Charles Darwin, with the cooperation of shipmates and a local network of landowners, merchants, and guides, made an important collection of fossil vertebrates from South America during the second expedition of HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836. Many of the particulars of Darwin’s fossil collecting have been confused or omitted in previous accounts of his voyage. The present account, drawing on several previously underutilized resources, adds interesting details to the story and corrects a few misconceptions. It also explores the nationalistic aspects of Darwin’s science – the network of expatriated Englishmen who helped him and their loyalist motives. Finally, it examines the study and description of Darwin’s fossils by Richard Owen (Fig. 4.1). A review of Owen’s results shows that, despite claims to the contrary, Darwin’s field identifications were remarkably good.

Darwin’s shipmates were not uniformly friendly to paleontology. His collection of vertebrate fossils attracted heaps of abuse, some good-natured, some hostile. He endured “sundry sneers about Seal & Whale bones” from the crew. Worse, First Lieutenant John C. Wickham, who was “always growling about [Darwin] bringing more dirt on board than any ten men,” referred to his deck cluttering specimens as “damned beastly devilment” (Barlow 1945, 103). And FitzRoy (1839, 107) called them “cargoes of apparent rubbish.” Even Darwin himself was plagued by doubts about the usefulness of his fossils. He confessed to his Cambridge mentor John Stevens Henslow that he was “not feeling quite sure of the value of such bones as I before sent you” (Barlow 1967, 81). In time, however, the fossil vertebrates would prove to be the most personally satisfying, as well as one of the most scientifically significant, collections Darwin made during the voyage.

On 8 May 1900, the English biologist William Bateson was on the way to the Royal Horticultural Society to read a paper on the topic “Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation” (Fig. 33.1). Several years later, his wife tells the story: “He had already prepared this paper, but in the train on his way to deliver it, he read Mendel’s actual paper on peas for the first time. As a lecturer he was always cautious, suggesting rather than affirming his own convictions. So ready was he however for the simple Mendelian ratios that he at once incorporated it into his lecture” (B. Bateson 1928, 73). Mendelism had arrived on the scene!

Mendelians and Biometricians

Bateson was one of a number of biological researchers who, in the 1880s, had started their careers as morphologists or embryologists, much interested in evolutionary questions (Ruse 1996). However, it was not long before he and his fellows realized that truly they were getting nowhere. Although, out in the American West, fabulous fossil finds were being made almost daily, overall the fossil record was not strong enough to support detailed investigations of life’s past. Closer to home, Haeckel’s biogenetic law was simply not sufficiently accurate or powerful to allow for reliable tracings of phylogeny. Morphology and embryology did not suffice. In Bateson’s own words: “Morphology was studied because it was the material believed to be most favourable for the elucidation of the problems of evolution, and we all thought that in embryology the quintessence of morphological truth was most palpably presented. Therefore every aspiring zoologist was an embryologist, and the one topic of professional conversation was evolution.” To no avail. “Discussion of evolution came to an end primarily because it was obvious that no progress was being made. Morphology having been explored in its minutest corners, we turned elsewhere” (B. Bateson 1928, 390). Bateson himself turned to the potential building blocks of change, producing a massive tome on the subject in the early 1890s (Materials for the Study of Variation).

Charles Darwin’s views on language were inseparable from his views on the evolution of humanity’s brain capabilities as well as on the origins of racial distinctions – topics that will form a significant share of this discussion. Our starting point, however, is Darwin’s fundamental theory of how language originated. It was universally acknowledged in Darwin’s day, as in our own, that language use was a key aspect of what it means to be uniquely human, and so Darwin was obliged to explain how language could have emerged via gradual and naturalistic means, as an essential part of human evolution. On this and related topics we find Darwin working with a few simple ideas that he held throughout his career, even though he elaborated those ideas in increasingly complex ways.

Exposition in Descent

Darwin’s main views on the origin of language appear in a ten-page section on “Language” found in chapter 2, on the “Mental Powers of Man,” of his book The Descent of Man (1871a, 1:53–62). The section begins with preliminary observations on how communication among higher animals often approximates language. There are also remarks about language’s hybrid nature: it is part instinct and part invention. Darwin was careful, however, to qualify his use of the latter term: “No philologist [i.e., linguist] now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; each has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps” (1:55). As to the specific means of origination, Darwin said: “I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries” (1:56). Here Darwin built on two standard eighteenth-century conjectures about the way early humans could have formulated their first words. Both theories involved vocal mimicry: the difference lay in what was said to be imitated. One emphasized sounds in nature such as animal cries; the other emphasized humans’ own spontaneous grunts, groans, and mating calls (Stam 1978). Darwin in essence combined these two perspectives.

Charles Robert Darwin, the fifth child (of six) and second son of Dr. Robert Darwin and his wife Susannah (formerly Wedgwood) of Shrewsbury (pronounced Shrowsberry), a town in the English Midlands next to the Welsh border, was born on 12 February 1809 (the same day as Abraham Lincoln across the Atlantic) (Fig. Preface.1). He was sent to one of England’s famous public (in reality private) schools and then at a young age was directed north, to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, to study medicine. After two years he realized that medicine was not for him, and so he moved south to Cambridge, to work for a degree and prepare for the life of a clergyman in the Church of England. He graduated in 1831.

Through connections he had made as a student, Darwin was offered the chance to join the British warship HMS Beagle, as it set off for South America to map the coastline (Plate I). The voyage took five years, eventually going all the way around the world, returning to England in 1836. By this time, all thoughts of a clerical life had vanished, and Darwin, supported by family money, settled into full-time work as a scientist. He became an evolutionist shortly after the Beagle voyage and discovered the mechanism for which he is famous, natural selection, in 1838. He married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood early in 1839 (Fig. Preface.2), and by that time, starting to show the signs of a still-unknown illness that plagued him for the rest of his life, he settled into the role of a somewhat reclusive invalid. The couple moved to a house in Kent and in all had ten children, seven of whom lived to maturity.

Just as a strong white light fragments into colorful beams through a prism, so Charles Darwin has various images throughout the world. He not only appears as a scientific sage, the founder of modern evolutionary biology; he also has wider cultural images. He can be a liberal or a conservative; an abolitionist or a racist; a moralist or a devil’s chaplain (Kjærgaard 2010, 105–22). His banner can be waved by socialists for mutual aid, as well as by capitalists for jungle rule. Finally, and inevitably, he was a Victorian gentleman. These different, sometimes contradictory images show diverse appropriations of Darwin in the various contexts in which he has been encountered. My aim in this essay is to investigate the Chinese encounter with Darwin and the appropriation of his theories in changing political and social contexts.

The image of Darwin in the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, was clearly embodied in the “Meeting in Commemoration of Great Figures of World Culture” held on 27 May 1959 at Beijing to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Darwin and the 200th anniversary of the birth of – amazingly – Robert Burns, the plowman poet from Scotland. What a combination, a gentlemanly capitalist and a spokesman of the proletariat! Bing Zhi, the president of the Zoological Society of China, lectured on “A Century of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species,” and Zheng Zuoxin, the secretary-general of the Zoological Society of China, delivered an address “In Commemoration of the Great Naturalist: Charles Darwin.” According to their address, Darwin was first of all a “great materialistic scientist” who was buried in Westminster Abbey with Isaac Newton, another “great materialistic scientist” (for if Newton can be counted a materialist, why not Darwin?); Darwin was also a scientist who “broke through the shackle of religion,” and his Origin “sets forth a new outlook on the universe, which overthrows the superstitious allegation that God is the creator.” One reason we should pay homage to Charles Darwin is “his resolute endeavor in overthrowing the conservative and reactionary forces.”

What kinds of things fall within the scope of evolutionary theory? One view holds that evolutionary theory concerns how populations of biological entities (such as genes, organisms, and species) change over successive generations. Another view maintains that evolutionary theory deals with how populations of any kind change over successive generations. This latter view is implicit in the vast literature on cultural evolution, a literature that addresses the evolution of such diverse things as religious beliefs, scientific theories, social norms, vocabulary, technologies, agricultural techniques, and corporate practices. Most generally, “cultural evolution” refers to the various ways that an evolutionary perspective may be applied to the study of culture and society.

As the term “evolution” has acquired various meanings, the term “cultural evolution” is also employed in several ways. For nineteenth-century thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan (Fig. 53.1), “evolution” was synonymous with “progress” or “development.” These thinkers posited natural laws of cultural evolution whereby human societies all pass through the same sequence of developmental stages, from primitive to civilized. Their theories of cultural evolution bear little connection to evolution as Darwin understood it, and they have long been discredited.

Charles Darwin was born into a world in which taxonomy was already the established scientific language for expressing the diversity of life. In Europe and its colonies around the world, a growing community of museum workers, wealthy collectors, and avid hobbyists named and classified kinds of plants and animals numbering in the tens of thousands, a number that was increasing at a dizzying rate (Farber 2000). As a boy, Darwin absorbed samples of this community’s output, using taxonomists’ names for flowers in his father’s garden and for birds shot for sport; in his university years, he began to interact with taxonomists. Years later, he recollected those carefree days:

Childish though Darwin’s collecting hobby seemed to him later, it meant that as an undergraduate he was familiar with current taxonomic ideas and practices; without this familiarity, Professor Henslow would not have recommended him for the Beagle voyage.

According to Howard S. Reed (1942, 3), “among the events of the nineteenth century which indicated the impetus given to biological studies by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) none was more significant than the rise of international congresses.” Indeed, international congresses were a “symbol of the new freedom that science found after the emergence of the great ideas presented by Darwin.” For the botanical sciences, the introduction of Darwin’s theory of descent with modification created new challenges and fostered key developments that forever altered its practices. The world was expectant of new discoveries, the integration of ideas, the unification and simplification of terminologies, improvements in record keeping and documentation, and frequent international gatherings to present ongoing or novel programs of research to the larger community of botanists (see Reed 1942). This essay examines key movements and figures in the botanical sciences from the years between the 1880s and the 1920s, highlighting the impact of Darwin on the botanical sciences.

Darwin’s Botany by 1880

Botany provided key evidence to support Charles Darwin’s argument for descent with modification in the Origin of Species (1859), stemming from botanical experiments and observations by Darwin himself, as well as research from plant breeders such as T. A. Knight, plant distribution information from the Candolles, and advice from Joseph Dalton Hooker (Morton 1981, 415). Once the Origin of Species was completed in 1859, Darwin’s attentions were focused increasingly on botanical subjects, including publications on the fertilization of orchids (1862), climbing plants (1865), insectivorous plants (1875), fertilization (1876), flowers on plants of the same species (1877), and in 1880 the power of movement in plants.

Charles Darwin’s position on the subject of heredity is not the easiest of tasks to establish. Not only was he working on the subject in the shadow of Lamarck’s well-known version of the inheritance of acquired characters, but his own views were crucially shaped by what to him were the more important elements in the mechanism he was formulating for the transmutation of species. He never wrote a book specifically on heredity. In his Origin of Species there is not even a chapter so entitled. How unlike his cousin Francis Galton, who was to write several books on the subject, and the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who introduced to British biologists the term “heredity” in chapter 8 of his Principles of Biology (1864, vol. 1). Compare this with Darwin’s treatment of variation. This topic is the subject of three chapters of the Origin – the first, second, and fifth. Six years later Darwin published his magnum opus, the two-volume Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Here variation is the theme, but this time three chapters are included on heredity: chapter 12 on inheritance, 13 on reversion, and 14 on fixedness of character. Related topics are in chapter 17 on effects of crossing and 19 on hybridism. Of the remaining twenty-five chapters, one is given to his hypothesis of pangenesis, this being Darwin’s attempt at a hypothesis that brings together heredity, variation, and other aspects of the broad field of “generation.”

As for manuscripts, we find in his Transmutation Notebooks beginning in 1837 frequent notes of sources on inheritance, and his discussion of these sources can be found in the chapters on variation in the Origin. The nature of heredity was evidently of considerable concern to him from the early notebooks right on to pangenesis in 1868. How, then, are we to understand Darwin’s study and theorizing on heredity in relation to his work as an evolutionist? Was it a “subfield” that he explored “more with an eye to formulating evolutionary explanations than to solving the internal problems of the field” (Glick and Kohn 1996, 47)? If so, we may be able to identify ways in which he exploited and interpreted selected data in his efforts to find a viable hypothesis for the transmutation of species. For if species are to evolve, variations not only must occur but must be heritable, and the strength of that heritability must be lasting.

As Darwin’s readers have often noted, he was enthusiastic about the explanatory reach of his theory. Everyone knows of Darwin’s promissory note in the Origin (1859, 448): “In the distant future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.” Of course, evolutionary approaches to psychology have been prevalent for some time now; however, theorists from philosophy and the sciences have wondered if knowledge itself – understood as a state of mind, to be explained in scientific terms – might also be approached from the perspective of an evolutionarily informed psychology. This essay gives a selective overview of some of the projects we might collect under the heading of “evolutionary epistemology” and of the likely limits to using evolution to shed light on what knowledge is and how much of it we have.

One of the best-known essays on Darwin’s broader impact is John Dewey’s “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” originally delivered as a lecture in 1909. Darwin taught us that species were malleable, ephemeral; that there was no hard-and-fast distinction between good species and mere varieties; and that we should expect no rigorous answer to be had to the questions of when, precisely, a new species has been created or what sort of a thing a species is (Fig. 56.1). As Dewey (1910, 5) notes near the beginning of his essay,

It is often felt that Darwin’s views on ethics betray his great contributions to science. When he makes comments about women and the Irish and others, he reveals all of the prejudices of his Victorian class. Even worse, he is committed to a form of Spencerian evolutionary ethics, somewhat misnamed “social Darwinism.” However, properly understood, Darwin on morality is much richer and more rewarding than in this general perception. To see this, we must go back well beyond the Descent of Man, published in 1871, and usually the only source to which people refer. While recognizing that Darwin’s genius is more than just the sum of its parts, for full understanding we must look at his family background and education as well as other sources.

The Early Years (1809–1836)

On his father’s side, Charles Darwin came from a medical family. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) was a well-known physician. He was also a poet and inventor, a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group of businessmen and industrialists that included Joseph Priestley (the chemist) and James Watt (the inventor). On his mother’s side, Darwin came from a family of industrialists, for his grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), another member of the Lunar Society, who founded the great pottery factory famous for its ceramics and porcelain. Both sides of Darwin’s heritage were socially concerned and liberal, and members of the family (the Wedgwoods particularly) were in close contact with British intellectual life. Darwin’s mother, Susannah, knew the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance. Particularly distinctive of both the Darwins’ and the Wedgwoods’ social concerns was a strong commitment to the abolition of slavery. Indeed, Erasmus Darwin wrote poetry condemning slavery, and Josiah Wedgewood financed the Sierra Leone Company, which was established to create a homeland in West Africa for liberated slaves.

In one original formulation, the term Protestant identified those “protesting” or asserting the basics of Christian belief as discerned in the Bible and in the face of perceived distortions. “The Bible alone” (sola scriptura) quickly became a rallying cry for different kinds of religious agendas and political causes. In a more radical guise, it also made individual believers the final arbiters of religious truth. One consequence of this unstable mix of biblicism and individualism has been the proliferation of Protestant denominations. While many have retained a firm commitment to the Bible as their final authority others, particularly since the rise of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century, have given increasing priority to reason, experience, or individual conscience. Such diversity makes a discussion of the relations between Protestantism and Darwin at once problematic and absorbing. What we manifestly do not have is a single relationship between a well-defined religious movement and a fixed set of scientific or philosophical ideas (Figs. 58.1 and 58.2).

This complexity is indicated here by looking at a sample set of theologians and thinkers from Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Dutch and Swiss Reformed denominations. This denominational diversity alerts us to the range of views included within Protestantism but also points to Protestant perspectives not explored here (on Quakers, for example, see Cantor 2005; and for wide-ranging surveys, see J. R. Moore 1979; Livingstone 1984; and J. H. Roberts 1988). Of course, denominational affiliations do not map neatly onto other ways of registering diversity within Protestantism. More conservative or evangelical and more liberal or progressive versions of Protestantism cut across denominational lines. While it is true at some general level that most evangelicals have been more hostile to Darwin than liberal Protestants, this claim masks a messier history. In the end, no register of Protestant diversity provides a straightforward basis for predicting responses to Darwin (on this, see Livingstone 1992; J. H. Roberts 1999; and J. R. Moore 2001).

Between 1851 and 1855, Darwin published a series of four monographs on the cirripedes (barnacles), two on the living Cirripedia (1852, 1854) and two on fossil Cirripedia (1851, 1855). This study consumed eight years of his life, from 1846 to 1854. Sandwiched between penning early drafts of his species theory in 1842 and 1844 (Darwin 1909) and the publication of Origin of Species in 1859, the barnacle monographs have been interpreted as delaying Darwin’s work on his theory of evolution. It is clear, however, that the study of the barnacles complemented Darwin’s earlier preoccupation with invertebrate biology and served to bolster his confidence in his species theory (Sloan 1985; A. C. Love 2002). He gained from this study clarity on points important to his evolutionary theory (the significance of variation, homology, and embryology as keys to affinity, change of function, and the evolution of novelty), as well as significant empirical support that would feature in Origin. In addition, his receipt of the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1853, largely on the basis of his first barnacle volume, gained him widespread recognition as a naturalist of high standing. Coupled with his earlier geological studies, the barnacle monographs reinforced Darwin’s scientific reputation. His credentials were thus impeccable prior to publishing a theory of evolution that would attract protracted and vociferous criticism among naturalists and laymen alike.

To be sure, Darwin’s barnacle monograph was a significant achievement in its own right. Indeed, despite some errors in interpretation, it remains an important work in cirripede morphology and systematics to this day (Southward 1987; Newman 1987, 4). Certainly it was solidly within the tradition of mid-nineteenth-century natural history. Taxonomy – the grouping and classification of organisms – was a major preoccupation of nineteenth-century naturalists. Botanists and zoologists, following the model set by Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) (1707–78), had long strived to catalog nature’s vast array of species, exponentially expanded in the early nineteenth century by the voyages of exploration such as that of the Beagle. Naturalists thus employed a hierarchical approach of dividing plant and animal kingdoms into rational categories – orders, classes, genera, and species – using the Linnaean binomial system of naming the genus and species (R. A. Richards 2009). But the aim was not simply to turn the natural world into a museum. Taxonomy formed a prominent pillar within the particularly British tradition of natural theology – a way to illustrate in the “Great Chain of Being” the order of nature reflecting the design of the Creator.

In his On the Origin of Species, Darwin proclaimed that natural selection was the main, but not exclusive mechanism of change. Alongside natural selection, based on the struggle to survive, was sexual selection, based on the struggle to reproduce. Twelve years later, in his two-volume Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin focused on sexual selection, devoting part of the first volume and the entire second volume to sexual selection, not just in humans but across biodiversity. He used sexual selection to explain traits not easily explained by natural selection. How, for instance, could natural selection form the peacock’s extravagant tail when that tail seemed to be a liability in avoiding predators in the struggle for existence? Perhaps the peacock’s tail was instead a way to charm female peahens in the struggle for a mate. The evolutionists who came after Darwin were less inclined to give female choice such an important role, but in the past fifty years there has been a renaissance, and sexual selection now enjoys the enthusiastic support of many who work in the biological and human sciences. It is currently used to explain even more than Darwin had imagined.

Darwin’s interest in sexual selection long predated his Origin. In his “Sketch of 1842,” he included a passage on sexual selection contrasting it with natural selection (Darwin 1909, 10). This passage reappeared in a slightly modified form in his “Essay of 1844”:

A similar passage was included in the brief and first public statement of his views – the extract of his “big species book” read before the Linnaean Society along with Alfred R. Wallace’s paper in 1858 (Darwin and Wallace 1858, 50).

Evolution is a child of the Enlightenment. For the Greeks, ongoing organic change was simply ruled out by the design-like nature of organisms (Sedley 2008). They must be understood in terms of what Aristotle called “final causes.” The eye is for seeing, the hand is for grasping. The Greeks could not see how this intricate, purposeful complexity could have come about by blind law, and so they denied the possibility of what Charles Darwin called “descent with modification.” This fixity was reinforced when Christianity appeared and when the new religion decided to take on board what Thomas Carlyle called “Jewish old clothes.” It was by no means obvious to the early members of the church that they had to adopt the Old Testament as canonical – it was after all the record of a group who had brought on the death of the Christian Savior. However, particularly under the influence of Saint Augustine (ca. 400 c.e.), it was appreciated that making sense of Christian drama demanded the background of the Jewish history, and so the early chapters of Genesis became an integral foundation of the Christian religion.

This happy fusion of Greek philosophy and Jewish religion lasted for more than fifteen hundred years. The earth was young, organisms were created by divine fiat, humans (just one pair) came last, and shortly thereafter almost everything was wiped out by a worldwide flood. As we move from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, various factors acted to break the stranglehold of this vision. First there was the rise of science: in the physical sciences there arose thoughts that perhaps origins could be explained naturally; in the earth sciences, suspicions that so complex an entity as the globe could not be quite as young as once suspected. Then there were the pressures from philosophy and religion. The great French philosopher René Descartes lived and died a practicing Catholic. But his Meditations introduced the idea of a malignant being that deceives us all, and although Descartes himself thought he had contained this being, others were not quite so sure. Even more corrosive was both the Reformation (with at least two variants of Western Christianity, why should one be true and not the other?) and the discovery of non-Christian faiths in the East (who is to say that Buddhists or Confucians are completely wrong in their ignorance of the Christian story?).

Though it would be hard to consider him a botanist in the strict sense of the term, Charles Darwin used plants in at least three interrelated ways: in his thinking about evolution, in his own researches, and in his professional life as a whole. By the end of his long and productive career, he had completed no fewer than six books, published between 1862 and 1880, exclusively devoted to botanical subjects, in addition to botanical articles published in the weekly Gardner’s Chronicle and journals like the Agricultural Gazette (Ornduff 1984; Browne 2003; Ayres 2008; Kohn 2008). Even his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, which drew on examples from as many types of living organisms as Darwin could find, relied heavily on plant examples to ground his famous argument (Smocovitis 2009). In their habits, mating systems, morphological structures, adaptations, distribution patterns, and even behavior, plants provided some of the best evidence in support of his theory of descent with modification by means of natural selection. After 1860, in fact, Darwin turned increasingly to botanical subjects of research.

Darwin’s Botanical Work

Darwin’s botanical works were voluminous and impressive, to be sure, but his contributions remained underappreciated or incompletely understood, until the second half of the twentieth century. This was due to several reasons. For one thing, Darwin was taxonomically promiscuous, flitting from organism to organism as his curiosity dictated or in search of appropriate examples in support of a generalizable theory of evolution. He lacked the kind of single-minded devotion to plants (or, indeed, to any one organismic system, let alone to a taxonomic group) that characterized contemporaries like Asa Gray and Joseph Hooker, both of whom were renowned in their day as systematic botanists. Darwin’s methodology, furthermore, lacked the kind of experimental rigor that was increasingly associated with late nineteenth-century botanical sciences generally and the German export of the “new” botany in particular, which stressed laboratory practice and relied heavily on microscopy and other instrumentation.

In England, the month of March 1838 brought with it an early-spring chill. At this time at the London Zoo, Jenny the orangutan was quartered inside the Giraffe House, a location heated to a degree appropriate for a tropical ape. Into Jenny’s cage one day walked a man, age twenty-nine and two years back home in England after participating in a naturalist’s dream, a five-year, seagoing scientific expedition during which he observed, studied, and collected specimens of the world’s fauna.

The man, of course, was Charles Darwin. Darwin was, on that spring day, twenty-one years away from publishing a book on evolution, and thirty-three years away from committing to paper his thoughts on human evolution (Zimmer 2007). He was already keenly curious, though, about behavior of nonhuman primates. Darwin “watched Jenny gaze at herself in a mirror. She used bits of straw like tools…. Others might believe they were vastly different from an orangutan, but Darwin didn’t.” In a letter to his sister, Darwin even concluded that Jenny “certainly understood every word” of the zookeeper’s language directed at her (Zimmer 2007, 5).