“For, that there are men with tails,” wrote Lord Monboddo, pictured above, “…is a fact so well attested that I think it cannot be doubted.”¹

This was 1774, which must have been a delightful time to be alive — especially if you were prone to credulity with regard to travelers’ tales. Among other reports, Monboddo tells us that a crew under a certain Swedish captain of the East India Company had visited one of the Nicobar Islands “where they saw men with tails like those of cats, and which they moved in the same manner.”² Monboddo is especially interested in this account, because the tails described by the Swedish captain were the longest ever recorded.  

I suspect the tales were actually tall, not long. But tails were just the beginning for Lord Monboddo. A wide variety of stories had come back to Britain testifying to the shocking primitivity of certain “savage” races.  For example, a doctor named Peter Greenhill had informed Monboddo that, while employed in Africa, he had personally examined members of a tribe so primitive that they had not even developed language. They had been given as gifts by members of a different tribe to a slave trader called Captain Gregory — gifted, rather than sold to him as slaves per usual, because the other tribesmen considered them to be monkeys rather than men. Yet as far the doctor could tell, they were entirely human, except for their lack of speech.³

Meanwhile, other travelers were telling stories of apes that were surprisingly humanlike. Monboddo relays the report that chimpanzees in Africa “live together in communities, build little towns or villages, are governed by a king that does not work, and have their games and pastimes as well as the negroes.”⁴ Of the orangutans in Java, he informs us:

They excel in judgement and intelligence, and learn every thing very readily… When they are clothed, they immediately walk erect; and they play very well upon the pipe, harp, and other instruments. The females among them have their monthly courses; and the males have a great desire for [human] women.⁵

A Daring Hypothesis 

All this hard data led Monboddo to formulate a daring hypothesis: that humans and apes were actually the same species. Apes were merely the most primitive humans, retaining the character of the ancestors from which civilized man had evolved long ago. Uncivilized tribes (tails and all) represented the missing link. 

Monboddo’s fantasy did have its limits. He admits that apes cannot be made to behave like normal humans, even if trained from a young age. But in his mind, this should not be taken as proof that they are not human, because the same is true of other human races: 

For the habits and disposition of mind, and, by consequence, the aptitude to learn any thing, are qualities which go to the race, as well as the shape and other bodily qualities…Kolben, in his account of the Hottentots, tells us, that it is not possible to tame a Hottentot, and reconcile him to Dutch manners, though taken quite young, and bred up in a European way; and he says, the experiment has often been tried, but never succeeded. In like manner, an Iroquois, or a Huron, though take very young, the Europeans have never been able to breed to labour or a sedentary life.

Same Premises, Different Conclusion

Other scientists of the era would start with similar “facts” about race, but derive a less inclusive conclusion. Rather than try to bring apes into the fold of the human species, they argued that if there are so many differences between human groups, those groups should be considered separate species.

This is how Charles Darwin summarized the thought of his predecessors on the subject: 

Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive character between them.⁶

For Darwin, the question of whether Man was one species or two or sixty-three was ultimately subjective. If all species had evolved by random variation from a common ancestor, instead of coming into being as special creations, then there was no pre-existing definition of a “species” — scientists could delineate it however they wanted. What Darwin was interested in was not whether the differences in the human race made us many species, or one species with the apes, but what the differences revealed about our evolutionary origin. Darwin argued that if humans differed among themselves in all important qualities, there was no objective reason to put them in an entirely different class from other animals, as advocates of special creation had so often done. “If man had not been his own classifier,” Darwin wrote, “he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.”⁷

This was a reasonable conclusion — at least, given the common beliefs of his time. 

Shifting Foundations 

Of course, people believed many silly things in the past. But these particular silly things are of more than historical interest, because they continue to influence our thinking today. 

Monboddo did not succeed in convincing the world that Man had evolved from Ape, but he may have influenced Erasmus Darwin. We know at any rate that Erasmus read Monboddo, as he cited him in his famous poem about evolution.⁸ Even in the days of his grandson, Charles Darwin, the science concerning race was still in its infancy. People were so shockingly ill-informed that when Darwin wrote The Descent of Man in 1871, the mutual fertility of all races was not considered a proven fact. It was an open question whether humans of all different races could produce fully fertile offspring together, or if certain races produced at least somewhat sterile offspring — similar to horses and donkeys making mules!⁹

This racism was not merely the context of the theory of common descent — it was one of the main reasons for it. The idea that humans developed from apes by natural processes was born from the idea that humans and apes were not really all that different — an idea which, in turn, was derived from the racist lens through which early explorers and colonists saw various indigenous people groups. 

There’s no shame in building a theory on false premises, as long as you are ready to discard the theory when those premises are shown to be false. Sometimes, though, a theory lingers on long after the premises that originally rendered it plausible have been disproven.

In this case, the premise of innate racial disparities lost its credibility a long time ago. Indeed, even in Charles Darwin’s day, the evidence concerning racial differences (or rather, lack thereof) had progressed a lot since the wide-eyed days of Lord Monboddo. Darwin knew there was no race of men with tails. Some of this new evidence created difficulties for Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which he tried to address in his writings. In my next post, we’ll examine how Darwin used (now debunked) 19th-century race science to salvage a theory that had been inspired by (then debunked) 18th-century race science. 

Notes

1. Monboddo, James Burnett (1774). Of the Origin and Process of Language. Volume I, Second edition. Page 262. J. Balfour.
2. Op. cit. page 258.
3. Op. cit. pages 254-6. 
4. Op. cit. page 288. 
5. Op. cit. page 276.
6. Darwin, Charles (1871). The Descent of Man, page 226. Murray.
7. Op. cit. page 191. 
8. Darwin, Erasmus (1803). “The temple of nature, or, The origin of society.” Page 5, Canto I, note on line 36. J. Johnson. 
9. Op. cit. page 220-224.