Of Apes and Men

If man was “created from animals,” as Charles Darwin wrote in one of his notebooks, from what animals was he created?  In The Descent of Man, Darwin agreed with Carl Linnaeus in classifying humans together with monkeys and apes as belonging to the Primate Order (the “prime” or top-ranked animals) based mostly on anatomical similarities. Within that Primate Order, Darwin assigned humans to a suborder including the anthropomorphous (humanlike) apes—chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and gibbons. And yet Darwin thought man was uniquely set apart from and above the apes through “the great development of the brain in man” that gave him “his god-like intellect.” Here Darwin echoed what Linnaeus had said about human uniqueness: “Man, the last and best of created works, formed after the image of his Maker, endowed with a portion of intellectual divinity, the governor and subjugator of all other beings.”