By the beginning of the 21st century many of the mysteries of our world and science have been discovered. We even know what the sun and most of the sun’s planets are made of. We have been to the moon and brought back samples of its surface. Computers have been able to revel mysteries of physics and science. Space probes and telescopes have helped us explore distant galaxies and enabled us to peer further back into the birth of the universe.
DNA profiling has given us tools to explore the origins of animals and plants to realms that Darwin could only dream of. Yet the origins one animal is still clouded in mystery, this creature is ourselves – Homo sapiens.
In 1942 the German pathologist Max Westenhofer discussed various human characteristics such as hairlessness, subcutaneous fat, direction of body hair that could have derived from an aquatic past. Westenhofer unfortunately later abandoned the concept.
Independently of Westenhofer’s writings, the English marine biologist Alister Hardy had since 1930 also speculated that humans may have had ancestors more aquatic than previously imagined, although his work, unlike Westenhofer’s, was firmly established on Darwinian consensus. On the advice of colleagues , Hardy delayed presenting his threories for approximately thirty years. After had been elected to the Royal Society and knighted for his contributions to marine biology Hardy finally made his views public in a speech to the British Sub-Aqua Club in Brighton in 1960. The national press reported Hardy’s sensational presentations of his ideas. In an article in the New Scientist Hardy explained his views more fully: ” My thesis is that a branch of primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the sea-shores and hunt for food, shellfish, sea-urchins etc. in the shallow waters off the coast.’ Hardy’s ideas were generally ignored by the scientific community after the article was published
Earth Scientists, including anthropologists and palaeontologists did indeed pour scorn on the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Anthropologist John D. Hawks wrote that it is fair to categorize the AAH as pseudoscience because of the social factors that inform it, particularly the personality-led nature of the hypothesis and the unscientific approach of its adherents. Physical anthropologist Eugenie Scott has described the aquatic ape hypothesis as an instance of “crank anthropology” akin to other pseudoscientific ideas in anthropology such as alien-human interbreeding and Bigfoot. One of the theory’s few supporters was Elaine Morgan, who in her turn was equally ridiculed, partly because her academic qualifications were in literature and not in science, and partly because some reviewers dismissed her work ‘the Decent of Woman’ as an attempt to portray human evolution in feminist terms. In doing so the carefully argued support for Sir Alister Hardy’s theory and Elaine’s further development of the hypothesis was overlooked. Further research on the subject by Elaine Morgan produced books such as ‘ The Aquatic Ape’, ‘The Decent of the Child’, and “The Scars of Evolution”. Slowly but surely Sir Alister Hardy’s theories are being advanced, though not yet firmly established as fact instead of theory by the scientific establishment, but the time will come.
In much the same way as Thomas Huxley’s strong support for Darwin’s theories earned him the title of “Darwins Bulldog”, Morgan became “Hardy’s Bulldog”. However much of Morgan’s work was not acknowledged because of her lack of a scientific education, but throughout history many great scientific discoveries and inventions were made by geniuses who had not had a formal education in the scientific discipline for which they became famous, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Issac Newton, Gregor Mendel and remarkable people such as James Croll.
| James Croll of Andrews University in Glasgow (which became the University of Strathclyde) submitted learned papers on physics and astronomy from the university, on university headed paper before it was discovered that he was the university janitor who studied in the college libraries in the evenings after his days work. Croll went on to become a Fellow of the Royal Society. |
As the Church controlled both of England’s only two universities in early modern England, Oxford and Cambridge, until Durham was formed in 1832, all graduates were destined for the Church or law, so all scientists and people of an investigative and enquiring mind were “amateurs’. One of the greatest being Leonardo da Vinci, an eccentric and innovative genius on many levels, art, sculpture, engineering, science, draughtsmanship and apart from art all self taught.
Da Vinci’s main source income as an artist came from the Church, so many of his experiments had to be carefully handled, none more than his researches in geology. Leonardo rejected the prevailing reason for fossils and shells being on mountains as proof of Noah’s Flood. In his private notebooks Leonardo almost correctly observed that there had to be another reason, if the world had been flooded to the mountain tops there would have been nowhere for the water to recede to after the Flood, his logic was that the shells lived on the sea bed, and mountains formed under the sea and gradually raised parts of the sea bed into dry mountains.
All this knowledge from someone in the fifteenth century who was self taught!
Criticism of Sir Alister Hardy, a marine biologist is sometimes levelled at him because he is not a trained palaeontologist. One could reverse this logic, Hardy’s academic critics might be eminent palaeontologists and geologists but it is rather uncharitable of them to criticise a renowned expert of the marine habitat.