Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

336 THE CRANES OF CULTURE The Monkey's Uncle Meets the Meme 337
on preventing the idea from crossing over. The famous first confrontation
was the notorious debate in Oxford's Museum of Natural History in 1860,
only a few months after the initial publication of Origin, between "Soapy
Sam" Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's
bulldog." This is a tale told so often in so many variations that we might
count it a phylum of memes, not just a species. Here it was that the good
bishop made his famous rhetorical mistake, asking Huxley whether it was on
his grandfather's side or his grandmother's side that he was descended from
an ape. Tempers were running high in that meeting room; a woman had
fainted, and several of Darwin's supporters were almost beside themselves
with fury at the contemptuous misrepresentation of their hero's theory that
was being given, so it is understandable that eyewitnesses' stories diverge at
this point. In the best version—which in all likelihood has undergone some
significant design improvement over the retellings—Huxley replied that he
"was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be
ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the
truth" (R. Richards 1987, p. 4; see also pp. 549-51, and Desmond and Moore
1991, ch. 33).
And ever since, some members of Homo sapiens have been remarkably
thin-skinned about our ancestral relationship to the apes. When Jared Diamond
published The Third Chimpanzee in 1992, he drew his title from the
recently discovered fact that we human beings are actually more closely
related to the two species of chimpanzees {Pan troglodytes, the familiar
chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo ) than
those chimpanzees are to the other apes. We three species have a common
ancestor more recent than the common ancestor of the chimpanzee and the
gorilla, for instance, so we are all on one branch of the Tree of Life, with
gorillas and orangutans and everything else on other branches.
We are the third chimpanzee. Diamond cautiously lifted this fascinating
fact from the "philological" work on primate DNA by Sibley and Ahlquist
(1984 and later papers), and made it clear to his readers that theirs were a
somewhat controversial set of studies ( Diamond 1992, pp. 20, 371-72). He
was not cautious enough for one reviewer, however. Jonathan Marks, an
anthropologist at Yale, went into orbit in denunciation of Diamond—and
Sibley and Ahlquist, whose work, he declared, "needs to be treated like
nuclear waste: bury it safely and forget about it for a million years" (Marks
1993a, p. 61). Since 1988, Marks, whose own earlier investigations of primate
chromosomes had placed the chimpanzee marginally closer to the
gorilla than to us, has waged a startlingly vituperative campaign condemning
Sibley and Ahlquist, but this campaign has recently suffered a major setback.
The original findings of Sibley and Ahlquist have been roundly confirmed by
more sensitive methods of analysis (theirs was a relatively crude technique,
path-finding at the time, but subsequently superseded by
Family tree of the higher primates. Trace back each pair of modern higher primates
to the black dot connecting them. The numbers to the left then give the percentage
difference between the DNAs of those modern primates, while the numbers to the
right give the estimated number of millions of years ago since they last shared a
common ancestor. For example, the common and pygmy chimps differ in about 0.7
percent of the DNA and diverged around three million years ago; we differ in 1.6
percent of our DNA from either chimp and diverged from their common ancestor
around seven million years ago, and gorillas differ in about 2.3 percent of their DNA
from us or chimps and diverged from the common ancestor leading to us and the
two chimps around ten million years ago. [Diamond 1992]
FIGURE 12.1
more powerful techniques). Why, though, should it make any moral difference
whether we or the gorillas win the competition to be the closest
cousin of the chimpanzee? The apes are our closest kin in any case. But it
matters mightily to Marks, apparently, whose desire to discredit Sibley and
Ahlquist has driven him right out of bounds. His most recent attack on them,
in a review of some other books in American Scientist ( Marks 1993b), drew
a chorus of condemnation from his fellow scientists, and a remarkable apology
from the editors of that magazine: "Although reviewers' opinions are
their own and not the magazine's, the editors do set standards that we deeply
regret were not maintained in the review in question" (Sept.-Oct.