1 The artist who drew the earliest “March of Progress” image disagreed with it
My 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 What I discovered in the course of my research, from unpublished letters and other sources, was that the artist who drew the skeletons for Huxley’s book, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, was himself bitterly opposed to evolution.
FLAT FOOTED: In this precursor to the march of progress, the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins embedded an anti-evolutionary message. He drew the gorilla with an unsteady gait to suggest that man did not evolve in a direct line from apes as Darwin and other scientists claimed. Illustration by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, from Huxley, T.H. Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863).
At the time, Darwin’s theory of evolution had only just been introduced: Origin of Species was published in 1859. Huxley was a resolute evolutionist who regarded himself as “Darwin’s bulldog.” Hawkins only agreed to work for him because he needed the money, having two families to support following a bigamous second marriage. As became apparent when they worked together, the two men also disliked each other intensely.
Hawkins nevertheless found ways to surreptitiously introduce his own views into the ascending procession of primate skeletons, particularly in his drawing of the gorilla. This ape totters awkwardly on the sides of its feet, giving the impression that it is more likely to fall over than stride toward humanity. The tottering pose was entirely Hawkins’ creation. The skeleton he drew from, which stood in a museum in London, was placed with its feet flat on the ground, and in anti-evolutionary lectures, Hawkins described gorillas as having “the most waddling gait imaginable.” So this iconic image of evolution actually contains, if you know where to look, clear anti-evolutionary messages.
2 One woman helped keep the controversial “March of Progress” image alive
Between the frontispiece to Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature and “The Road to Homo Sapiens,” depictions of evolution as a gradual ascent from apes to humans were challenged and fell out of favor. In the early 20th century, the iconographic tradition of linear progress was kept alive, pretty much exclusively, by a woman artist who is now almost completely unknown. Even in her own time, Helen Ziska was overworked,
