Posted: Aug 27, 2016 3:04 pm
Calilasseia wrote:Indeed, with respect to the above Zoon, no less a person than Linnaeus wrote a letter in 1747, to fellow taxonomist Johann Georg Gmelin, in which he stated that the anatomical evidence alone warranted placing humans and chimpanzees in the same Genus.
Yes, I hadn't realised Linnaeus was clear about the similarities so early. He did have to worry about theologians, as shown in his letter quoted here:
Wikipedia wrote:Linnaeus classified humans among the primates (as they were later called) beginning with the first edition of Systema Naturae. During his time at Hartekamp, he had the opportunity to examine several monkeys and noted similarities between them and man.[86]:173–174 He pointed out both species basically have the same anatomy; except for speech, he found no other differences.[156][note 5] Thus he placed man and monkeys under the same category, Anthropomorpha, meaning "manlike."[157] This classification received criticism from other biologists such as Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, Jacob Theodor Klein and Johann Georg Gmelin on the ground that it is illogical to describe a human as 'like a man'.[158] In a letter to Gmelin from 1747, Linnaeus replied:[159][note 6]:
It does not please [you] that I've placed Man among the Anthropomorpha, perhaps because of the term 'with human form',[note 7] but man learns to know himself. Let's not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name we apply. But I seek from you and from the whole world a generic difference between man and simian that [follows] from the principles of Natural History.[note 8] I absolutely know of none. If only someone might tell me a single one! If I would have called man a simian or vice versa, I would have brought together all the theologians against me. Perhaps I ought to have by virtue of the law of the discipline.
I did have in mind rather the "Great Hippocampus Question", when Richard Owen tried to show, after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, that humans have at least one structure in the brain, the hippocampus minor, which is not found in apes, and which might account for some god-given difference. He was eventually shown to be wrong, and that monkey and ape brains include the same structure, but the raging arguments over some years provided entertainment for the Victorians and useful publicity for evolution:
Wikipedia wrote:The Great Hippocampus Question was a 19th-century scientific controversy about the anatomy of apes and human uniqueness. The dispute between Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen became central to the scientific debate on human evolution that followed Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. The name comes from the title of a satire the Reverend Charles Kingsley wrote about the arguments, which in modified form appeared as "the great hippopotamus test" in Kingsley's book for children, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby. Together with other humorous skits on the topic, this helped to spread and popularise Darwin's ideas on evolution.
The key point that Owen asserted was that only humans had part of the brain then known as the hippocampus minor (now called the calcar avis), and that this gave us our unique abilities. But careful dissection showed that apes and monkeys also have a hippocampus minor.