Monkey Business

A Preposterous Myth Continues

Sometimes new ideas take a while to catch on. In 1773, English writer Samuel Johnson and his younger sidekick and future biographer James Boswell toured the Hebrides, the Western Isles of Scotland. In a letter to a friend, Johnson reported:

We . . . dined at Lord Monboddo’s, the Scotch judge who has lately written a strange book about the origin of language, in which he traces monkeys up to men, and says in some countries the human species have tails like other beasts.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a Scottish judge and scholar, was considered quite eccentric, “touched in the head.” Boswell recorded in his Hebrides journal:

Dr Johnson said, “It is a pity to see Lord Monboddo publish such notions as he has done; a man of sense, and of so much elegant learning. There would be little in a fool doing it; we should only laugh; but when a wise man does it, we are sorry. Other people have strange notions; but they conceal them. If they have tails, they hide them.”

Nonetheless, Monboddo’s works, especially Of the Origin and Progress of Language,were read by many, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. By 1859, his grandson’s idea of man being a descendant of monkey-like creatures was no longer ridiculed as preposterous among the intellectual classes. Millions of years of small changes, Charles proposed, could give rise to new species.

By 1925, that idea had caught on. The trial of John Scopes was hyped by the national press and the American Civil Liberties Union into the Scopes Monkey Trial. The “trial of the century” pitted Darwinian evolution against the creation of man by God, “science” against the Bible and Christianity. Those who did not accept Darwin’s idea were ridiculed as bigots and bumpkins. The tables were thus turned: Question man’s descent from apes and you will be considered “touched in the head.”

Monkey Scripture

Lord Monboddo also had an idea about language. Boswell recorded that he and Johnson dined with several scholars in Edinburgh; at one point the conversation turned to primates:

We talked of the Ourang-Outang, and of Lord Monboddo’s thinking that he might be taught to speak. Dr Johnson treated this with ridicule. Mr Crosbie said, that Lord Monboddo believed the existence of everything possible; in short, that all which is in posse might be found in esse.

As an example of “anything is possible,” consider the infinite monkey theorem: a monkey typing randomly on a keyboard, given infinite time, could produce a work of Shakespeare. The argument has been put forward to defend evolution by blind, random forces: no monkey is aware of what he is typing, but it’s theoretically possible he could type out Hamlet by chance. Then again, time is not infinite, so given the history of the universe, this is not possible.

Of course, the monkey theorem could be blended with Darwinism to assert that, given enough time, clueless animals could evolve into playwrights. In 1955, two playwrights typed out Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized play about the Scopes trial which was made into a Hollywood movie in 1960. But that didn’t happen by chance, either.

Competing Tales

Realistically, some things will never happen. In light of recent discoveries that life is more information-rich than we ever imagined (and we are still learning), the likelihood that coded DNA instructions were typed into an executable script to create Man (or a playwright) by billions of random chemical keyboard strokes really is preposterous.

Sadly, the tale of “random” creation is still being told, while the “new” idea that Intelligent Design best explains the data about the world around us is routinely ridiculed among the intellectual classes.

We trust that this special issue of Salvo marking the 100th anniversary of the “Monkey Trial” will help set the record straight.