This is a wholly mistaken view, since both they and we have travelled evolutionary paths of the same length, albeit divergent. The confusion has reached the present day, leading many people to believe that apes such as chimpanzees, orangutans or gorillas are frustrated human designs, like species that got stuck halfway through their evolution- The Planet of the Apes -and did not progress any further. But both Huxley’s and Darwin’s works made it clear what the concept was: humans and other primates descended from a “common progenitor,” from “some lower form,” not the former from the latter. Thus, at the time, The Descent of Man was considered a late intervention in this field, when the problem of human evolution was already the subject of wide discussion. Frontispiece to Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. Illustration comparing the skeletons of various apes to that of man. Its implication in relation to humans, which in his previous volume Darwin had left aside with the suggestion that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history,” was nevertheless already more than evident. Huxley’s work was eight years ahead of Darwin’s, although in it the author did no more than apply to human beings the principles discovered earlier by his colleague, extending the idea that closed On The Origin of Species, according to which multiple forms of life had appeared from one or a few. Others had made this connection before the naturalist, with Thomas Henry Huxley ‘s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) being the first scientific book that dealt in depth with the problem of human evolution. But in Darwin’s century as well, the idea of kinship between humans and apes was already being discussed. A more or less rudimentary notion of the transmutation of some species into others-evolution-had existed at least since the Greek philosopher Anaximander, more than 500 years before Christ, and throughout the following centuries as a result of the observation of fossils. And this despite the fact that the proposal of evolutionary relationships between humans and other primates was not a novelty at the time. The idea of kinship between humans and apesīut if the foundational work of his theory caused an upheaval in science and in human thought in general, with The Descent of Man Darwin himself became the centre of debate and criticism. Moreover, many will be surprised to learn that the noun “evolution” is not mentioned even once in the first editions of On the Origin of Species -Darwin spoke simply of “variation.” At the very end of the work, the word with which the book closes is the verb “to evolve,” it’s only appearance. Only in later books did the naturalist analyse the birds of the Galapagos in detail, but more so the mockingbirds than the finches. It suffices to mention other ideas that are popularly associated with his work: Darwin’s famous finches did not inspire the theory developed in On The Origin of Species in fact, they are not even mentioned in it. For some reason, 150 years later, the work of the father of the theory of evolution has remained one of the most misunderstood in the history of science. In fact, not only did Darwin never propose that humans are descended from monkeys, but the very idea is erroneous. Science said so and I don’t lie.” A caricature of Charles Darwin as an ape published in The Hornet, a satirical magazine. It was followed by many others, but one year earlier in Spain, in 1870, the label of Anís del Mono (Monkey Anís), a liquor still consumed today, first appeared, portraying an ape with a human head-Darwin himself?-clutching a scroll of paper on which it reads: “It is the best. On March 22nd of that year, a famous cartoon appeared, showing the head of the scientist himself on the body of an ape. In 1871, the second of Darwin’s best-known works, The Descent of Man, was published, in which he applied to human evolution the principles previously described in On the Origin of Species. If we ask someone what Charles Darwin’s essential contribution to science was, they are likely to respond that he was the English naturalist who discovered that humans are descended from monkeys.
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