One would imagine such a question would not be asked. Clearly if the ape was descended from man, instead of its being evolution, that is, the process of development, it would be contrariwise, a process of degeneration. And yet this is what Professor F. Wood-Jones, Professor of Anatomy at the University of London, believes. He is a thorough-going devolutionist. He says of Huxley's belief that man, the anthropoid apes, the monkeys, the lemurs, and the pronograde quadrupedal mammals, represented a true evolutionary series:- "No attentive student of anatomy can possibly believe this to be true."
But he goes further than throwing Huxley's belief overboard. He says:- "It is difficult to imagine how a being, whose body is replete with features of basal mammalian simplicity, can have sprung from any of those animals in which so much of this simplicity has been lost. It becomes impossible to picture man as being descended from any form at all like the recent monkeys or anthropoid apes, or from their fossil representatives " (p. 34).
Again the same writer says:- " If a man is a more primitive mammal than are the monkeys and apes, and if he undoubtedly belongs to their phylum [a primary division, of organisms], then it follows that, far from being a descendant of the apes he may be looked upon as their ancestor.... Indeed, from the point of anatomy I conceive it to be impossible to take any other view " (p. 39).
Professor Wood-Jones quotes Professor Boule of Paris, Professor A. W. Hubrecht and Professor Klaatsch in support of his views.
Dr. James G. Walsh, professor of psychology at Cathedral College, New York, while addressing the City Club, Boston, in 1916, said:- " I want to suggest to you that the monkey is the degeneration of man, rather than that man is evolved from the monkey."
Nor is this theory a modern one. Dr. A. C. Dixon in " The Origin of Life " says:—" Plato said to those Greek philosophers who were promulgating Darwinism from 300 to 700 years before Christ: You gentleman are mistaken; man did not evolve from the beast, but man began equal with the gods, and the beast evolved from him.' Plato's teaching was, not that man was an IMPROVED monkey,, but that the monkey was a DEGENERATE man (p. 8).
Imagine going to the Zoo with two scientists. You are a poor layman, so ignorant that the word hypothesis or theory vastly impresses you, and you feel like a worm in the presence of men, who claim to be scientific. One scientist points with solemnity at an anthropoid ape, and says in an awe-struck whisper, " Behold your ancestor!" With what reverence your eyes rest upon the creature to whom you are beholden for your very being. But the other scientist says, " See that frisky mischievous ape," pointing to the same animal, " that is your descendant. You are responsible for its being."
You cannot believe both these scientists. One must be wrong—both may be wrong, and in our judgment are. You may well ponder whether they have any claim to be called scientists. True science does not build on hypotheses nor theories, but on facts.