A particularly interesting line of fundamentalist Christian argument against evolution is that of "devilution." There was more of a tendency for life (particularly humanity) to degenerate rather than progress upwards. Where the argument originated among creationists, I have yet to discover, but during the beginning of the 20th century some considered it more reasonable that apes were degenerate humans than humans derived apes. This is not to say that they actually believed this, but that they directly tied evolution to causing "backsliding" and moral decay, a more vivid version of the "If we believe we are animals we will act like animals" argument. William Jennings Bryan used this idea in his famous "Prince of Peace" speech of 1904;
If a man links himself in generations with the monkey, it then becomes an important question whether he is going toward him or coming from him -- and I have seen them going in both directions. I do not know of any argument that can be used to prove that man is an improved monkey that may not be used just as well to prove that the monkey is a degenerate man, and the latter theory is more plausible than the former.
The linking of "man and monkey," Bryan argued, was based entirely on the physical level, generally ignoring the mind and acting as if the soul did not exist. Given that the soul was the "highest third" of any individual human, scientists were using physical criteria to undermine what Bryan saw as the unique spirituality of humans. While too absurd to be a real premise, this made our nearest living relatives like humans fallen into a dreadful state rather than reaching upwards towards humanity (which was the more popular narrative among scientists).
In some cases, "devilution" was seen as a regular consequence of the balance of things. It was part of the larger dichotomy between good and evil and the ability to choose to do one over the other prevalent in Christian writings. In Fundamentals for Daily Living (1921), for instance, there is this passage;
We can trace in the development of human society the mind and purpose of that Spiritual Power, in obedience to whom men have fashioned their lives and done their work. Of course, human civilization has had its ups and downs; its leaps forward and back; its evolution and its "devilution." But to all except the skeptics and the pessimists, the world has been moving forward to a better day, out of darkness into light, out of cruelty into unselfishness, out of despair into hope.
This more positive tone was in stark contrast to other writings, that emphasized the "fallen nature" of humanity. Such a pessimistic statement can be found in the polemical Notes on Ingersoll (1883). The book features a curious comment and reply format, with tidbits by the agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll being teased apart and shouted down by the Catholic priest L.A. Lambert. The relevant passage states;
INGERSOLL -- " Will you tell me why God failed to give the Bible to the whole world ?"
COMMENT -- God did not fail to give his revelation to the whole world. In the beginning, he revealed himself and his will to mankind, who afterwards to a great extent forgot that revelation. Man began on this earth with a true knowledge of the true God, but subsequently fell into idolatry. The wise sayings and moral precepts of the philosophers in the remoter ages were but the echoes of that original divine revelation. The nearer we approach to the origin of the human race the purer we find both doctrine and morals. This has been demonstrated by Thebaud in his remarkable work on Gentilism.
God then gave mankind originally a revelation, but man in the course of time failed to keep it in his memory, and fell into ignorance, idolatry and barbarism. He became a victim, not of evolution, but of devilution.
Degeneracy was the prevailing trend, and this allowed primates to be seen as our potential fate should we fail to heed the Bible. I have not seen this point explicitly stated as yet, but it appears to have been a potential implication of tying them to the "devilution" argument. Primates were living lessons to keep us clinging to our Bibles; that was the Creator's purpose for them.
Even if this were not the case or a subsidiary point (which is appears to have been), emphasizing "devilution" retained the initial divine plan God had for humanity. We were made perfect, the argument went, but we have destroyed ourselves by disobeying God. This was driven home in a 1903 article that appeared in The Homiletic Review. Called "Evolution or Devilution, Which?" the article regarded any "non-Christian nations" as degenerate and stated;
History and archeology, if they tench anything, teach that human nature, if left to itself, will deteriorate or grow from bad to worse by the process of that law which, viewed from the story of the fall, may be termed Devilution. ... Retrogression and not progress has been the law in all countries not influenced directly or indirectly by the gospel of the Crucified. The revelations of the excavator's pick confirm the doctrines of the "fall " and "total depravity." The hope of humanity is centered in the "divine Redeemer."
The term "devilution" has generally slipped from anything but satire at this point, but the same concerns and fears remain among fundamentalist Christians. Not only do some fundamentalists believe that we have an inherent propensity to do evil, but acknowledging our evolutionary past makes this worse. If we could just tell ourselves that we are the descendants of a pile of dust and a rib less than 10,000 years old, then we would be back on the right track.
What I am more interested in, however, is the role of primates in these arguments and how society viewed them in general. Apes, in particular, have been recognized as being near us in at least appearance (if not kinship) for over 300 years, but through time our species has employed different arguments to keep them just out of our family tree (be it through appeals to religious authority or modern debates over culture and language). (This may vary in non-Western cultures. I have to do some more research, but I have heard some suggestions that the gibbon was much more venerated in the East than apes were in the West.) The best way I can think to describe it (at the moment, anyway) is a sort of attraction to ugliness. People have often been repulsed by primates, yet we are fascinated by them, and their status as a warning to the faithful is something I would like to find out more about.
[Image from The Encyclopedia Brittanica (1911), "Primates"]
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The idea that things can de-volve is derived from "the Fall", Adam & Eve being thrown from the garden of Eden and made to toil in agriculture to feed themselves. Without the guiding hand of the creator, things just tend to fall apart, i.e., entropy sort of takes over. This argument was used to counter the oft observed evolution via natural selection. This idea also has elements of thinking evolution is guided or directed toward a purpose (clearly being the organisms such as ourselves)and must be progressive. When the term was actually first used I do not know, but this was a common theme among so-called "scientific" creationists 30 years ago.
There is some discussion of the history of apes being described as degenerate humans in Hector Avalos's Fighting Words (2005). It's a habit which goes back quite a ways.
Thanks, Blake. It has been duly added to my wish list.
I know there was some discussion of it in the book Strange Creations, too. I don't have it handy at the moment, though, so I just tried to dig up what I could with "devilution" on google books.
shouldn't it be "devolution" rather than "devilution"? the former retains the original root.
IDers still make this argument, only now they call it "frontloading." The claim is that since there is no such thing as a positive mutation, all the blueprints for later species were contained in the first life form, which subsequently devolved into various pieces and parts which are all inferior reflections of their originator. Don't ask to see this perfect genetic blueprint in any existent organism, of course, since it has long been "lost" and fragmented beyond recognition.
Like Adam and Eve, god's creation was perfect in the beginning before sin and entropy ruined everything.
Others are correct to note the connection with The Fall in Genesis. There are a number of variations connected deeply to the Adam and Eve notion. For example, in Orthodox Judaism there is the notion of the "decline of the generations" in which each generation of Torah scholars is believed to be less intellectually powerful than the past.
In Charedi (ultra-orthodox) and some other Orthodox circles this is used as a justification for keeping certain traditions of past generations under the argument that people today lack the ability to understand the true basis for the traditions. This notion also gets wrapped up in old-fashioned nostalgia with predictable results. They are also fond of generalizing this to a general decline since Adam. I am not however aware of any Jewish sources that ever claimed that people devolved into apes if they were bad (although certain strands of Judaism do allow reincarnation into non-human animals as a for of punishment).
Found it!
Furthermore,
From Fighting Words (2005), pp. 309–10; the original contains footnotes to sources which I hesitate to reproduce here because ScienceBlogs doesn't like superscripts now and again.
Though Darwin made it perfectly plain that natural selection sorted features for "fitness", not "better-ness", and that a turtle with a long neck is "fitter" for an island where the food is tall shrubs, while a turtle with a short neck is "fitter" for island where the food is moss, the Victorian public could not get its head around this concept, and invariably confused "fitness" with "superiority" --- in their world invariably conflated with aristocracy and conquest. This remains the fundamental confusion in the public's mind, today, though some of the class aspects of it have faded. It is further confused by modern scientist's constant discussions of "complexity". The sorting process of natural selection is bound to result in some features being snazzier, more complex in structure than others... but the bargain-basement eyes of arthropods, the mid-price-range eyes of humans, and the deluxe models of hawks and eagles are all equally "fit" for their respective owners. An arthropod with an eagle's eyes would be selected out of existence. Scientists don't quite get the fact that when the public hears the word "complexity" they interpret it as "superiority" in the same way that the Victorians interpreted "fitness" as "superiority". It's this kind of confusion that has to be cleared up with students, when they are first introduced to the idea of evolution.
Among historians and social scientists, even sloppier uses of the word "complexity", "fitness", and "evolution" have created long-standing theoretical muddles.
It all makes me think that Rhetoric --- the art of paying attention to what you are saying and how to say it --- should be brought back to the center of education.
I think the idea that society is spiralling downwards from a past golden age might have roots deeper than something learned from the Genesis story. I recently read Gulliver's Travels with scholarly notes from the editor. The notes discuss how this is a common theme in ancient Greek and Roman satires (with Sparta often held up as representative of the uncorrupted past). These ought to be independent from Jewish scripture.