Harriet Ritvo

Humans & humanists

“When I use a word,” says Humpty beg such questions. Previously, although Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, “it humanism itself has often been contro- means just what I choose it to mean– versial, a fair amount of consensus exist- neither more nor less.” Alice demurs on ed among practitioners and critics about several grounds, appealing ½rst to con- its denotation. This consensus has been trary popular consensus–“But ‘glory’ notably durable. In the Oxford English doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argu- Dictionary (oed), the ½rst three senses ment’”–and then to the essential limits of distinguish “mankind” from of language: “The question is . . . whether animals, from “mere objects or events,” you can make words mean so many dif- and from “God or superhuman beings.” ferent things.” Neither of Alice’s objec- All three of these senses emerged before tions fazes Dumpty, who countertheo- 1600, and none has yet been labeled ob- rizes that “the question is . . . which is to solete.2 The oed’s de½nition of humanist be master,” then illustrates the practical is much more restricted, focusing on di- bene½ts of his approach with a brilliant visions among learned men, rather than interpretation of “Jabberwocky,” a poem among orders of creation. Its senses re- whose vocabulary Alice had previously fer to the various subcategories of schol- found impenetrable.1 There is, of course, arship that humanists have chosen to ex- much to be said on both sides of this de- plore; none of these senses has yet been bate. Many people have, like Dumpty, labeled obsolete either.3 recognized the power of vocabulary and In 1976, the cultural critic Raymond made similar attempts to control de½- Williams included humanity (as repre- nitional borders. If, again like Dumpty, senting “a complex group of words, in- they have neglected to acknowledge cluding human, humane, humanism, the alternative viewpoints represented humanist, [and] humanitarian”) in by Alice and her ilk, they have usually Keywords, his compendium of brief es- found this easier said than done. says on common terms, the senses of The term human has in recent years which had altered or splintered as a been the site of such contestation and result of cultural and political pressures struggle among humanist scholars, that emerged during and after World whose self-categorization may seem to War II. But a crude statistical calcula- tion suggests that Williams did not con- © 2009 by Harriet Ritvo sider this word or group of words as

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 among the most problematic or inter- The organization of information about & esting in his collection: he allotted it animals, plants, and minerals into a co- humanists only three pages. Words whose evolu- herent system was part of the core dis- tion he considered particularly compel- ciplinary, or protodisciplinary, agenda ling or important–class, culture, democra- of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cy, masses, nature, realism, socialist, and naturalists. A taxonomic system was structural–commanded, in comparison, necessary for the practical purposes of ½ve pages or more. In his discussion, retrieval and comparison, as knowledge Williams took the limits of the human about the world and its contents grew for granted, emphasizing instead the exponentially during the centuries of shades of moral connotation that dis- European exploration and expansion. tinguish human from humane, and the More abstractly, especially in the wake shades of intellectual connotation that of Newton, taxonomy constituted a vi- distinguish the specialties of some tal component of naturalists’ claim to “humanists” from those of others.4 intellectual respectability and prestige. Keywords included no entry for animal, Without system, they feared, natural beast, or monster–or for machine, god, history would be “but a confused, un- or deity, for that matter–and no such disciplined crowd of subjects,” and nat- entries are planned for an updated ver- uralists “mere collectors of curiosities sion of the book currently under prepa- and super½cial trifles . . . , objects of rid- ration. These editorial decisions may icule rather than respect.”6 suggest that, in the view of many hu- Before any natural kind could be manists, the boundaries between hu- assigned its place in a system, it had manity and its abutting categories re- to be described with suf½cient preci- main relatively unproblematic.5 sion to establish clear criteria for inclu- Like the oed lexicographers, Wil- sion or exclusion. This was often prob- liams chose most of the examples that lematic since, at the time, transporta- illustrate his de½nitions from the litera- tion was slow and uncertain, commu- ture of humanism, which may explain nication among specialists was dif½- the narrowness of his disciplinary fo- cult, and preservation techniques were cus and his lack of attention to the un- often ineffective. In addition, although settled borders that have begun to pre- some organisms, like the giraffe, can occupy at least some humanists. (It is be easily differentiated from all others, not surprising to ½nd Williams follow- many plants and animals have relatives ing the oed’s lead: it was his major pri- close enough to undermine the distinc- mary source for Keywords.) But neither tion between similarity and sameness. blurry edges nor strenuous attempts to Extra study did not necessarily make clarify them are recent developments. things clearer; indeed, intensi½ed ex- As Humpty Dumpty discovered, to his amination of dubious cases often made cost, that he was not the only author them seem more dif½cult to describe and of his own story, humanists have never delimit. As Charles Darwin remarked been alone in their interest in the hu- of the differentiation of species and va- man. Certainly, they have never had rieties, “[I]t is in the best-known coun- the last word in de½ning it. tries that we ½nd the greatest number of forms of doubtful value. . . . if any animal Categories and boundaries have long or plant . . . closely attract [human] atten- obsessed students of the natural world. tion, varieties . . . will almost universally

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 Harriet be found recorded.”7 Human beings ½t ½ed no distinctive physical feature, but Ritvo on being both criteria. The territories where hu- merely commented, “nosce te ipsum”– human mans lived were inevitably very familiar know thyself.9 and well documented, and most people Linnaeus’s terse description left many found humans–themselves–to be the questions unanswered, the most obvi- most fascinating of the earth’s inhabi- ous of which was how to de½ne thyself. tants. Consequently, many naturalists At the next level of analysis, where he struggled to determine where their spe- described each genus in greater detail cies ½t in the natural order. One possi- and itemized its constituent species, bility–the one implied by oed de½ni- Linnaeus offered some very suggestive tions, as well as by the chain of being answers. In his classi½cation, Homo was that descended from antiquity–was not a monolithic taxon; it contained that humans occupied a position just two species, of which Homo sapiens, the outside or on top of the natural order.8 ½rst and largest, was further subdivid- But other possibilities existed, several ed into the conventional geographical of which suggested greater integration. races (American, European, Asiatic, and African), with additional catego- As the gap between humans and oth- ries for the wild children who occasion- er creatures diminished, boundary con- ally turned up (Ferus) and for still more fusion increased. Many naturalists fol- unusual kinds of people (Monstrosus).10 lowed the lead of Linnaeus, the Swedish According to Linnaeus’s descriptions, taxonomist whose system of latinate bi- those in Homo differed suf½ciently in nomials remains the foundation of bo- their physical and temperamental qual- tanical and zoological nomenclature. ities to make it unlikely that the self- He ½rst published his classi½cation of knowledge of members of one group, the animal kingdom in Systema Naturae however comprehensive and accurate, in 1735; it was expanded and revised would automatically illuminate the na- through many subsequent editions, of ture of the others. For example, Homo which the tenth, published in 1758, is Europaeus was “sanguineus,” while considered de½nitive. Unlike many of Homo Afer was “phlegmaticus.” The his contemporaries, Linnaeus had no other species within the genus Homo doubt that people were a kind of ani- more severely challenged the limits mal, if an unusual kind. He embedded of empathetic insight. Linnaeus’s cor- humans ½rmly within his taxonomic respondence and his lectures at Upp- system, devising the primate order to sala University contained repeated accommodate four genera: Homo, Sim- suggestions that he found it dif½cult to ia (monkeys and ), Lemur (prosim- establish a ½rm dividing line between ians), and Vespertilio (bats). Linnaeus humans and apes.11 Homo troglodytes did not, however, treat humans and was not subdivided; its sole occupant their ilk in quite the same way that he was the orangutan.12 treated these structurally parallel cate- The evidence offered by this place- gories. Instead, he signaled human dis- ment is ambiguous, however. The tinctiveness in the brief characteriza- orangutan was also known as Homo syl- tions that accompanied his schematic vestris, or, “the wild man of the woods” list of genera. For simians and prosimi- (a translation from Malay, although ans he highlighted dentition; for bats, not of the Malay word for the orang- wings. With regard to Homo he identi- utan), and, at a time when the unity

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 of the human species was the subject of the head of it; the closer juxtaposition Humans & vigorous debate, there was widespread within the genus Homo was inevitably humanists uncertainty about whether or not orang- even more troubling. According to the utans were human. In addition, natural- British naturalist Thomas Pennant, ists had not yet clearly distinguished the “[M]y vanity will not suffer me to rank orangutan of Southeast Asia from the mankind with Apes, Monkies, Maucaucos, of Africa, whose taxonom- and Bats”; a colleague further asserted, ic placement, therefore, generated simi- “[W]e may perhaps be pardoned for the lar (or identical) uncertainty. In 1699, repugnance we feel to place the monkey for example, the anatomist Edward at the head of the brute creation, and Tyson had published a treatise entitled thus to associate him . . . with man.”16 Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris. Or, the Some dissenters simply proposed Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of their own counter-taxonomies, which a Monkey, an , and a Man.13 (By “ape” implicitly posited a much wider separa- he meant baboon, and by “pygmie” he tion. Thus, early in the nineteenth cen- meant chimpanzee.) The human status tury the anatomist William Lawrence of the quasi-mythical pygmies had, con- suggested that “the principles must be versely, long been the subject of Europe- incorrect, which lead to such an approx- an speculation. Even at the end of the imation” between humans, apes, and eighteenth century, naturalists could monkeys within the primate order; in- claim that the “race of men of diminu- stead, he argued that “the peculiar char- tive stature,” or “supposed nation of acteristics of man appear to me so very pygmies” described by the ancients, strong, that I not only deem him a dis- was “nothing more than a species of tinct species, but also . . . a separate or- apes. . . that resemble us but very im- der.”17 Naturalists who recognized this perfectly.”14 exclusively human order normally des- With regard to the orangutan (or ignated it “Bimana,” which stressed chimpanzee), Linnaeus hedged his taxo- the erect posture and purpose-built nomic bets. On the one hand, he extend- feet characteristic of people, in contrast ed the human genus in the direction of with the four-handed apes and mon- apes–or toward the dark side, to use his keys who were segregated in the order own terminology: he described Homo “Quadrumana.”18 As the author of one sapiens as H. diurnus, while Homo troglo- mid-nineteenth-century guidebook to dytes was H. nocturnus. On the other, he the Mammalia enthusiastically put it, reserved a place for them at the head of “Man! Privileged in every other aspect, the simians, in the species Simia satyrus is zoologically distinguished by possess- (the name of which evokes a more imag- ing hands on the anterior extremities inative direction in which the boundary alone.”19 A contemporary more force- of the human could be problematic).15 fully asserted, “[M]inute examination Linnaeus had good reason to equivocate. shows us that even these highest forms Despite his iconic status as a systematiz- of the brute creation are separated by er, in his own time as well as subsequent- a vast interval from him to whom was ly, his inclusive primate order was fre- originally delegated the dominion over quently rejected. Not everyone, wheth- them all.”20 er serious naturalist or casual observer Nevertheless, such assertions were of nature, enjoyed being placed ½rmly rearguard efforts and, at least among within the animal kingdom, even if at specialists, Linnaeus’s primate order

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 Harriet ultimately triumphed. By the middle of amused herself by carefully turning the Ritvo the nineteenth century, most zoologists pages of an illustrated book. At the Re- on being human had accepted it, although some main- gent’s Park Zoo in London, a chimpan- tained the two-hand/four-hand division zee named Jenny regularly appeared at a lower level of taxonomic discrimina- in a flannel nightgown and robe. Con- tion. Even Louis Agassiz, who emerged sul, a young chimpanzee who lived in as one of the most prominent opponents Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoological Gar- of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natu- dens at the end of the nineteenth centu- ral selection, argued that “as man is re- ry, greeted the public dressed in a jack- lated to animals by the plan of his struc- et and straw hat, smoked cigarettes, ture, so these are related to him by the and drank his liquor from a glass.23 At character of those very faculties which about the same time, the London Zoo are so transcendent in man as to point routinely dressed a chimp named Mike at ½rst to the necessity of disclaiming to impersonate Captain Cuttle, a char- for him completely any relationship acter from Dickens’s Dombey and Son. with the animal kingdom.” (He further Even apes with no public role to play speculated that because the absence of tended to behave in a distinctively hu- other animals from the afterlife would man manner. For example, a chimpan- involve a “lamentable loss,” they were zee acquired by the Earl Fitzwilliam in likely to share with people something 1849 was reported to walk “perfectly like a soul.)21 But even within Agassiz’s erect” and handle “everything like a generous embrace, similarity did not human being”; in addition, its food imply identity. Like the animal com- was “choice, and wine a favorite bev- panions that he feared to miss in heav- erage.”24 en, apes and monkeys remained out- Rumor persistently whispered that side the human taxon. these visual analogies might represent more substantial and productive con- Among the general public, the possi- nections. Thus one seventeenth-centu- bility that apes might actually be people ry report featured a “poor miserable lingered in various ways. Illustrations in fellow” who had copulated with a mon- books of popular natural history often key, “not out of any evil intention . . . but portrayed apes as particularly human in only to procreat a Monster, with which both appearance and behavior, showing he might win his bread.”25 At the end them assuming erect posture, using hu- of the eighteenth century, the surgeon man tools (frequently a walking stick), and naturalist Charles White reported and approximating human proportions that orangutans “have been known to in the torso and limbs.22 Still more strik- carry off negro-boys, girls and even ingly, this visual tradition was not con- women . . . as objects of brutal passion”; ½ned to the page or the canvas; it was more than sixty years later the Anthro- also constantly reenacted in the displays pological Society republished Johann of the and orangutans Friedrich Blumenbach’s summary of that constituted popular components travelers’ accounts that “lascivious male of nineteenth-century zoos and menag- apes attack women.”26 White recorded eries. Show apes ate with table utensils, rumors “that women have had offspring sipped tea from cups, and slept under from such connection” and proposed blankets. One orangutan who lived in that “supposing it to be true, it would be London’s Exeter Change Menagerie an object of inquiry, whether such off-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 spring would propagate, or prove to be modern groups, the rhetoric of evolu- Humans & mules.”27 Blumenbach, more cautious, tion could be deployed to suggest that humanists asserted “that such a monstrous con- human-ape mixtures existed in the pres- nection has any where ever been fruit- ent, as well as in the ancestral past. For ful there is no well-established instance example, a Laotian girl named Krao was to prove.”28 Addressing the same con- exhibited in 1883 as “Darwin’s missing cern, in his pioneering account of chim- link,” not only because she was unusu- panzee anatomy, Edward Tyson had ally hairy, but because she allegedly pos- gone out of his way to assure his read- sessed prehensile feet and could pout ers that “notwithstanding our Pygmie like a chimpanzee.32 does so much resemble a Man . . . yet by Even among scientists, the convic- no means do I look upon it as the Prod- tion that apes were not people did not uct of a mixt generation.”29 exclude the possibility that some people might be apes. Indeed, over the course Outside the community of experts, of the nineteenth century this possibil- claims could be less restrained, or more ity loomed increasingly large, as special- enthusiastic. A Victorian impresario, ists focused more intensely on ways to for example, advertised the merely hairy subdivide the human species. The dis- Julia Pastrana as “a hybrid, wherein the criminations could be very ½ne. For ex- nature of woman predominates over ample, John Beddoe, the author of The the ourang-outangs.”30 And there were Races of Britain, deemed it possible to other ways of positing similarly con- distinguish between the appearance of crete connections between people and people who lived in Boston and those the non-human animals most nearly who lived in Lincoln (towns separated allied to them by anatomy. Well into by approximately thirty miles), and fur- the nineteenth century, physicians ex- ther speculated that some of the differ- plained many kinds of birth defects as ences between the Saxon and the Celtic the unfortunate consequences of what components of the British population was termed maternal imagination or im- could be explained by the persistence pression–that is, an expectant mother’s of “Mongoloid” and African traces per- fascination with an external object that sisting in the latter group.33 And the somehow influenced the development stakes could be high, both intellectually of her unborn child. Where the object and politically. During the 1860s, the was animate, the fascination could oc- nascent British anthropological commu- casion a kind of mental hybridization: nity was riven by a struggle between a child whose parentage involved more so-called ethnologicals, generally evolu- than one species. Thus in 1867 the Lancet tionists and monogenists (believers in attributed the dense fur covering an un- the common descent of all human vari- fortunate girl’s back to the fact that her eties), and the anthropologicals, gener- mother had been frightened during ally anti-Darwinians and polygenists pregnancy by an organ grinder’s mon- (believers in the independent origin of key.31 In addition, because the evolu- human varieties).34 In the presidential tionary theories that gained currency address that inaugurated the Anthropo- in the late Victorian period assumed the logical Society of London in 1863, which existence of extinct forms intermediate was billed as a consideration of “the sta- between humans and apes, at least in tion to be assigned to [the Negro] in the the sense of having given rise to both genus Homo,” James Hunt argued that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 Harriet “there is as good a reason for classifying discovery of Neanderthal remains,37 Ritvo on being the Negro as a distinct species from the paleoanthropologists have exhumed human European, as . . . for making the ass a dis- and identi½ed species after species, so tinct species from the zebra.” After a that Homo sapiens is now surrounded series of disparaging characterizations, by a crowd of ghostly parents, grand- Hunt concluded that “the Negro race parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, can only be humanised and civilised by some of them only very recently extin- Europeans.”35 guished. In this respect, if not in others, As displays of great apes suggested humans are now more like the cat than their latent humanity, the anthropoid like the giraffe. Homo neanderthalensis qualities of derogated human groups and Homo sapiens coexisted for millen- could be indicated concretely as well nia in parts of Europe and southwest as in words. Museums frequently exhib- Asia.38 Remains of small-bodied and ited the remains of non-European hu- small-brained humans discovered on mans in ways that underlined their dif- the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004 ference from Europeans, or suggested have been classi½ed as a separate spe- their greater af½nity with other animals. cies (Homo floresiensis) that lived there In 1766, a traveling collection of “curios- until about 17,000 years ago.39 ities” grouped a “Negro Child” with a The phylogenetic relationship “Monstrous Cat with 8 legs,” a “Chick- between people and the other great en’s Foot with 6 Toes,” a sloth, and an apes has also become better and better armadillo. A century later the Cam- documented, making any classi½cation bridge University anatomical collection that groups chimpanzees, gorillas, and listed separate entries for the “Tegumen- orangutans together, while leaving hu- tary System or Skin” of the “Human” mans in splendid isolation, primarily a and the “Negro.”36 If twentieth-centu- case of wishful thinking. Although the ry natural history museums included ½ne points of ape taxonomy are still displays of human artifacts, or diora- subject to debate, it has become clear mas showing human activity, they were that orangutans, rather than humans, much more likely to feature people who are the outliers. In one recent formula- could be characterized as exotic or prim- tion, the family contains itive than people who wore business three subfamilies: Ponginae (orangu- suits and carried briefcases. The politi- tans), Gorillinae (gorillas), and Homi- cal consequences of such explicit and ninae (chimpanzees, , and hu- implicit taxonomic juxtapositions have mans).40 And if the claim embedded been demonstrated repeatedly, wheth- in the title of ’s book The er human groups are associated with fel- Third Chimpanzee still seems provocative, low primates or, as in the rhetoric of the a more generic version of it is de½nitely Nazis, resurrected in the recent Rwan- ready for prime time.41 A publicity re- dan genocide, with insects whose simi- lease for the Nova television program’s larities are purely metaphorical. episode “Ape Genius” begins, “Congrat- ulations: You are an ape.”42 I have visit- Although it has never been dif½cult to ed zoos that provide a mirror in which distinguish between people and cock- visitors can admire one last specimen roaches, human uniqueness has come as they leave the great ape house. under increasing taxonomic challenge. This increasing convergence has de- Beginning with the nineteenth-century stabilized the assumptions on which the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 dictionary de½nitions of human and harder it has become to maintain a ½rm Humans & humanist have been based. If people are separation. Many characteristics that humanists apes, then they must understand and once seemed exclusively or at least dis- justify their preeminence in novel ways, tinctively human, including moral intu- or, if they are committed to traditional ition, oppressive patriarchy, internecine understandings of human distinctive- strife, and cannibalism, turn out to be ness, they must at least ½nd new evi- more widely distributed.44 Intelligence dence to support them. As evidence has proved a weak reed for similar rea- of physical difference has become less sons. None of the intellectual barriers persuasive, evidence from the behav- erected to isolate people has proved re- ioral, intellectual, or spiritual sphere liably robust. In Sartor Resartus, Thomas has gained prominence. Nineteenth- Carlyle chose “Tool-using Animal” as century naturalists uneasy about the a de½nition that emphasized human human-ape connection frequently pos- uniqueness, noting that “Man is called ited an alternative alliance. They rea- a Laughing Animal, but do not the apes soned that if non-primate animals re- also laugh, or attempt to do it.”45 In the sembled humans more closely than wake of Jane Goodall’s pioneering ob- apes, then they would necessarily dis- servations of chimpanzees, tool creation place apes from their awkward proxim- has been observed in several primate ity. Such displacement required that species (and many kinds of animals are qualities other than physical resem- capable of using found tools).46 The ob- blance be identi½ed as the most sig- stacles to speech in other primates are ni½cant for purposes of comparison. located in their vocal tracts rather than Animal mental ability was de½ned as in their brains.47 In any case, parrots can different in kind from that of humans; talk, as can a few other kinds of birds; most highly esteemed were qualities some of them, like the recently deceased that produced good servants. This met- Alex, arguably make sense.48 And it has ric was unlikely to privilege apes or become clear that, with the aid of sign monkeys. In 1881, for example, George language, computers, or other acces- J. Romanes, a close friend and colleague sories, apes and dolphins can breach of Darwin’s with a special interest in the ½nal barrier, that of symbolic com- animal behavior, celebrated the “high munication.49 intelligence” and “gregarious instincts” of the dog, which, he claimed, gave it The implications of these snowballing a more “massive as well as more com- recognitions are more than abstract or plex” psychology than any member theoretical. In the preface to The Great of the monkey family.43 And since the Ape Project, the editors argue that the competing closeness so constructed “sphere of moral equality” to which we was clearly ½gurative, the whole ani- all belong should be based not on reduc- mal creation was thereby implicitly re- tive taxonomy–membership in the spe- moved to a more comfortable distance. cies Homo sapiens–but on “the fact that Temperament, of course, is hard to pin we are intelligent beings with a rich and down; as with Linnaeus’s characteriza- varied social and emotional life.” Since tion of human types, it is often in the eye these “are qualities that we share . . . with of the beholder. The more that we have our fellow great apes,” the boundary of come to know about the dispositions of the sphere should be redrawn so that chimpanzees and other primates, the they are included, too.50 Contributors

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 Harriet include scientists who study apes in the York Times commentator on the Span- Ritvo wild, scientists who study apes in captiv- ish resolution pointed out the failings on being human ity, and specialists in language, philoso- of extremists on both sides, but came phy, and law, among other disciplines. down on the side of the apes: “Critics They all subscribe to the “Declaration object that recognizing rights for apes on Great Apes,” which speci½es that, would diminish human beings. But it for human beings, chimpanzees, goril- seems more likely that showing respect las, and orangutans, the right to life, the for apes would elevate humans at the protection of individual liberty, and the same time.”53 prohibition of torture should all be en- These developments reflect the forceable by law.51 evolution of an argument that has Since not all humans enjoy these le- been going on for centuries. In com- gal protections, it is not surprising that parison, most humanists have just apes remain outside the “sphere of mor- begun to wonder about the limits and al equality.” Some recent developments limitations of the human. We might, in Europe suggest the possibility of fu- indeed, wonder whether the label “hu- ture change, especially the resolution manist” has always carried a certain adopted in 2008 by a committee of the amount of hubris (or at least tunnel Spanish parliament giving great apes vision), as well as what it would take the rights formulated in The Great Ape to become “post-human.” Perhaps the Project.52 But such change will certainly liberation of all the apes now held in be slow, and in any case most apes do captivity (not to speak of all the other not live in Europe (at least not yet). Nor animals)? As Humpty Dumpty might do they live in the United States, where have said, “There’s a nice knock-down the legal system, as well as the culture argument for you.” at large, seems less sympathetic. A New

ENDNOTES 1 Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], Through the Looking Glass, in The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (1865; New York: Bramhall House, 1960), 269–272. 2 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “human.” 3 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “humanist.” 4 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 11–13, 148–151. 5 Author’s personal communication with Jonathan Arac. 6 William Borlase, Natural History of Cornwall (Oxford: W. Jackson, 1768), viii; Richard Pulteney, A General View of the Writings of Linnaeus (London: J. Mawman, 1805), 11. 7 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. Ernst Mayr (1859; Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 1964), 50. 8 Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagina- tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 23, 28–31. 9 Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturae: Regnum Animale (1758; London: British Museum, 1956), 18. 10 Ibid., 20–23.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 11 Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Humans & 1999), 87–88. humanists 12 Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 24. 13 Edward Tyson, “Preface,” in Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris. Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man (London: Thomas Bennet, 1699). 14 An Historical Miscellany of the Curiosities and Rarities in Nature and Art . . . , vol. III (London: Champante and Whitrow, ca. 1800), 288–289. 15 Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 25. 16 Thomas Pennant, History of Quadrupeds (London: B. and J. White, 1793), iv; William Wood, Zoography; or the Beauties of Nature Displayed (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807). 17 William Lawrence, Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural His- tory of Man; delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in the Years 1816, 1817, and 1818 (London: R. Carlile, 1823), 127, 131. 18 See, for example, Richard Owen, “On the Anthropoid Apes and their relations to Man,” Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 2 (1855): 41. 19 Charles Hamilton Smith, Introduction to the Mammalia (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, 1846), 93. 20 P. H. Gosse, Natural History: Mammalia (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowl- edge, 1848), 3. 21 Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classi½cation, ed. Edward Lurie (1857; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 75–76. 22 See, for example, the illustrations in Thomas Bewick’s popular A General History of Quad- rupeds (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1790). 23 C. V. A. Peel, The Zoological Gardens of Europe: Their History and Chief Features (London: F. E. Robinson, 1903), 205–206; “In Memory of Consul,” pamphlet in the Belle Vue col- lection, Chetham’s Library, Manchester. 24 William Bingley, Animal Biography; or, Authentic Anecdotes of the lives, manners, and economy, of the animal creation, arranged according to the system of Linnaeus, vol. I (London: 1803), 45– 50; Edward Jesse, Gleanings in Natural History, 2nd series (London: John Murray, 1834), 40; William Broderip, Zoological Recreations (London: Henry Colburn, 1847), 250; “Importa- tion of Another Specimen of the Chimpanzee,” Zoologist 7 (1849): 2379. 25 Quoted in Dudley Wilson, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1991), 56–67. 26 Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Veg- etables; and from the Former to the Latter (London: C. Dilly, 1799), 34; Johann Friedrich Blu- menbach, The Anthropological Treatises . . . , ed. and trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Long- man, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green/The Anthropological Society, 1865), 73. 27 White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, 34. 28 Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises, 80–81. 29 Tyson, Orang-Outang, 2. 30 Jan Bondeson and A. E. W. Miles, “Julia Pastrana, the Nondescript: An Example of Con- genital Generalized Hypertrichosis Terminalis with Gingival Hyperplasia,” American Jour- nal of Medical Genetics 47 (1993): 199. 31 Lancet (1867). 32 Nature, May 12, 1882, cited in Martin Howard, Victorian Grotesque: An Illustrated Excursion into Medical Curiosities, Freaks, and Abnormalities–Principally of the Victorian Age (London: Jupiter Books, 1977), 56–57.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2009.138.3.68 by guest on 24 September 2021 Harriet 33 John Beddoe, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the of Western Europe (Bris- Ritvo tol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1885), 9, 11. on being human 34 W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1991), 248–254; for the subsequent evolution of this debate, see Douglas Lorimer, “Theoretical Racism in Late- Victorian Anthropology, 1870–1900,” Victorian Studies 31 (1988): 405–430. 35 James Hunt, “On the Negro’s Place in Nature,” Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Soci- ety of London 1 (1863–1864): 1, 51–52. 36 Catalogue of a Great Variety of Natural and Arti½cial Curiosities, Now Exhibiting at the Large House, the Corner of Queen’s Row, facing the Road, at Pimlico (London, 1766), 4; G. M. Humphrey, Analysis of the Physiological Series in the Gallery of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy (Cambridge, 1866), 9. 37 See A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 38 Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know about (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 180–182, 224, 244–245. 39 Adam Brumm et al., “Early Stone Technology on Flores and Its Implications for Homo flo- resiensis,” Nature 441 (2006): 624–628. 40 See, for example, the website for a physical anthropology class at Palomar College, a com- munity college in California: http://anthro.palomar.edu/primate/prim_8.htm. 41 Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 42 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/apegenius/human.html. 43 George J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 439. 44 See, for example, Frans De Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). 45 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1836; London: J. M. Dent, 1908), 30. 46 Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 277–280. 47 Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, 55. 48 Irene Pepperberg, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Gray Parrots (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 49 Donald Grif½n, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 228–251. 50 Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 1. 51 Ibid., 4–6. 52 Jeffrey Stinson, “Activists pursue basic legal rights for great apes; Spain ½rst to vote on some freedoms,” usa Today, July 15, 2008. 53 Adam Cohen, “What’s Next in Law? The Unalienable Rights of Chimps?” The New York Times, July 14, 2008.

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