor and sting. The irony was that Darwin had never claimed that man descended from ape; he had only explained that man and ape share a common ancestor. So “Hornet” was hitting back, basing its entire satire on a distortion.
In fact, this misunderstanding—or rather, deliberate misinterpretation—had become commonplace in the early years of the evolutionary debate. One need only recall the annual congress of the British Society in 1860, where Darwin's theses of "The Origin of Species" were being tested against religious and conservative authority. It was there that the renowned Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce, a man of learning but also a master of elegantly disguised irony, addressed Thomas Huxley, Darwin's staunchest defender, with a question intended to provoke laughter and contempt:
— “Sir, on which side are you more related to monkeys, on your grandfather’s side or your grandmother’s side?”
Huxley, sober and sharp, rose with dignified calm and gave the priest a response that went down in history as a triumph of reason over sarcasm:
— “If I had to choose as my ancestor between an ape and a man who, however educated, uses his reason to deceive an ignorant public, I would not hesitate for a moment to choose the ape.”
This answer was not only a redefinition of human dignity, but also a moral lesson: evolution is not a humiliation of man, while conscious deception is. After all, even today, between a creature that follows instinct and a being that uses its mind to distort the truth, the choice remains as clear as it was for Huxley: better an innocent ape than a fraud adorned with titles.
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