The Chimpanzee's place in the Chain

When Linnaeus was attempting to organize "the Creation," he gave the chimpanzee the binomial Homo troglodytes. Since Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a "pigmie" (a juvenile chimpanzee [see Gould's essay "To Show An Ape" in The Flamingo's Smile]), the close resemblance between apes and humans has been recognized, even if a recognition of our actual evolutionary relationship has been harder won.

Sometimes Tyson's landmark work is heralded as a true understanding of the relationship between humans and apes, but in fact it was primarily an attempt to weld on a "missing link" in the Great Chain of Being. All organisms could be ranked from lowest to highest (man) and beyond (angels), but there seemed to be species missing that would serve as intermediates between groups. Species did not evolve and each had their station in the natural world as prescribed by the Almighty, but it was still suspected that the Chain would form something of a continuous gradation of one form to another if it was all revealed. Being that the concept of extinction did not become established until the close of the 18th century, it could even be supposed that the missing organisms would yet be found in some other region of the world.

Tyson's juvenile chimpanzee seemed to fit the bill for a missing link. Sick from an infected wound the chimpanzee sustained on the trip from Angola, Tyson thought that it really walked upright most of the time and only knuckle-walked in its degraded state. Tyson played up other human aspects of the chimpanzee, as well, but ultimately decided that it was close to humans than other "apes" (which essentially was any large primate known at the time).

It is interesting, albeit somewhat frustrating, that the close resemblance of humans and chimpanzees had been noted long before Darwin published On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man. I guess it's one thing to note a resemblance to fill in a spot of missing knowledge about God's ordered creation and quite another to say that it is truly a family resemblance that we share with apes. Long before there was a record of fossil hominids or genetic studies, the similarities between humans and primates could not be ignored, and some have expended copious amounts of time & energy trying to obscure that reality. Still, uncomfortable as it may be, our kinship with the living apes can't be denied. Perhaps Konrad Lorenz said it best when he wrote;

An inexorable law of perception prevents us from seeing in the ape, particularly in the chimpanzee, an animal like other animals, and makes us see in its face the human physiognomy. From this point of view, measured by human standards, the chimpanzee of course appears as something horrible, a diabolical caricature of ourselves. ...he is irresistibly funny and at the same time as common, as vulgar as no other animal but a debased human being can ever be.