Moses Never Encountered Another Primate
Posted on Feb 19, 2016 by Trevor in Religion, Science
In The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, distinguished primatologist Frans de Waal offers an interesting hypothesis about why some religious traditions struggle with the theory of evolution. I’ve copied a segment from the book below.
How humans related to the rest of nature is hardly the core of evolutionary theory, yet it constitutes the main stumbling block for religious detractors. One rarely hears objections to the evolution of plants, bacteria, insects, or other animals; it’s all about our own precious species.
To understand this obsession with human origins, keep in mind that the Judeo-Christian tradition arose with little or no awareness of other primates. Desert nomads knew only antelopes, snakes, camels, goats, and the like. No wonder that they saw a yawning gap between human and animal, and reserved the soul just for us. Their descendants were shocked to the core of their beliefs when, in 1835, the first live anthropoid apes went on display at the London Zoo. People were offended, unable to hide their disgust. Queen Victoria judged the apes “painfully and disagreeably human.”
