David Stevens

Charles Darwin › Questions

Did Darwin say humans came from apes?

Not in the Origin, which never mentions apes. Twelve years later he argued for a common ancestor.

The short answer

Not in the book everyone thinks says it. The first edition of On the Origin of Species contains the words ape and apes zero times. On human origins it says one sentence: light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

The Descent of Man

He made the human argument twelve years later, in The Descent of Man (February 1871). Its claim is common descent: that people and the other animals are related by ancestry, not that people are descended from the apes now living. Its last sentence: Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

The same book insists that all human beings are one species with a single origin, against the racial science of its day that called them separate creations. It also ranks peoples as savage and civilised throughout, and says he would as soon be descended from a heroic little monkey as from a savage who tortures his enemies. Both are on the page; the book does not tidy either away.

The monkey at Oxford

The famous exchange at Oxford in 1860, when a bishop is supposed to have asked whether a scientist claimed descent from a monkey on his grandfather's side or his grandmother's, has no transcript. The version everyone repeats was put together more than twenty years afterwards.

More about Charles Darwin

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The trial file

A short piece, free: what the documents in Galileo’s own trial file actually say, including the two pages that decided it. It isn’t sold anywhere, and it’s the fastest way to see how these books are built.

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