Title: Darwin and the monkey
Authors: Daniel Turbón and Carlos Alberto Marmelada
Year: 2009
Editorial: Ediciones Sello Editorial, S.L.
Number of pages: 170
Only poetry could give the flagship Darwin travelled in the peculiar name of a hound. Aboard the Beagle, the father of evolution did not embark on any fox hunting, but to trace the origins of man and questioned the religious views of Creation, previously taken care of by scientists.
In this book of didactive reading, Turbón and Marmelada, anthropologist and philosopher respectively, present us with a young naturalist with a rooted religious vocation, who overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscapes he saw and travelled through, discovers in the privacy of the living a reality and an unheard logic. From the Neolithic to the industrial revolution, humans put an ever increasing distance between the wild and the civilized to the point of losing track and believing that men and animals live in different worlds; that even the most primitive native tribes were by origin, animals.
In the England that Darwin knew, the Patagonian natives of South America were exhibited in zoos as a wild curiosity.
In his voyage aboard the Beagle, it is explained in this book, that Darwin became startled; he began to utter the characteristic barking of the beagle who has found the trail. He did not know what or where, but something important left a clear trail of truth wherever he went. The naturalist was not given to making speeches or sell ideas. His track, his intuition, has as a vehicle his books in which, even, more than a theory, many questions are exposed and posed.
Turbón and Marmelada remind us that, with Darwin, several naturalists of his era, including Alfred R. Wallace and Thomas H. Huxley gave texture to the final idea that living things follow, in their reproduction, a selective process that introduces adaptive modifications to the environment in which it exists. Also, that the selection variables are common to almost all species, revealing a common origin.
Is it enough that apes resemble humans to infer that they are phylogenetically related? More than a yes, Darwin presents a Why not? For years, the naturalist carried out a comparative study of the behaviour habits and facial expressions of a baby orang-utan and those of his daughter and found endearing similarities.
Without Darwin mediating too much in this case, the notion that man and woman were the result of a series of adaptive selection between primates and not a specific design in the likeness of God began to take shape in the academies of science. This raised (and still does today) blisters between those who give the biblical myth of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark a category of scientific truth.
Even now, one hundred and fifty years after the publication of The Origin of species, many of the questions raised by Darwin remain unanswered. Since palaeontology, questions about missing links between one species and another have been resolved. However, there is still ground to be explored, leads to follow, intuitions to put right, traces.
A lovely quote from Leon Bloy, with which the authors preface the second part of the book, reads: "Man has places in his heart that do not yet exist and for them to exist pain enters through them."
Darwin felt that pain with the untimely death of his daughter. The dim light, the bright dawn of his discoveries got to know then a twilight shadow, a painful question. Life itself was reduced to a fleeting experience, ephemeral, with no more sense than that of chance and necessity. The doctrines did not make sense, his glove no longer fitted the insistent hand, his justice and moral lost all value.
For Wallace things were not going any better. He lost all his collections, including his travel notes, and ended up ruined. Huxley was cornered by the reactionaries of his time, who accused him of an abiding loyalty to Darwinism ... At a certain public debate, a bishop asked Sir Thomas if he would enjoy being the grandson of a monkey, to which Huxley replied with British phlegm that it was more fun to have an ape for a grandfather than an Anglican bishop.
Speaking of monkeys ... The book launch took place at the premises of Anís del Mono (Badalona), the company created by Vicente Bosch in 1872. On the label of their packaging of refined anise appears since then the humanized image of a primate resembling Darwin, who in one hand is holding a bottle and in the other a scroll where its written: "He is the best; science has said so and I don´t lie"… What a toast to the book, for Darwin and the other hounds of human existence.
