Page 82 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism

he last chapter showed how the fossil record re-
moved all of Darwinism's underpinnings. In The
Origin of the Species, Darwin did not touch on the
fossil record as it relates to human origins. But in The Descent
of Man, published 12 years later, he proposed that human be-

ings were the highest rung on the so-called evolutionary lad-
der, and that their nearest ancestors were primates
resembling modern-day apes.
In proposing that human beings and apes were de-
scended from a common ancestor, Darwin had no proof to
back up these claims; he just imagined that there was a family
relationship between human beings and apes, animals that,

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