Harriet Ritvo - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Harriet Ritvo

Humans & humanists

“When I use a word,” says Humpty

Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, “it
means just what I choose it to mean–
neither more nor less.” Alice demurs on
several grounds, appealing ½rst to con-
trary popular consensus–“But ‘glory’
doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argu-
ment’”–and then to the essential limits
of language: “The question is . . . whether
you can make words mean so many dif-
ferent things.” Neither of Alice’s objec-
tions fazes Dumpty, who countertheo-
rizes that “the question is . . . which is to
be master,” then illustrates the practical
bene½ts of his approach with a brilliant
interpretation of “Jabberwocky,” a poem
whose vocabulary Alice had previously
found impenetrable.1 There is, of course,
much to be said on both sides of this de-
bate. Many people have, like Dumpty,
recognized the power of vocabulary and
made similar attempts to control de½-
nitional borders. If, again like Dumpty,
they have neglected to acknowledge
the alternative viewpoints represented
by Alice and her ilk, they have usually
found this easier said than done.

The term human has in recent years
been the site of such contestation and
struggle among humanist scholars,
whose self-categorization may seem to

beg such questions. Previously, although
humanism itself has often been contro-
versial, a fair amount of consensus exist-
ed among practitioners and critics about
its denotation. This consensus has been
notably durable. In the Oxford English
Dictionary (oed), the ½rst three senses
of human distinguish “mankind” from
animals, from “mere objects or events,”
and from “God or superhuman beings.”
All three of these senses emerged before
1600, and none has yet been labeled ob-
solete.2 The oed’s de½nition of humanist
is much more restricted, focusing on di-
visions among learned men, rather than
among orders of creation. Its senses re-
fer to the various subcategories of schol-
arship that humanists have chosen to ex-
plore; none of these senses has yet been
labeled obsolete either.3

In 1976, the cultural critic Raymond
Williams included humanity (as repre-
senting “a complex group of words, in-
cluding human, humane, humanism,
humanist, [and] humanitarian”) in
Keywords, his compendium of brief es-
says on common terms, the senses of
which had altered or splintered as a
result of cultural and political pressures
that emerged during and after World
War II. But a crude statistical calcula-
tion suggests that Williams did not con-
sider this word or group of words as

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among the most problematic or inter-
esting in his collection: he allotted it
only three pages. Words whose evolu-
tion he considered particularly compel-
ling or important–class, culture, democra-
cy, masses, nature, realism, socialist, and
structural–commanded, in comparison,
½ve pages or more. In his discussion,
Williams took the limits of the human
for granted, emphasizing instead the
shades of moral connotation that dis-
tinguish human from humane, and the
shades of intellectual connotation that
distinguish the specialties of some
“humanists” from those of others.4
Keywords included no entry for animal,
beast, or monster–or for machine, god,
or deity, for that matter–and no such
entries are planned for an updated ver-
sion of the book currently under prepa-
ration. These editorial decisions may
suggest that, in the view of many hu-
manists, the boundaries between hu-
manity and its abutting categories re-
main relatively unproblematic.5

Like the oedlexicographers, Wil-
liams chose most of the examples that
illustrate his de½nitions from the litera-
ture of humanism, which may explain
the narrowness of his disciplinary fo-
cus and his lack of attention to the un-
settled borders that have begun to pre-
occupy at least some humanists. (It is
not surprising to ½nd Williams follow-
ing the oed’s lead: it was his major pri-
mary source for Keywords.) But neither
blurry edges nor strenuous attempts to
clarify them are recent developments.
As Humpty Dumpty discovered, to his
cost, that he was not the only author
of his own story, humanists have never
been alone in their interest in the hu-
man. Certainly, they have never had
the last word in de½ning it.

Categories and boundaries have long

obsessed students of the natural world.

The organization of information about
animals, plants, and minerals into a co-
herent system was part of the core dis-
ciplinary, or protodisciplinary, agenda
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
naturalists. A taxonomic system was
necessary for the practical purposes of
retrieval and comparison, as knowledge
about the world and its contents grew
exponentially during the centuries of
European exploration and expansion.
More abstractly, especially in the wake
of Newton, taxonomy constituted a vi-
tal component of naturalists’ claim to
intellectual respectability and prestige.
Without system, they feared, natural
history would be “but a confused, un-
disciplined crowd of subjects,” and nat-
uralists “mere collectors of curiosities
and super½cial trifles . . . , objects of rid-
icule rather than respect.”6

Before any natural kind could be
assigned its place in a system, it had
to be described with suf½cient preci-
sion to establish clear criteria for inclu-
sion or exclusion. This was often prob-
lematic since, at the time, transporta-
tion was slow and uncertain, commu-
nication among specialists was dif½-
cult, and preservation techniques were
often ineffective. In addition, although
some organisms, like the giraffe, can
be easily differentiated from all others,
many plants and animals have relatives
close enough to undermine the distinc-
tion between similarity and sameness.
Extra study did not necessarily make
things clearer; indeed, intensi½ed ex-
amination of dubious cases often made
them seem more dif½cult to describe and
delimit. As Charles Darwin remarked
of the differentiation of species and va-
rieties, “[I]t is in the best-known coun-
tries that we ½nd the greatest number of
forms of doubtful value. . . . if any animal
or plant . . . closely attract [human] atten-
tion, varieties . . . will almost universally

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Harriet
Ritvo
on being
human

be found recorded.”7 Human beings ½t
both criteria. The territories where hu-
mans lived were inevitably very familiar
and well documented, and most people
found humans–themselves–to be the
most fascinating of the earth’s inhabi-
tants. Consequently, many naturalists
struggled to determine where their spe-
cies ½t in the natural order. One possi-
bility–the one implied by oedde½ni-
tions, as well as by the chain of being
that descended from antiquity–was
that humans occupied a position just
outside or on top of the natural order.8
But other possibilities existed, several
of which suggested greater integration.

As the gap between humans and oth-

er creatures diminished, boundary con-
fusion increased. Many naturalists fol-
lowed the lead of Linnaeus, the Swedish
taxonomist whose system of latinate bi-
nomials remains the foundation of bo-
tanical and zoological nomenclature.
He ½rst published his classi½cation of
the animal kingdom in Systema Naturae
in 1735; it was expanded and revised
through many subsequent editions, of
which the tenth, published in 1758, is
considered de½nitive. Unlike many of
his contemporaries, Linnaeus had no
doubt that people were a kind of ani-
mal, if an unusual kind. He embedded
humans ½rmly within his taxonomic
system, devising the primate order to
accommodate four genera: Homo, Sim-
ia (monkeys and apes), Lemur (prosim-
ians), and Vespertilio (bats). Linnaeus
did not, however, treat humans and
their ilk in quite the same way that he
treated these structurally parallel cate-
gories. Instead, he signaled human dis-
tinctiveness in the brief characteriza-
tions that accompanied his schematic
list of genera. For simians and prosimi-
ans he highlighted dentition; for bats,
wings. With regard to Homo he identi-

½ed no distinctive physical feature, but
merely commented, “nosce te ipsum”–
know thyself.9

Linnaeus’s terse description left many

questions unanswered, the most obvi-
ous of which was how to de½ne thyself.
At the next level of analysis, where he
described each genus in greater detail
and itemized its constituent species,
Linnaeus offered some very suggestive
answers. In his classi½cation, Homo was
not a monolithic taxon; it contained
two species, of which Homo sapiens, the
½rst and largest, was further subdivid-
ed into the conventional geographical
races (American, European, Asiatic,
and African), with additional catego-
ries for the wild children who occasion-
ally turned up (Ferus) and for still more
unusual kinds of people (Monstrosus).10
According to Linnaeus’s descriptions,
those in Homo differed suf½ciently in
their physical and temperamental qual-
ities to make it unlikely that the self-
knowledge of members of one group,
however comprehensive and accurate,
would automatically illuminate the na-
ture of the others. For example, Homo
Europaeus was “sanguineus,” while
Homo Afer was “phlegmaticus.” The
other species within the genus Homo
more severely challenged the limits
of empathetic insight. Linnaeus’s cor-
respondence and his lectures at Upp-
sala University contained repeated
suggestions that he found it dif½cult to
establish a ½rm dividing line between
humans and apes.11 Homo troglodytes
was not subdivided; its sole occupant
was the orangutan.12

The evidence offered by this place-

ment is ambiguous, however. The
orangutan was also known as Homo syl-
vestris, or, “the wild man of the woods”
(a translation from Malay, although
not of the Malay word for the orang-
utan), and, at a time when the unity

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of the human species was the subject of
vigorous debate, there was widespread
uncertainty about whether or not orang-
utans were human. In addition, natural-
ists had not yet clearly distinguished the
orangutan of Southeast Asia from the
chimpanzee of Africa, whose taxonom-
ic placement, therefore, generated simi-
lar (or identical) uncertainty. In 1699,
for example, the anatomist Edward
Tyson had published a treatise entitled
Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris. Or, the
Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of
a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man.13 (By “ape”
he meant baboon, and by “pygmie” he
meant chimpanzee.) The human status
of the quasi-mythical pygmies had, con-
versely, long been the subject of Europe-
an speculation. Even at the end of the
eighteenth century, naturalists could
claim that the “race of men of diminu-
tive stature,” or “supposed nation of
pygmies” described by the ancients,
was “nothing more than a species of
apes. . . that resemble us but very im-
perfectly.”14

With regard to the orangutan (or

chimpanzee), Linnaeus hedged his taxo-
nomic bets. On the one hand, he extend-
ed the human genus in the direction of
apes–or toward the dark side, to use his
own terminology: he described Homo
sapiens as H. diurnus, while Homo troglo-
dytes was H. nocturnus. On the other, he
reserved a place for them at the head of
the simians, in the species Simia satyrus
(the name of which evokes a more imag-
inative direction in which the boundary
of the human could be problematic).15
Linnaeus had good reason to equivocate.
Despite his iconic status as a systematiz-
er, in his own time as well as subsequent-
ly, his inclusive primate order was fre-
quently rejected. Not everyone, wheth-
er serious naturalist or casual observer
of nature, enjoyed being placed ½rmly
within the animal kingdom, even if at

the head of it; the closer juxtaposition
within the genus Homo was inevitably
even more troubling. According to the
British naturalist Thomas Pennant,
“[M]y vanity will not suffer me to rank
mankind with Apes, Monkies, Maucaucos,
and Bats”; a colleague further asserted,
“[W]e may perhaps be pardoned for the
repugnance we feel to place the monkey
at the head of the brute creation, and
thus to associate him . . . with man.”16
Some dissenters simply proposed
their own counter-taxonomies, which
implicitly posited a much wider separa-
tion. Thus, early in the nineteenth cen-
tury the anatomist William Lawrence
suggested that “the principles must be
incorrect, which lead to such an approx-
imation” between humans, apes, and
monkeys within the primate order; in-
stead, he argued that “the peculiar char-
acteristics of man appear to me so very
strong, that I not only deem him a dis-
tinct species, but also . . . a separate or-
der.”17 Naturalists who recognized this
exclusively human order normally des-
ignated it “Bimana,” which stressed
the erect posture and purpose-built
feet characteristic of people, in contrast
with the four-handed apes and mon-
keys who were segregated in the order
“Quadrumana.”18 As the author of one
mid-nineteenth-century guidebook to
the Mammalia enthusiastically put it,
“Man! Privileged in every other aspect,
is zoologically distinguished by possess-
ing hands on the anterior extremities
alone.”19 A contemporary more force-
fully asserted, “[M]inute examination
shows us that even these highest forms
of the brute creation are separated by
a vast interval from him to whom was
originally delegated the dominion over
them all.”20

Nevertheless, such assertions were
rearguard efforts and, at least among
specialists, Linnaeus’s primate order

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Harriet
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on being
human

ultimately triumphed. By the middle of
the nineteenth century, most zoologists
had accepted it, although some main-
tained the two-hand/four-hand division
at a lower level of taxonomic discrimina-
tion. Even Louis Agassiz, who emerged
as one of the most prominent opponents
of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natu-
ral selection, argued that “as man is re-
lated to animals by the plan of his struc-
ture, so these are related to him by the
character of those very faculties which
are so transcendent in man as to point
at ½rst to the necessity of disclaiming
for him completely any relationship
with the animal kingdom.” (He further
speculated that because the absence of
other animals from the afterlife would
involve a “lamentable loss,” they were
likely to share with people something
like a soul.)21 But even within Agassiz’s
generous embrace, similarity did not
imply identity. Like the animal com-
panions that he feared to miss in heav-
en, apes and monkeys remained out-
side the human taxon.

Among the general public, the possi-

bility that apes might actually be people
lingered in various ways. Illustrations in
books of popular natural history often
portrayed apes as particularly human in
both appearance and behavior, showing
them assuming erect posture, using hu-
man tools (frequently a walking stick),
and approximating human proportions
in the torso and limbs.22 Still more strik-
ingly, this visual tradition was not con-
½ned to the page or the canvas; it was
also constantly reenacted in the displays
of the chimpanzees and orangutans
that constituted popular components
of nineteenth-century zoos and menag-
eries. Show apes ate with table utensils,
sipped tea from cups, and slept under
blankets. One orangutan who lived in
London’s Exeter Change Menagerie

amused herself by carefully turning the
pages of an illustrated book. At the Re-
gent’s Park Zoo in London, a chimpan-
zee named Jenny regularly appeared
in a flannel nightgown and robe. Con-
sul, a young chimpanzee who lived in
Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoological Gar-
dens at the end of the nineteenth centu-
ry, greeted the public dressed in a jack-
et and straw hat, smoked cigarettes,
and drank his liquor from a glass.23 At
about the same time, the London Zoo
routinely dressed a chimp named Mike
to impersonate Captain Cuttle, a char-
acter from Dickens’s Dombey and Son.
Even apes with no public role to play
tended to behave in a distinctively hu-
man manner. For example, a chimpan-
zee acquired by the Earl Fitzwilliam in
1849 was reported to walk “perfectly
erect” and handle “everything like a
human being”; in addition, its food
was “choice, and wine a favorite bev-
erage.”24

Rumor persistently whispered that
these visual analogies might represent
more substantial and productive con-
nections. Thus one seventeenth-centu-
ry report featured a “poor miserable
fellow” who had copulated with a mon-
key, “not out of any evil intention . . . but
only to procreat a Monster, with which
he might win his bread.”25 At the end
of the eighteenth century, the surgeon
and naturalist Charles White reported
that orangutans “have been known to
carry off negro-boys, girls and even
women . . . as objects of brutal passion”;
more than sixty years later the Anthro-
pological Society republished Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach’s summary of
travelers’ accounts that “lascivious male
apes attack women.”26 White recorded
rumors “that women have had offspring
from such connection” and proposed
that “supposing it to be true, it would be
an object of inquiry, whether such off-

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spring would propagate, or prove to be
mules.”27 Blumenbach, more cautious,
asserted “that such a monstrous con-
nection has any where ever been fruit-
ful there is no well-established instance
to prove.”28 Addressing the same con-
cern, in his pioneering account of chim-
panzee anatomy, Edward Tyson had
gone out of his way to assure his read-
ers that “notwithstanding our Pygmie
does so much resemble a Man . . . yet by
no means do I look upon it as the Prod-
uct of a mixt generation.”29
Outside the community of experts,

claims could be less restrained, or more
enthusiastic. A Victorian impresario,
for example, advertised the merely hairy
Julia Pastrana as “a hybrid, wherein the
nature of woman predominates over
the ourang-outangs.”30 And there were
other ways of positing similarly con-
crete connections between people and
the non-human animals most nearly
allied to them by anatomy. Well into
the nineteenth century, physicians ex-
plained many kinds of birth defects as
the unfortunate consequences of what
was termed maternal imagination or im-
pression–that is, an expectant mother’s
fascination with an external object that
somehow influenced the development
of her unborn child. Where the object
was animate, the fascination could oc-
casion a kind of mental hybridization:
a child whose parentage involved more
than one species. Thus in 1867 the Lancet
attributed the dense fur covering an un-
fortunate girl’s back to the fact that her
mother had been frightened during
pregnancy by an organ grinder’s mon-
key.31 In addition, because the evolu-
tionary theories that gained currency
in the late Victorian period assumed the
existence of extinct forms intermediate
between humans and apes, at least in
the sense of having given rise to both

modern groups, the rhetoric of evolu-
tion could be deployed to suggest that
human-ape mixtures existed in the pres-
ent, as well as in the ancestral past. For
example, a Laotian girl named Krao was
exhibited in 1883 as “Darwin’s missing
link,” not only because she was unusu-
ally hairy, but because she allegedly pos-
sessed prehensile feet and could pout
like a chimpanzee.32

Even among scientists, the convic-
tion that apes were not people did not
exclude the possibility that some people
might be apes. Indeed, over the course
of the nineteenth century this possibil-
ity loomed increasingly large, as special-
ists focused more intensely on ways to
subdivide the human species. The dis-
criminations could be very ½ne. For ex-
ample, John Beddoe, the author of The
Races of Britain, deemed it possible to
distinguish between the appearance of
people who lived in Boston and those
who lived in Lincoln (towns separated
by approximately thirty miles), and fur-
ther speculated that some of the differ-
ences between the Saxon and the Celtic
components of the British population
could be explained by the persistence
of “Mongoloid” and African traces per-
sisting in the latter group.33 And the
stakes could be high, both intellectually
and politically. During the 1860s, the
nascent British anthropological commu-
nity was riven by a struggle between
so-called ethnologicals, generally evolu-
tionists and monogenists (believers in
the common descent of all human vari-
eties), and the anthropologicals, gener-
ally anti-Darwinians and polygenists
(believers in the independent origin of
human varieties).34 In the presidential
address that inaugurated the Anthropo-
logical Society of London in 1863, which
was billed as a consideration of “the sta-
tion to be assigned to [the Negro] in the
genus Homo,” James Hunt argued that

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Dædalus Summer 2009

Harriet
Ritvo
on being
human

“there is as good a reason for classifying
the Negro as a distinct species from the
European, as . . . for making the ass a dis-
tinct species from the zebra.” After a
series of disparaging characterizations,
Hunt concluded that “the Negro race
can only be humanised and civilised by
Europeans.”35

As displays of great apes suggested
their latent humanity, the anthropoid
qualities of derogated human groups
could be indicated concretely as well
as in words. Museums frequently exhib-
ited the remains of non-European hu-
mans in ways that underlined their dif-
ference from Europeans, or suggested
their greater af½nity with other animals.
In 1766, a traveling collection of “curios-
ities” grouped a “Negro Child” with a
“Monstrous Cat with 8 legs,” a “Chick-
en’s Foot with 6 Toes,” a sloth, and an
armadillo. A century later the Cam-
bridge University anatomical collection
listed separate entries for the “Tegumen-
tary System or Skin” of the “Human”
and the “Negro.”36 If twentieth-centu-
ry natural history museums included
displays of human artifacts, or diora-
mas showing human activity, they were
much more likely to feature people who
could be characterized as exotic or prim-
itive than people who wore business
suits and carried briefcases. The politi-
cal consequences of such explicit and
implicit taxonomic juxtapositions have
been demonstrated repeatedly, wheth-
er human groups are associated with fel-
low primates or, as in the rhetoric of the
Nazis, resurrected in the recent Rwan-
dan genocide, with insects whose simi-
larities are purely metaphorical.

Although it has never been dif½cult to

distinguish between people and cock-
roaches, human uniqueness has come
under increasing taxonomic challenge.
Beginning with the nineteenth-century

discovery of Neanderthal remains,37
paleoanthropologists have exhumed
and identi½ed species after species, so
that Homo sapiens is now surrounded
by a crowd of ghostly parents, grand-
parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins,
some of them only very recently extin-
guished. In this respect, if not in others,
humans are now more like the cat than
like the giraffe. Homo neanderthalensis
and Homo sapiens coexisted for millen-
nia in parts of Europe and southwest
Asia.38 Remains of small-bodied and
small-brained humans discovered on
the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004
have been classi½ed as a separate spe-
cies (Homo floresiensis) that lived there
until about 17,000 years ago.39

The phylogenetic relationship
between people and the other great
apes has also become better and better
documented, making any classi½cation
that groups chimpanzees, gorillas, and
orangutans together, while leaving hu-
mans in splendid isolation, primarily a
case of wishful thinking. Although the
½ne points of ape taxonomy are still
subject to debate, it has become clear
that orangutans, rather than humans,
are the outliers. In one recent formula-
tion, the family Hominidae contains
three subfamilies: Ponginae (orangu-
tans), Gorillinae (gorillas), and Homi-
ninae (chimpanzees, bonobos, and hu-
mans).40 And if the claim embedded
in the title of Jared Diamond’s book The
Third Chimpanzee still seems provocative,
a more generic version of it is de½nitely
ready for prime time.41 A publicity re-
lease for the Nova television program’s
episode “Ape Genius” begins, “Congrat-
ulations: You are an ape.”42 I have visit-
ed zoos that provide a mirror in which
visitors can admire one last specimen
as they leave the great ape house.

This increasing convergence has de-
stabilized the assumptions on which the

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dictionary de½nitions of human and
humanist have been based. If people are
apes, then they must understand and
justify their preeminence in novel ways,
or, if they are committed to traditional
understandings of human distinctive-
ness, they must at least ½nd new evi-
dence to support them. As evidence
of physical difference has become less
persuasive, evidence from the behav-
ioral, intellectual, or spiritual sphere
has gained prominence. Nineteenth-
century naturalists uneasy about the
human-ape connection frequently pos-
ited an alternative alliance. They rea-
soned that if non-primate animals re-
sembled humans more closely than
apes, then they would necessarily dis-
place apes from their awkward proxim-
ity. Such displacement required that
qualities other than physical resem-
blance be identi½ed as the most sig-
ni½cant for purposes of comparison.
Animal mental ability was de½ned as
different in kind from that of humans;
most highly esteemed were qualities
that produced good servants. This met-
ric was unlikely to privilege apes or
monkeys. In 1881, for example, George
J. Romanes, a close friend and colleague
of Darwin’s with a special interest in
animal behavior, celebrated the “high
intelligence” and “gregarious instincts”
of the dog, which, he claimed, gave it
a more “massive as well as more com-
plex” psychology than any member
of the monkey family.43 And since the
competing closeness so constructed
was clearly ½gurative, the whole ani-
mal creation was thereby implicitly re-
moved to a more comfortable distance.

Temperament, of course, is hard to pin

down; as with Linnaeus’s characteriza-
tion of human types, it is often in the eye
of the beholder. The more that we have
come to know about the dispositions of
chimpanzees and other primates, the

harder it has become to maintain a ½rm
separation. Many characteristics that
once seemed exclusively or at least dis-
tinctively human, including moral intu-
ition, oppressive patriarchy, internecine
strife, and cannibalism, turn out to be
more widely distributed.44 Intelligence
has proved a weak reed for similar rea-
sons. None of the intellectual barriers
erected to isolate people has proved re-
liably robust. In Sartor Resartus, Thomas
Carlyle chose “Tool-using Animal” as
a de½nition that emphasized human
uniqueness, noting that “Man is called
a Laughing Animal, but do not the apes
also laugh, or attempt to do it.”45 In the
wake of Jane Goodall’s pioneering ob-
servations of chimpanzees, tool creation
has been observed in several primate
species (and many kinds of animals are
capable of using found tools).46 The ob-
stacles to speech in other primates are
located in their vocal tracts rather than
in their brains.47 In any case, parrots can
talk, as can a few other kinds of birds;
some of them, like the recently deceased
Alex, arguably make sense.48 And it has
become clear that, with the aid of sign
language, computers, or other acces-
sories, apes and dolphins can breach
the ½nal barrier, that of symbolic com-
munication.49
The implications of these snowballing

recognitions are more than abstract or
theoretical. In the preface to The Great
Ape Project, the editors argue that the
“sphere of moral equality” to which we
all belong should be based not on reduc-
tive taxonomy–membership in the spe-
cies Homo sapiens–but on “the fact that
we are intelligent beings with a rich and
varied social and emotional life.” Since
these “are qualities that we share . . . with
our fellow great apes,” the boundary of
the sphere should be redrawn so that
they are included, too.50 Contributors

Humans &
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Dædalus Summer 2009

Harriet
Ritvo
on being
human

include scientists who study apes in the
wild, scientists who study apes in captiv-
ity, and specialists in language, philoso-
phy, and law, among other disciplines.
They all subscribe to the “Declaration
on Great Apes,” which speci½es that,
for human beings, chimpanzees, goril-
las, and orangutans, the right to life, the
protection of individual liberty, and the
prohibition of torture should all be en-
forceable by law.51

Since not all humans enjoy these le-
gal protections, it is not surprising that
apes remain outside the “sphere of mor-
al equality.” Some recent developments
in Europe suggest the possibility of fu-
ture change, especially the resolution
adopted in 2008 by a committee of the
Spanish parliament giving great apes
the rights formulated in The Great Ape
Project.52 But such change will certainly
be slow, and in any case most apes do
not live in Europe (at least not yet). Nor
do they live in the United States, where
the legal system, as well as the culture
at large, seems less sympathetic. A New

York Times commentator on the Span-
ish resolution pointed out the failings
of extremists on both sides, but came
down on the side of the apes: “Critics
object that recognizing rights for apes
would diminish human beings. But it
seems more likely that showing respect
for apes would elevate humans at the
same time.”53

These developments reflect the
evolution of an argument that has
been going on for centuries. In com-
parison, most humanists have just
begun to wonder about the limits and
limitations of the human. We might,
indeed, wonder whether the label “hu-
manist” has always carried a certain
amount of hubris (or at least tunnel
vision), as well as what it would take
to become “post-human.” Perhaps the
liberation of all the apes now held in
captivity (not to speak of all the other
animals)? As Humpty Dumpty might
have said, “There’s a nice knock-down
argument for you.”

ENDNOTES
1 Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], Through the Looking Glass, in The Annotated
Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (1865; New York: Bramhall House, 1960), 269–272.
2 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “human.”
3 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “humanist.”
4 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 11–13, 148–151.
5 Author’s personal communication with Jonathan Arac.
6 William Borlase, Natural History of Cornwall (Oxford: W. Jackson, 1768), viii; Richard
Pulteney, A General View of the Writings of Linnaeus (London: J. Mawman, 1805), 11.
7 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. Ernst Mayr (1859; Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1964), 50.
8 Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagina-
tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 23, 28–31.
9 Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturae: Regnum Animale (1758; London: British Museum,
1956), 18.
10 Ibid., 20–23.

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11 Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1999), 87–88.

Humans &
humanists

12 Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 24.
13 Edward Tyson, “Preface,” in Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris. Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie

compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man (London: Thomas Bennet, 1699).

14 An Historical Miscellany of the Curiosities and Rarities in Nature and Art . . . , vol. III (London:

Champante and Whitrow, ca. 1800), 288–289.

15 Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 25.
16 Thomas Pennant, History of Quadrupeds (London: B. and J. White, 1793), iv; William

Wood, Zoography; or the Beauties of Nature Displayed (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807).
17 William Lawrence, Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural His-
tory of Man; delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in the Years 1816, 1817, and 1818 (London:
R. Carlile, 1823), 127, 131.

18 See, for example, Richard Owen, “On the Anthropoid Apes and their relations to Man,”

Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 2 (1855): 41.

19 Charles Hamilton Smith, Introduction to the Mammalia (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, 1846), 93.
20 P. H. Gosse, Natural History: Mammalia (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowl-

edge, 1848), 3.

21 Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classi½cation, ed. Edward Lurie (1857; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1962), 75–76.

22 See, for example, the illustrations in Thomas Bewick’s popular A General History of Quad-

rupeds (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1790).

23 C. V. A. Peel, The Zoological Gardens of Europe: Their History and Chief Features (London:
F. E. Robinson, 1903), 205–206; “In Memory of Consul,” pamphlet in the Belle Vue col-
lection, Chetham’s Library, Manchester.

24 William Bingley, Animal Biography; or, Authentic Anecdotes of the lives, manners, and economy,
of the animal creation, arranged according to the system of Linnaeus, vol. I (London: 1803), 45–
50; Edward Jesse, Gleanings in Natural History, 2nd series (London: John Murray, 1834), 40;
William Broderip, Zoological Recreations (London: Henry Colburn, 1847), 250; “Importa-
tion of Another Specimen of the Chimpanzee,” Zoologist 7 (1849): 2379.

25 Quoted in Dudley Wilson, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the

Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1991), 56–67.

26 Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Veg-
etables; and from the Former to the Latter (London: C. Dilly, 1799), 34; Johann Friedrich Blu-
menbach, The Anthropological Treatises . . . , ed. and trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Long-
man, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green/The Anthropological Society, 1865), 73.

27 White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, 34.
28 Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises, 80–81.
29 Tyson, Orang-Outang, 2.
30 Jan Bondeson and A. E. W. Miles, “Julia Pastrana, the Nondescript: An Example of Con-
genital Generalized Hypertrichosis Terminalis with Gingival Hyperplasia,” American Jour-
nal of Medical Genetics 47 (1993): 199.

31 Lancet (1867).
32 Nature, May 12, 1882, cited in Martin Howard, Victorian Grotesque: An Illustrated Excursion
into Medical Curiosities, Freaks, and Abnormalities–Principally of the Victorian Age (London:
Jupiter Books, 1977), 56–57.

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Harriet
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33 John Beddoe, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (Bris-

tol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1885), 9, 11.

34 W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1991), 248–254; for the
subsequent evolution of this debate, see Douglas Lorimer, “Theoretical Racism in Late-
Victorian Anthropology, 1870–1900,” Victorian Studies 31 (1988): 405–430.

35 James Hunt, “On the Negro’s Place in Nature,” Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Soci-

ety of London 1 (1863–1864): 1, 51–52.

36 Catalogue of a Great Variety of Natural and Arti½cial Curiosities, Now Exhibiting at the Large
House, the Corner of Queen’s Row, facing the Road, at Pimlico (London, 1766), 4; G. M.
Humphrey, Analysis of the Physiological Series in the Gallery of the Museum of Comparative
Anatomy (Cambridge, 1866), 9.

37 See A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of

Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

38 Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know about Human Evolution

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 180–182, 224, 244–245.

39 Adam Brumm et al., “Early Stone Technology on Flores and Its Implications for Homo flo-

resiensis,” Nature 441 (2006): 624–628.

40 See, for example, the website for a physical anthropology class at Palomar College, a com-

munity college in California: http://anthro.palomar.edu/primate/prim_8.htm.

41 Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New

York: HarperCollins, 1992).

42 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/apegenius/human.html.
43 George J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 439.
44 See, for example, Frans De Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans
and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Richard
Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

45 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1836; London: J. M. Dent, 1908), 30.
46 Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 277–280.
47 Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, 55.
48 Irene Pepperberg, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Gray Parrots

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

49 Donald Grif½n, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2001), 228–251.

50 Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 1.

51 Ibid., 4–6.
52 Jeffrey Stinson, “Activists pursue basic legal rights for great apes; Spain ½rst to vote on

some freedoms,” usaToday, July 15, 2008.

53 Adam Cohen, “What’s Next in Law? The Unalienable Rights of Chimps?” The New York

Times, July 14, 2008.

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