Gowan Dawson, Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024) 392 pp. £30.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-300-27062-4
Monkey to Man is Gowan Dawson’s study of the 1860-1979 emergence of the ‘March of Progress’ image: the well-worn notion of evolutionary development as an orderly left-to-right ascent. One finding: it was D.H. Lawrence who coined the phrase, mockingly (224). It is cleverly written and just in the first section alone I jotted down such words as ‘animadversions’, ‘ekphrasis’, and ‘apathetic petulance’. The pictures shown are also excellent, either supporting or undermining the March of Progress. Chapter Three was my favourite, featuring not simply a March of Progress but also a March of Death – with the necroegalitarian implication that everyone – from ‘popes and emperors to the lowest mendicants’ – becomes equal at the end of our journey (105). The recurring feud is Monkey to Man’s favored methodological strategy, with such disputes forcing antagonists to articulate tacit assumptions and commit them to writing. Dawson’s considerable archival research has turned up numerous debates, between T. H. Huxley and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, between Henry Fairfield Osborn and William King Gregory, and between Elwyn LaVerne Simons and Louis Leakey. Such gossip is delightful, but it did lead to me getting lost in the detail while also noting some key omissions.
First, Monkey to Man seems entirely committed to contingency as historical cause. Contingency is invoked via Stephen Jay Gould (8-9), who in his 1989 Wonderful Life criticized the March of Progress, regarding it as a dangerous myth. Readers are doubtless familiar with the book’s argument: alluding to the Frank Capra film, Gould stated that if one rewound the tape of evolution, things could have turned out very differently. This counterfactual was demonstrated by the diverse fossils of Canada’s Burgess Shale, produced by the Cambrian explosion; only a few survived, with many extraordinary body plans being extinguished in a mass extinction. Yet Monkey to Man leaves unmentioned a later rejoinder by Simon Conway Morris, the starring palaeontologist of Wonderful Life. Conway Morris argued in his 2003 Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe against complete evolutionary contingency. That is, there are structural pathways that channel development toward certain forms (eyes, for instance, keep re-evolving). Embarrassingly for Gould, only two years after Wonderful Life appeared, one of the key organisms (Hallucigenia) he cited to demonstrate life’s utter contingency was shown to be mistakenly reconstructed upside-down; the new reconstruction seems to have been far closer to phyla that did survive the mass extinction that ended the Cambrian explosion. In short, if one rewinds the tape of life the same forms and properties tend to keep re-appearing.
I belabour this episode because of its historiographic implications: perhaps there are historical causes other than contingent ones. Monkey to Man aspires to be a ‘finely textured account of artistic production’ (16), asserting that ‘there are also moments of contingency where the historical tape [of the image] might have run very differently’ (15) – in other words, there might have been a chance for depictions of evolution to have been different, had only some small detail changed. But the production of these images is surely driven by much larger forces too. I often wonder if the Latin and Greek origins of Western European languages explain the assumption that the March of Progress moves left to right – and that if history’s tape was rewound and evolution was instead discovered somewhere in the Islamic:Arabic world, the March would move from right to left, as one reads Arabic and Farsi. Icons tend to be created in forms that audiences can immediately understand, and by extension it’s possible that some images are more popular than others because they are more easily understood by local audiences.
The role played by audiences brings me to the second curious silence in Monkey to Man. A key finding of the past thirty years of history of science scholarship is that audiences often take very different meanings from a text or theory than intended by its author, so in reading this book I often wondered how audiences shaped the images that coalesced into the March of Progress. To borrow a metaphor from Georges Dumézil, images passed from person to person gradually have their rough edges smoothed out. We know that as images and concepts are conventionalized and become exemplary, they are frequently simplified or oversimplified. They come to harden in forms that may even horrify the author – Thomas Kuhn had a lot to say about this in his later years. To be sure, the book does consider creators’ imagined audience reactions, with W.K. Gregory saying he didn’t want to ‘jam scientific knowledge down people’s throats’ but ‘swallow it without knowing it, by approaching them through the lines of thought that they are familiar with’ (191). Gregory’s appeal to familiarity implies that the images adopted must not be too strange or counter-intuitive to audiences; and it doesn’t hurt one’s popularity to adopt images that appeal to an audience’s sentiments. Images that emphasize death, or our kinship with animals, may not appeal to the amour-propre of most audience members. This must especially be the case if the creator of the images needs to court audiences for their financial survival.
But I’m being unfair by pointing out things I wished had been in the book. The historical research of Monkey to Man is excellent, and Dawson’s scholarship is impeccable. We learn that the Huxley sequence of hominid skeletons appearing in the 1863 Man’s Place in Nature became ‘sacred’—despite the human skeleton being taken from an executed criminal – by repeatedly being shown in Haeckel’s popular Anthropogenie. The use of this sequence was unauthorized; this was Haeckel, after all (121-123). Queen Truganini, shown in her cultural specificity in an 1866 portrait, had this context erased as her image was placed into a 1927 moralizing and racist sequence in which she appeared sequentially earlier than a fictitious and white-skinned ‘Roman athlete’ who was supposed to have lived 1600 years before her (205-209). Despite reservations, Rudolph Zallinger’s 1965 ‘Road to Homo Sapiens’ became linearly progressive because of changes of proportion to images that made the later humans larger than the other primates in the sequence (258-264).
Perhaps the book’s working definition of ‘iconic’ – described as when an image is ‘transgressing the parameters of its initial making, function, context and meaning’ (6) – may have been so broad as to be unhelpful. For an alternative we might turn to Bruno Latour’s 1986’s ‘Visualization and Cognition,’ which suggested that iconicity has its price: a flattening of detail, a simplification of meaning, sometimes a distortion of intent. But these are embraced because icons (along with words, numbers, and maps) help our limited minds grasp overwhelming detail. They do so by flattening it. Similarly, for greater clarity on people’s insistence on linearity and progress we might think about emplotment. The late William Clark, in his brilliant 1995 essay ‘Narratology and the History of Science,’ proposed a four-fold schema for such narratives: Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, and Satire. Using this schema, one could imagine four different Marches. Huxley’s March of Death might be read as a Comedy – not because it is humorous, but because everyone ends up in the same place. Osborn’s would be a Romance, albeit a racist tale of ascent. The Christian moralists’ version, exemplified in one plate depicting a March of Decline after Adam’s expulsion from Eden (197; Eve is not depicted) is clearly a Tragedy. What, then, of Satire? We might move from tales about Marches into stories about how Marches are created: Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions, with its cheeky feminist subversions, could belong here. If I am correct, perhaps we might describe various Marches more generally as ‘emplotted icon sequences’. A more elegant phrase awaits its future D.H. Lawrence.
James Elwick, York University
