As a famous figure in the debates surrounding human evolution, Darwin could be something of a lightning rod for eccentric thinkers with their own ideas about his theories. The idea of a “missing link” compelled one such enthusiast to write to him about the possible origins of humankind. Having read an “exposition of the ‘Darwinian theory’” that posited the missing link as an extinct “race of ‘Speechless Men,’” an American banker living in Paris by the name of William B. Bowles suggested to Darwin that, in fact, the “missing link” was neither speechless nor extinct. Rather, the “missing links” in human evolution were “Speaking Monkies,” and Bowles was bold enough to suggest that he thought he could “point out this missing race, show where and how it lives.”

Like Gaston de Saporta, who wrote to Darwin about (among other things) male simians’ sexual attraction to female humans, Bowles had read widely in the travel literature of the nineteenth century and believed that “cohabitation” between human women and “monkey tribes”—“by rape probably”—took place where human populations lived in close proximity to other apes. “In this way,” Bowles suggested, “the blood & nature of the monkey may have been introduced into that of mankind and in this way we may account for the existence of ‘Speaking Monkeys’ among us—and—the ‘Missing Link.’” And if interspecies sex was the mechanism by which the “missing link” arose, this hybrid human-monkey category’s ability to speak was, for Bowles, significant, as it allowed these creatures to move through human society unnoticed:

Is it not within our daily experience to meet men and women—so called—who are cruel, selfish, licentious and imitative, having all or a portion of these monkey attributes—and no other qualifications to distinguish them from the mon[k]ey tribe, except the power of speech. And how much does that say?— Simply that they communicate their wants to each other by means of a different set of articulate sounds from those used by their true progenitors, the monkey tribes:— thoughts they have none; of course.

For Bowles, connecting sex and language was a way to explain the similarities between human beings and great apes. The ideas that he laid out in his letter to Darwin seem to suggest that language was inherited, but unique to humans. Without “intermingling…their impure and animal blood” with our own species, no simians–hybrid or otherwise–could acquire complex language.

Whether or not language could be found in other animals was of the utmost importance in the late nineteenth century. It bore on the legitimacy of evolutionary theory, and on the idea of humankind’s privileged place in nature–the very privilege that the ideas contained in Descent of Man threatened to revoke. Darwin debated this point in his correspondence with several of the top experts in the study of languages, but he always put human language firmly on the same continuum as the instinctual calls of animals. “He who is fully convinced, as I am,” he wrote in reply to Friedrich Max Müller, a leading linguist of the day,

that man is descended from some lower animal, is almost forced to believe a priori that articulate language has been developed from inarticulate cries[.]

Perhaps some common ground can be found between Bowles and Darwin in their willingness to put human language in the same frame as the instinctual communications of animals, but for Darwin, the cross-species reproduction on which Bowles’s admittedly eccentric theory rested was simply impossible.

For his part, no sooner had he penned his ideas to Darwin than Bowles began to have second thoughts. In a short note written a day later, which accompanied his longer disquisition on “Speaking Monkeys,” Bowles expressed uncertainty over the ideas he had put forth to Darwin:

Now that the letter is written…I hesitated to send it, as altho’ I pass for a man of good common sense, I cant make up my mind whether what I have written is sense or nonsense.”

Whether it was, in fact, sense or nonsense, the search for the “missing link” would continue for years to come, drawing notice from both the fringes and the centres of scientific inquiry, as much a captivating and perturbing question for modern audiences as it was for Darwin’s contemporaries.

Sources and further reading:

Jeannette Eileen Jones. “Simians, Negroes, and the “Missing Link”: Evolutionary Discourses and Transatlantic Debates on “The Negro Question.”” In Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Edited by Jeannette Eileen Jones and Patrick B. Sharp. New York & London: Routledge, 2010.

Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth. “Primate Communication and Human Language: Continuities and Discontinuities.” In Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals. Edited by Peter M. Kappeler and Joan B. Silk. London & New York: Springer, 2010.

Paul du Chaillu. Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa; with accounts of the manners and customs of the people, and of the chase of the gorilla, the crocodile, leopard, elephant, hippopotamus, and other animals. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1861.

Hugo Rheinhold, "Ape with Skull", (Darwin Monkey)

A long-standing debate concerns whether humans are specialized for speech perception ; in the the second half of the nineteenth century, two of the primary figures in this debate were Charles Darwin and Friedrich Max Müller.

A distinguished scholar and one of the leading figures of Victorian cultural life, Müller stated that language was a “Rubicon” between man and brute. Müller specifically attacked the ideas Darwin had formulated about languages in the Descent of Man, where Darwin had rejected Müller’s ideas about Man’s special place in evolution. The difference of opinion led to a series of letters  between the two men of science.

The recent findings of an experiment published in the journal Current Biology could, however, prove to be further evidence that Darwin was right.

Some researchers argue that the capacity for language acquisition is demonstrated by the ability to understand synthetic speech, incomplete or distorted spoken words. Lisa Heimbauer and her colleagues Michael Beran and Michael Owren, from Georgia State University in Atlanta tested a chimpanzee, which had been raised by humans and spoken to as if she were human, to find out whether she too could recognise incomplete or distorted spoken words. The talented chimp, named Panzee, recognised degraded spoken words far more often than should have been the case by chance, providing evidence that our common ancestor would have had the ability to perceive speech.

So has the Rubicon been crossed?

The human-like qualities of great apes have always been a source of scientific and popular fascination, and no less in the Victorian period than in any other. Darwin himself, of course, marshalled similarities in physiology, behaviour and emotional expression between Homo sapiens and other simians over the course of his long career to support his views on evolution. This kind of evidence appeared in many of his publications, notably The Descent of Man and  The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  But were some parallels between human beings and other great apes too disquieting to use as scientific evidence?

Correspondence between Charles Darwin and Gaston de Saporta, a French paleobotanist, suggests that this may indeed be the case. In 1872, de Saporta wrote to Darwin after reading Descent of Man. In a long letter in which he both praised the work and expressed his opinion that Darwin may have argued for too close a common ancestry for man and monkey, de Saporta identified two key pieces of evidence which he believed showed most strongly the commonalities between humans and apes: dentition, which “seems to denote an exclusive link with the Monkeys of the old continent,” and “female menstruation and, as a corollary, the odour which makes women attractive to many monkeys.”

In his reply, Darwin graciously thanked de Saporta for “the trouble which you have taken in giving me your reflections on the origin of Man.” Promising to reflect on de Saporta’s comments, he nonetheless stood his ground:

I cannot at present give up my belief in the close relationship of Man, to the higher Simiate. I do not put much trust in any single character, even that of dentition; but I put the greatest faith in resemblances in many   parts of the whole organization, for I cannot believe that such resemblances can be due to any cause except close blood-relationship.

It’s no accident that Darwin did not acknowledge de Saporta’s point about menstruation or its corollary—the attractiveness of human women to other apes. Darwin’s difficulty negotiating this issue had much to do with norms of Victorian respectability, and what was or wasn’t appropriate for wider circulation beyond private correspondence or, for publication.

From Punch 24 May 1873

While the idea that human women could be the object of desire for male monkeys was not novel in the 1870s, it remained shocking. Contemporary accounts contained in works of natural history often verged on the sensational: George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the famed eighteenth-century French naturalist and author of  the sixteen volume Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749-88), noted evidence collected by Dutch explorers that orangutans “are passionate for women; who are never safe in passing in the forest, where they find themselves all of a sudden attacked and violated by these monkeys.” The Italian naturalist, Odoardo Beccari, recounted in Wanderings in the Great Forests of Borneo (1904), a memoir of his 1865 expedition to Indonesia, that the Dyak people of Borneo “tell many a tale about women being carried off by orang-utans” although he hesitated to accept their interpretation of the sexual motives of these apes:

No doubt the thing in itself is possible, for an adult male Mayas is certainly strong enough to carry off a woman. But that this actually happens, and happens, moreover, from sexual reasons, is an assertion which only deserves to be left as the subject of a romance to some Dyak novelist of the future.

It’s likely that Darwin would have agreed with Beccari’s view of the proper place for discussing cross-species sexual attraction. Certainly, the slightly salacious undertone to this kind of anecdote struck the wrong note for the conscientious Darwin, who was all too aware of how his own work could be interpreted. But the question of sexual attraction across species was, and remains, a problematic one for reasons that go beyond ideas about propriety. People remain both fascinated and disturbed by the idea: the continued appeal of the classic narrative of King Kong, which originally appeared in 1933, attests to powerfully troubling notion of attraction across species, and particularly, the vulnerability of human women to male apes.

Within the context of 19th-century debate over evolution, de Saporta’s view on Descent suggests that Darwin’s audience was willing to accept a common ancestry for human beings and other apes, in some cases only as long as this was not too close a descent. With something as intimate as sexual attraction, and all the emotional and affective attachments it called up for Victorians (as indeed it calls up for readers today), the issue raised by de Saporta hit uncomfortably close to home. In the realm of sexual attraction, it was perhaps best to allow the great apes as un-human a nature as was humanly possible.

Sources and further reading:

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray, 1871.

Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray, 1872.

George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du roy… Paris: L’Imprimerie royale. 1749-1788.

Odoardo Beccari, Wanderings in the Great Forests of Borneo: Travels and Researches of a Naturalist in Sarawak. Trans. Enrico H. Giglioli. London: A. Constable & co., 1904.

Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Carel van Schaik. Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004.

On May, 19, 1868, an African explorer and unsuccessful novelist, William Winwoode Reade (1838–1875) offered to help Darwin, and started a correspondence and, arguably, a collaboration, that would last until Reade’s death.

After a first 1861 tour of West Africa, in which he paid particular attention to arguments then current about the character of gorillas and the existence of cannibalism, Reade had been associated with the Anthropological Society, which at the time mostly represented those who disagreed with Darwin’s theory and advocated the separate creation of the human races, and opposed the monogenist views of the Ethnological Society.

Nonetheless, Reade contacted Charles Darwin in 1868 to offer his services: his second expedition to Africa was conceived, at least in part, as a scientific venture. Darwin drew on this information in the Descent of Man. In turn, describing himself as a “disciple” of Darwin, Reade claimed inspiration from the Origin of Species (“your book – The Origin- has had considerable influence on my mind. If I read it earlier in life it might have completely changed the course of it – Winwood Reade to Charles Darwin, 31 January 1871) and sought Darwin’s advice on the passages about the origin of language which he intended to publish in the Martyrdom of Man. Reade’s reputation as a writer rests not on his novels, nor on his travel writing, but on that single work, first published in 1872. The Martyrdom was quoted as an essential book by HG Wells, George Orwell, and even the fictional Sherlock Holmes. People are sometimes surprised to find from his correspondence that Darwin worked so collaboratively, but this is just one of many examples drawn from his international network. The Darwin and Human Nature Project will be making some of the most significant of Reade’s letters available online ahead of their publication in the print edition of the Correspondence – a fascinating glimpse into the construction of Descent and into the warring

beginnings of two sciences, ethnology and anthropology, as understood by an avowed Darwinian free-thinker.

For more about William Winwood Reade, see

Felix Driver, Geography Militant, Cultures of Exploration and Empire, (Blackwell, 2001)

Felix Driver, ‘Reade, William Winwood (1838–1875)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, May 2009.

Dr White, from the Darwin Correspondence Project,  is speaking on Darwin and the evolution of sympathy at a workshop in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.

The event will focus on the moral and religious debates surrounding evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century and the implications of evolutionary theory for modern ethics and psychological models of the self.

Workshop in the History and Philosophy of Biology

Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine
and Department of Philosophy

Divinity Library, King’s College
University of Aberdeen

Saturday, May 21st 10:00-17:30

Programme:
10:00
Robert J. Richards, (Chicago)
Darwin’s Principles of Divergence and Natural Selection: Why Fodor was Almost Right
11:30
Paul White (Cambridge)
Becoming an Animal: Darwin and the Evolution of Sympathy
14:00
Pietro Corsi (Oxford)
Idola Tribus: Lamarck, Politics and Religion in the Early Nineteenth Century
15:00
Kevin Brosnan (Cambridge)
Do the Evolutionary Origins of our Moral Beliefs Undermine Moral Knowledge?
16:30
Catherine Wilson (Aberdeen)
From Biological Selves to Psychological Selves
The workshop is free and open to all. Registration is required via a note to c.wilson@abdn.ac.uk

Are humans inherently generous and sympathetic to others?

Is there such a thing as an “instinct for truth” ?

How do people around the world express their emotions?

All these questions are discussed in Darwin’s correspondence. Darwin also writes about the continuity in moral behaviour between humans and animals, evoked  the religious implications of his theory, and the wider significance of human progress in light of the eventual extinction of life on earth …

We have selected 10 letters,  written between 1830 and 1871, to give you a glimpse  of Darwin’s wide-ranging reflections on human nature

Discover what Darwin thought about animal behavior, the evolution of aesthetic taste and moral sensibility, the origin of the human races, and the implications of evolution for human progress … and let us know what your favourite letter is!

How can an English bishop and a French évêque help Darwin explain his theories about species and natural selection?

In the middle of the nineteenth century, linguists were concerned with establishing genetic relationships between the English language and cognates (words that have a common etymological origin) in various other Indo-European languages.

Hensleigh Wedgwood , Emma Darwin’s brother and Charles’ cousin was a philologist, barrister and original member of the Philological Society, which had been created in 1842. In 1857, while Wedgwood was preparing a dictionary of English etymology, he wrote to Darwin suggesting that the common origin of the French “chef” and the English “head” or “????” and “bishop” illustrated the parallels between extinct and transitional forms in language and palaeontology.

Hensleigh’s cousin must have appreciated the comparison, for he used the case of ‘bishop’ and evêque’ in a chapter about the difficulties presented by his theory in Natural selection, in order to show how apparently dissimilar animals could be derived from a common source, just like etymology could show words to be : “to one who knew no other language, dead or living, besides French & English, how absurd would the assertion seem, that evêque & bishop had both certainly descended from a common source, & could still be connected by intermediate links, with the extinct word episcopus.”

Charles Darwin dropped the bishops, but used the analogy again in Origin, and eventually in the in the Descent of Man, where he wrote soberly that “the formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process are curiously the same.”

19th century phrenology chart

According to the phrenological doctrine, as elaborated by Franz Joseph Gall, the shape of the skull reflects the `organs’ or faculties of the brain.

Phrenology attained considerable popularity in England: by 1832 there were 29 phrenological societies and an influential journal edited by George Combe.

Yet the theory is almost never mentioned by Darwin, who did not discuss it,  nor mentioned in any of the two editions of the Descent of Man the experiments which by then had demonstrated that some movements hitherto attributed to free will could be produced by localised electrical simulation of the brain - (although a section on the brain was added to the second edition in 1874).

Darwin’s early doubts about one of the most popular Nineteenth-century theories of nature  can be found in the correspondence: In 1830, a young Charles wrote to his cousin and friend William Darwin Fox  “I forgot to mention, I dined with Sir J. Mackintosh & had some talk with him about Phrenology, & he has entirely battered down the very little belief of it that I picked up at Osmaston.”

Darwin had spent three weeks with Fox at Osmaston Hall, the Fox Family’s home, in the summer of 1829.  Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832) was a philosopher and historian who had studied medicine at Edinburgh; he and Josiah Wedgwood of Maer married two of the Allen sisters, so there was connection by marriage between the families. Darwin wrote about fist meeting Mackintosh during one of his visits to Maer in 1827 and later referred to him as `the best converser I ever listened to’ (The autobiography of Charles Darwin, p. 55)

Osmaston

Charles’ letter to Fox is both interesting in showing how a popular subject such as phrenology could be “picked up” or not, by young minds, but also how easily a conversation was enough to “batter down” any belief in it !

Thanks to Darwin’s correspondence, we can get an insight  into what  Darwin called “an uncommonly curious subject” and his very own “hobby-horse”.

The “uncommonly curious subject” was the expression of emotions in animals and humans; Darwin spent almost forty years thinking, taking notes and inquiring about it, gathering observations and anecdotes from the most remote places on earth as well as from his own domestic surroundings.

As early as the 1830s, Charles Darwin had begun to record and make observations on expressions, noting the behaviour of animals as well as humans. In another example of Victorian women involved in scientific observations and experiments, the soon-to-be-married Emma was also contributing to the project; months later, Darwin began recording the expressions and behaviour of his own children, starting with his “little animalcule of a son, William Erasmus by name”.

Over the following years, Darwin’s interest did not vanish, but he was being cautious about his research. In January 1860, he wrote to Charles Lyell: “On that subject I have collected a good many facts & speculated: but I do not suppose I shall ever publish”, although he had, only a few days earlier, proved his continuous interest by sending a first formal query about Fuegians and Patagonians to the missionary Thomas Bridges. In 1862, he informed the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker that: “Expression is one of my hobby-horses; I have got some funny notions on subject” ; a few years later, Darwin had resolved to send other circulars with questions similar to the 1862 questionnaire and was writing more confidently to William Bowman: “Expression in animals & men is at present a hobby of mine & I think I shall probably utilize my notes made during several years.”

In 1872, thirteen years after the Origin and Species and one year after the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin eventually published his work on the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  It was an immediate best-seller,  although the first edition was not exhausted during Darwin’s lifetime.  It remains, with the correspondence pertaining to it and as expressed by Paul Ekman in the  introduction to the third edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals “a most fascinating example of “Darwin’s attempts to obtain more systematic evidence on the question of universality”.

Discover  Darwin’s routine on a typical day for instance, or read his advice to his son William on how to be good. You can also enjoy anecdotes about snobbish parrots and other vain birds …

We look forward to bringing you new insights into Darwin’s work, life, and surroundings.