Letters: December 2018

The science which won this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry, as described by Emma Stoye, (Chemistry World, November 2018, p20) is brilliant and fascinating. However it is a pity that the graphic chosen as the lead illustration, and reproduced as the cover picture of the edition, is the misleading cliché of a stepwise progression from chimpanzee to chemist. In many essentially similar forms, the ‘march of progress’ – as the picture is usually called – is surely the most widely recognised popular icon of evolution. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his 1989 book Wonderful Life, this is regrettable for two reasons. One is that we are not descended for chimpanzees – we and they are cousins, descendants of a common ancestor. Second, the picture reinforces the notion that we are evolution’s greatest achievement – or even (perish the thought) that evolution had some kind of ‘aim’, and that was us. That’s not what Darwin meant at all.