They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument.



Introduction to the Book of Job


by G.K. Chesterton
....


For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and
watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an
evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most
of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough
anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and
deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a piece of
a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere
near it he found an upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion
some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one creature,
which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost
equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a
complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of
hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary
historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox
or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the
portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing
was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his
head were all numbered No uninformed person looking at its carefully
lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the
portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.
In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual
whose influence and character were familiar to us all. I have just read
a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white inhabitants of
that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by the personal
influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern inhabitants of
Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but I do not
imagine that they need any encouragement from the discovery of a few
highly doubtful bones. Anyhow, those bones are far too few and
fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does
in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if
they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary
connection (a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny),
the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of
any such remains recording that connection at that point. The sincerity
of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a
term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too
strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen
into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They
talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if
one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative
or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or
dining with an undistributed middle.

....

 

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