The Dissent Hidden in an Iconic Scientific Image
1 The artist who drew the earliest “March of Progress” image disagreed with itMy book, Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image, tells the story of an iconic image: the “March of Progress,” which depicts evolution as an ascent from apes to humans. Created by scientists and artists in the mid-1960s, the image, originally called “The Road to Homo Sapiens,” still shapes how evolution is understood today.
The prototype for that image was the frontispiece for Thomas Henry Huxley’s book Man’s Place in Nature, from 1863. It shows a similar series of primates, from gibbon to gorilla, that become successively taller and more erect, culminating in an upright human. Only here, they appear in skeleton form. What I discovered in the course of my research, from unpublished letters an...