Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Science and the Studies of Man 65
collect insects and grubs, and to dig ground squirrels and moles out
of their burrows. As the monkeys acquired a taste for meat, they came
to relish the flesh of antelope and other large hoofed animals that
grazed on the plain, though these were hard to catch. They also soon
learned to watch out for lions and other beasts of prey with which
they had begun to compete for the meat. Life on the ground was as
dangerous as it was exciting. In the trees they had feared only falling
and the snake.
Although some of these monkeys may have found their way back to
the shrinking border of the forest, others stayed on the ground, where
they continued to run about on all fours, lifting stones, picking
berries, and nibbling on buds and shoots. They still do. They are the
baboons and Barbary apes. Others learned to stand on their hind
limbs and to walk or run erect when they needed to use their hands.
After a while, however, the climate changed once more and the forest
crept back over the plain. Some of the descendants of the monkeys
that had learned to walk upright went back to the forest, where they
became the ancestors of apes. Only those upright ones that stayed out
in the open grew to be men.
It cannot therefore be said that man is descended from apes, but
rather that apes are descended from ground-living primates. that
almost became men. There is sound evidence of this. We know that all
animals repeat, during their embryonic life, the general history of
their ancestors, from the form of a single-celled animal onward. The
human embryo at various stages has gill-slits and a tail. The embryo
of a chimpanzee at one stage has a foot resembling that of man
in that its great toe points forward for walking rather than backward
for grasping. Only as it approaches its birth size does its foot
acquire the appearance of a hand. At no stage of its development
does the human foot resemble that of an adult ape. The chimpanzee
embryo has hair on its head like that of a man, and human-style
eyebrows. l4
It is true that Mr. Coon is not unaware that the evidence on
which he bases his remarkably fanciful "reconstruction" is inadequate.
On page 43 he states that the Early and Middle Pleistocene
bones on which he bases his reconstruction are few and their exact
date is dubious. Nevertheless, he is confident about the recon-