Chapter 5. Planet of the Apes
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Troubles in Paradise-Downard 465 Chapter 5. Planet of the Apes Antievolutionists and Human Origins: Not connecting the fossil dots – p. 482 Making Up Our Minds: Home erectus, Neanderthal and the roots of us – p. 503 Dr. Doolittle in the Cartesian Theater: Human consciousness and language – p. 519 Mystery Creation Scientist Theater 1996: The Mysterious Origins of Man – p. 536 Few of those who have seen the 1968 film Planet of the Apes can easily forget its surprise ending. Stranded on what he believes to be an alien planet populated by intelligent apes, astronaut George Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) sets off to explore, accompanied by the mute human female Nova he had rescued from the apes’ zoo. They ride along the desolate beach until they encounter the rusting remains of a metallic structure (revealed to the audience only in carefully framed shots to obscure its identity) which turns out to be the Statue of Liberty, buried askew hip- deep in the sand. Taylor now realizes that he had made it home after all. And while a puzzled Nova looked on in complete non-comprehension at what was upsetting him, Taylor collapsed on the beach to declaim: “We finally, really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you—god damn you all to hell.”1 If all you went by was this final scene, Planet of the Apes was a dandy statement against the futility of nuclear war. The symbolism of the Statue of Liberty was intensely visceral—an icon of what had been lost in a brief lapse of mankind’s MAD strategic folly. But most of the film was about something other than the long-term suitability of Mutual Assured Destruction as a defense policy. Planet of the Apes was also a biting parable about the potential conflict between religious faith and scientific understanding. Indeed, Phillip Johnson should have been far more concerned over the philosophical impact of this movie than with any of the stereotypes he has objected to from Inherit the Wind.2 The bulk of the story turns on the work of two chimpanzee scientists, Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter). Based on his archaeological work, Cornelius favored the idea that the apes had evolved from a lower order, perhaps even man—but he backed away from these conclusions once the higher council proclaimed them heretical, contradicting the teachings of the Sacred Scrolls. At the trial to determine whether the talking intruder Taylor should be put to death as a social menace, Zira protested: “How can scientific truth be heresy?” To which attitude the ruling orangutan elite embodied the quintessential creationist credo, articulated by Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans): “There is no contradiction between faith and science— true science.” Could Henry Morris have said it better? But the implications of the plot twists in Planet of the Apes run still deeper, offering in miniature all the philosophical turmoil inherent in the recognition that humans too might have come “from so simple a beginning,” as Darwin put it. While the apes’ Sacred Scrolls purported to account for the origin of their life, its ape-centered perspective also ratified a traditional society where orangutans interpreted the law and religion, and gorillas fought the wars (rather a slur on the comparatively gentle gorillas of reality). Since defending the faith was inextricably linked to preserving the social order, Taylor’s dropping in represented a threat to that arrangement by his very existence, and so had to be dealt with.3 Another problem facing Dr. Zaius was Cornelius’ fossil dig, which had revealed an advanced pre-ape culture that challenged the historical validity of the Sacred Scrolls. It also afforded the cynical Taylor an opportunity to defend the superiority of “humanity”—a position he’d ridiculed earlier in the film. Believing that the bones being dug up were humanoids that had once existed on an alien world, Taylor could easily accept how these “people” had gone extinct even though they were “better” than the currently dominant apes. (The screenplay pulled a tactical trick, though, by having Taylor not consider that their demise might have been due to warfare rather than disease or climate change.) His self-esteem thus resuscitated, Taylor could now fix on the future even though all social interaction with his own humanity had been severed. And that was because he could still Troubles in Paradise-Downard 466 imagine the inhabitants of far-off earth, still possibly going about their business safely back home. What he couldn’t handle in the end was the idea that it was our species that had been so irrevocably stupid, ironically justifying the apes’ insular mythology about mankind. We had been a world- destroying blight after all! That queasy feeling you’re supposed to get at the end of Planet of the Apes plays off a profound and natural anxiety about the human condition. Whether on the personal or collective level, being truly alone in the universe is not very inviting. Taylor’s oscillating self-image was one sort of flinch against loneliness—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in Carl Sagan’s Contact is another. Even Robinson Crusoe needed his Friday. But with the thermodynamic clock ticking throughout the physical universe, eventually the whole shebang has to run down no matter how much effort is put into reversing the merciless arrow of entropy. Why then bother painting the bathroom if, in ten billion years or so, that and all other human accomplishments will have been reduced to so many rusted Statues of Liberty poking up from dead landscapes orbiting stellar cinders heading inexorably for absolute zero? Thus is the angst of human mortality writ on the cosmic scale. Like it or not, we’re all sailing on the Titanic, with the laws of thermodynamics playing the role of iceberg. The debate then is about more than the squabble between the “religious” and “scientific” explanations of how the ship got to be here—it concerns how long the physical vessel will take to sink, and what to do in the meantime.4 Antievolutionists of all persuasions cannot get by conceptually with Homo sapiens being merely the most extraordinary of living organisms, a sentient art-making species capable of such wonders as the Sistine Chapel, jazz, and the hamburger with onions … but also of cruelties from human slavery to the industrial obscenity of Auschwitz. To avoid existentialist gridlock there must be the potential of an escape hatch from the mechanistic rut that “lower” animals are stuck in … some way to circumvent the profane bumper sticker philosophy of “you’re born, shit happens, then you die.” For Biblical creationists especially, humans must be favored, blessed, or even cursed— but at least noticed by whatever transcendence is knocking about upstairs. Attention must be paid. This eminently understandable concern about where we came from, accompanied by nagging fears that changing our views of that origin will affect where we are headed and why, permeates the creation/evolution debate. It underlies the orthodox Creation Science conception of man, of course, where a literal Adam and Eve are believed to have once lived in a physical Garden of Eden. It likewise informs Phillip Johnson’s quest to graph man’s “true creator” on the polarized dichotomy of “God or matter” (as well as his myopic vision of hominid fossils as playing an overarching role in general evolutionary thinking). But these foregone conclusions are swept along by a perilously flawed methodological wave that does not depend in the least on the Bible for its authority. Disconnect the theological governor that keeps a Gish or Johnson circling in scriptural place and that faulty method as easily flows off in service of a disparate range of ideologies, from Vine Deloria’s stridently anti-Christian Native American creationism to the agnostic catastrophist mysticism of Richard Milton. The development of evolutionary thinking on human origins has taken many fascinating twists and turns since Darwin’s day. Just as in any human endeavor, conflicting personalities and prejudices have played their part, and it would be the obligation of a rigorous analysis to faithfully sort out all the flotsam to isolate the salient scientific facts. But such historical sieving is no more prevalent in modern antievolutionism than was a working Map of Time when it came to making sense of “fossil gaps.” When human evolution is the topic there is the same barrage of selective authority quoting, where the anthropological caveats of Charles Oxnard or Solly Zuckerman are marshaled long after their particular arguments were superceded by new evidence. And there is the revealing persistence of glib potshots, especially a fascination for beating dead paleontological horses like the Piltdown Man hoax. The root of the scientific problem turns out to be one of mundane taxonomy: the anatomical similarities between humans and apes were too many to ignore even in the 19th century, and modern biochemical and behavioral studies have only added further congruencies. That the various living primates are by no means identical actually provides the wellspring of clues to the fossil Troubles in Paradise-Downard 467 detective story, as we’ll see. But the more basic epistemological point is that any evolutionary hypothesis that could see its way to embrace the common ancestry of forms so divergent as arthropods and chordates would have little compunction not to bunch all the primates together. We know how gingerly Darwin tiptoed around the issue at first—and that was precisely because nearly everybody at the time had no