The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Though there is some evidence that they can deceive one another, chimpanzees generally hold nothing back. They scratch, fart, shit, and do everything else in full view. When they are tickled, they grin; when they are angry, they bear their fangs and roar; when they are excited or threatened, they jump up and down and scream. When the female is ovulating, she shows it vividly for all to see. When the male is aroused, he spreads his legs and displays his erection. They copulate openly, with everyone looking on and often with their children climbing over them. This is what it means to be shameless, or rather to exist in a world where shame does not exist.

  According to Genesis, before they had eaten the forbidden fruit, the first humans existed precisely in such a world. Of course, the Genesis story did not depict that existence in any detail, let alone in terms that made it resemble the lives of our chimpanzee cousins. All the text says is that “they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Most Christian commentators speculated that their copulation would have been brief—perhaps no more than the apes’ six seconds—and intended exclusively for reproduction. St. Augustine added that it would have certainly taken place openly in the presence of others, including offspring. But despite their mania for filling in the blank spaces in the biblical narrative, the theologians never fully imagined what it would be like to live lives that resemble ours minus any touch of shame.

  Before they violated the divine interdict, there was another crucial feature of life for the first humans: they had not eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The biblical contrast is not between a life governed by a moral code and a wild, lawless life. No, the contrast in Genesis is between a life lived with knowledge of good and evil—presumably, an awareness of the symbolic categories themselves and of the difference between them—and a life lived without such knowledge. The Bible clearly expects that its readers possess an understanding of what good and evil are, for we are all heirs to the humans who ate from the tree. But what it was like to be Adam and Eve before they ate from the tree—that is, what it was like to be humans without the knowledge of good and evil—is much less clear. Of course, we could say that any animal would serve as a model: a cat or a lobster will do. But Adam and Eve in the Garden were not any animal; they were our progenitors. Being perfectly innocent, as we are not, they could not have been identical to us, but they were still like us.

  As virtually everyone has recognized from ancient times to the present, apes are not identical to us, but they are very much like us. The resemblance is startling. Yet they do not possess the knowledge of good and evil. This does not mean that they live in the state of nature that the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously characterized as “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” The lives of chimpanzees are neither solitary nor short, and nasty is in the eye of the beholder. They are complex social beings; they solve problems; they use tools; they have distinct and varied personalities; they often survive to what, by the standards of most animals, is a ripe old age. But, as far as we can tell, their primal ancestors never ate from the fatal tree. Though they signal to one another, for example when danger is near, they do not possess symbolic concepts like good and evil. Chimpanzees are neither moral nor immoral; they are amoral.

  A primatologist wrote a celebrated book in the early 1980s that likened chimpanzee behavior—their shifting alliances, betrayals, bribes, and punishments—to Machiavellian politics. But in The Prince Machiavelli assumed that politicians fully understood what was good and what was evil; the survivors among them simply understood when it was necessary to violate their moral code. “Thus it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needed to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities” (The Prince, chap. 18). Chimpanzees seem to function politically without the need for a conceptual understanding of either fidelity or betrayal, domination or submission.

  For centuries, theologians—all men, of course—brooded uneasily about God’s curse on Eve: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Did not the husband, they asked, also rule over the wife in Paradise before the Fall? Yes, most of them reassured themselves: the man would always have ruled over the woman, for that was the natural order of things. But before eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the woman did not understand that she was being dominated; after her transgression, she did understand, and she bitterly resented it. Chimpanzee sexual relations then are something like the theologian’s dream of life before the Fall. The females are dominated, but they lack any concept of domination.

  Chimpanzee females scream when they are hit, but there is no evidence that they dream it should or could somehow be otherwise. So too young males form raiding parties to murder chimpanzees from neighboring groups, but they lack the concept of murder. If one of her children dies, a mother may carry it about for a while, as if she were in mourning, but chimpanzees do not have an abstract notion of death, just as they cherish and nurture without having the words for love and mothering. This does not mean that all their actions are purely instinctual. The young are highly observant, learning how to behave by watching the adults, and they may even rehearse their roles. Researchers note that juvenile males break off sticks and practice hitting adult females with them, while juvenile females with sticks are more likely to carry them as if they were babies. None of this behavior is conceptual or self-conscious, for chimpanzees have no language in which to formulate ideas, but it would be absurd to regard them as automata.

  We should be forever grateful to them. They enable us to see for ourselves what the Genesis origin story might have actually looked like, had it been real. Closely resembling us, they show us what it is to live without the knowledge of good and evil, just as they live without shame and without understanding that they are destined to die. They are still in Paradise.

  Of course, very few humans in their right mind think that the life apes live in the forest is the life humans would actually want for themselves in Paradise. But that is because we construct our idea of Paradise from notions that we derive from our knowledge of good and evil. We are already fallen; they are not.

  Medieval thinkers, reflecting on the striking resemblance of apes to humans, came to the opposite conclusion: they believed that simians too must have fallen, but even lower in the scale of being than we have. In Paradise, Adam and Eve were incomparably beautiful and huge in size. Now because of the legacy of sin, we have lost much of the beauty as well as the bulk of the first humans. The loss has been progressive: the earliest patriarchs and matriarchs retained some of the splendor of the first humans, but it is now almost entirely gone. “The fairest women compared with Sarah are as apes compared with a human being,” an ancient commentator sadly remarked, and compared with Eve, Sarah too resembled an ape. Apes, of course, are the gold standard of human ugliness.

  One legend held that at some point after the expulsion from the Garden, God visited Eve and asked her how many children she had. The truth is that she had a great many, but because she was afraid that the number of her offspring would indicate that she took too much pleasure in sex, she lied and only showed the Lord a few of them. God was not deceived: to punish her, He turned the children she had concealed into apes. Accordingly, apes were widely used in the Middle Ages as symbols not merely of ugliness but of carnal desire; they displayed in an exaggerated form the vice that contributed to our own fall. When in medieval paintings Adam and Eve stand by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, an ape often lurks somewhere nearby.

  It was only in the nineteenth century that the view decisively changed. The pivotal moment came at Oxford in 1860 when Darwin’s friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley engaged in a famous debate with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. The bishop capped his sardonic refutation of evolutionary theory by turning to his opponent and wryly asking, “Is it on your grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that you claim descent
from the apes?” Huxley slowly rose and said that while he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor, he would be ashamed to be connected to a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. Huxley’s voice did not carry through the large room, but everyone understood his words to mean “I would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.” A woman in the audience fainted.

  It was Darwin’s position that ultimately prevailed in the modern scientific account of human origins. No one any longer believes that apes are degenerate versions of humans, metamorphosed as punishment for lust or idleness. The fossil evidence gathered now for many decades and still emerging in spectacular finds provides overwhelming evidence that our remote ancestors were ape-like creatures who somehow contrived to walk on two feet. How any of them survived, let alone flourished, is still not clear. As scientists have shown beyond a reasonable doubt, they were not the happy product of a once-and-for-all creation, destined from the beginning to be masters of the universe. They were a work-in-progress, over an unimaginably long time. A biologist writes that one key period of evolutionary ferment, long before the emergence of modern humans, was between 2.5 and 2 million years ago. He is attempting to narrow down the crucial time period, and so in a way he does. But he is talking about 500,000 years. All of recorded human history, as far back as we can get, is only about 5,000 years.

  Over the course of this immense time span, our species evolved from diminutive, small-brained bipeds eating fruit, digging for tubers, and catching the occasional lizard to what we are now: animals, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, who can make promises. In a provocative book published in 1887, the German philosopher argued that the crucial mechanism for the transformation of amoral ape-like creatures into moral human beings was pain—repeated, remorseless infliction of pain. Punishment was the means by which the healthy, exuberant, violent energies of the dominant males—Nietzsche called them “the blond beasts”—were gradually tamed. In the process, everything that those who had once ruled the earth regarded as good—the ruthless satisfaction of appetite, the swaggering insolence, the reckless blend of rapine and largesse, the unrestrained will to be the alpha male—was rebranded as evil. The mass of women and male weaklings who had once been gleefully dominated by the blond beasts managed to proclaim their values of self-sacrifice, discipline, and pious fear as good. The transformation—Nietzsche termed it a “transvaluation of values”—was in effect a successful slave revolt. It must have been led, he thought, by an extremely clever priestly caste seething with resentment. He identified this caste with the Jews and declared that their culminating invention, in celebrating diseased suffering over amoral health, was Jesus, the new Adam.

  This sinister philosophical parable points to questions whose answers lie still in the sphere of wild speculation: given the fact that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and modern humans (Homo sapiens) share 96 percent of the same genes, how did it actually happen? What triggered the fantastically complex suite of features—long legs, hands with short fingers, feet unable to grasp things, prolonged childhood dependency, large brain size, cooperative social existence, capacity for symbolic thought, and many more—that characterize humans? How did we acquire language, religious beliefs, origin stories? Where did our moral conscience come from? And what do we still share with chimpanzees as an inheritance from the Last Common Ancestor?

  Scientific interest has been drawn in recent years to bonobos, found in the wild in only a single area of Central Africa. At some point in the relatively recent past, as measured by evolutionary time, a group of chimpanzees became isolated south of the Congo River and formed their own world. Over time, while they retained many behavioral characteristics of common chimpanzees, their social life began to change. Researchers observe that males continue to be competitive with one another, but their aggression now rarely turns against the females, who enjoy greatly increased rank and status. Forming intense bonds with one another, by acting together the females are able to dominate most of the males. Sexual activity is greatly heightened. The females show signs of being in heat even when they are not fertile, so that copulation is no longer exclusively linked to reproduction. Bonobos engage in fellatio; there is frequent male-male and female-female sexuality; and, perhaps most remarkably, encounters with neighboring groups lead not to violence but to intercourse. Behavior then that seemed constitutive of being a chimpanzee proved amenable, with isolation, the right environment, and enough time, to radical change.

  Something of the same kind may account for the way in which our species bafflingly combines characteristics found in both chimpanzees and bonobos and has interlaced these together with entirely new features. While managing to retain a penchant for intense competition for rank, group hunting, xenophobic violence, and a strong male impulse to dominate females, we have at the same time developed pervasive nonreproductive sexuality, friendship, cooperation, and the potential for egalitarianism and the peaceful embracing of other groups. To all of these we have added the fathomless complexities of toolmaking, art-making, language, and the capacity to reason. Our grasp of the way this came about is still at an early stage, and it is safe to say that in the years to come there will be both steady advances and spectacular surprises.

  But what the current scientific understanding still lacks—and may never achieve or even want—is the focus on moral choice that lies at the heart of the Adam and Eve story. The first humans in the biblical account were free to observe or to violate the divine prohibition: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” It is this transgression—a deliberate action, not an impersonal, mechanistic process of random genetic mutation and natural selection—that determined the shape of our lives. The Adam and Eve story insists that our fate, at least at the beginning of time, was our own responsibility. Millions of people in the world, including many who grasp the underlying assumptions of modern science, continue to cling to the peculiar satisfaction that the ancient story provides. I do.

  • • •

  WHEN I ARRIVED at the scientific research station in western Uganda, I was not allowed to go out immediately to observe the chimpanzees. Since they are vulnerable to human diseases, there was a quarantine period to determine that I was not infectious. With time on my hands, I went to Anglican services on Sunday morning in nearby Fort Portal. Uganda is an overwhelmingly Christian country, roughly divided between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, with a small but growing number of Pentecostals. In my application to visit the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, I had initially written that I was eager to observe the modern scientific origin story that has replaced the ancient biblical one, but if it was couched in these terms, friends who had worked there told me, the application would almost certainly be rejected. Ugandan authorities do not regard chimpanzee research as the alternative to their religious faith.

  In church—which happened to be called St. Stephen’s—the sermon delivered by the priest, the Reverend Happy Sam Araali, centered on the creation story. (He must have been tipped off that I was coming.) We can dig wells, he said, but only God can create lakes and seas. That is a sign of how powerful God is, and it should make us respect him, since He can do things that are so much bigger and more difficult than anything we can do. So too with the creation of man. We can draw figures on a wall and confer upon them a certain vividness, Reverend Happy told the congregation, but only God could create the first humans and make them live by breathing the breath of life into their nostrils.

  On the ride back to the field station, I asked the field assistant who had accompanied me whether he believed that the story of Adam and Eve was the literal truth. Yes, he did, he assured me; he was a good Christian. Then what did he make of the notion that we were closely related to chimpanzees? He laughed—“A very difficult problem,” he said—and then we both fell silent. The next day, when we were out in t
he forest observing the Edenic scene of grooming and Eslom’s mate-guarding, we did not pursue the subject.

  The alpha male’s cleaving to Bubbles set the stage for a scene I witnessed on the following morning that conjured up Genesis for me still more intensely. We were at breakfast at the camp when Melissa noticed a shadow near the entrance to the compound. At first she thought it was an elephant, but she realized quickly that it was a chimpanzee, and with the skill shared by all the scientists and field assistants, she immediately identified him as the beta male, Lanjo. We hurried down to see why he had come so uncharacteristically close to the human settlement.

  He was sitting in a small patch of grass and leaves looking increasingly impatient. From time to time he slapped the ground noisily with his feet or hands. (I realized with a start where we get the otherwise inexplicable impulse to stamp our feet in frustration.) Then after ruffling the leaves, dragging a stick across the ground, and making a low noise, he reached out and gave a vine a violent shake. At last, the source of his impatience appeared: from out of the thick bush came a very uneasy female, nineteen-year-old Leona, looking over her shoulder and carrying her young child Lily. What had happened, the field assistant explained, was that Lanjo must have taken advantage of Eslom’s mate-guarding preoccupation to lure away Leona, who was also showing signs of being in heat, though not as vividly as Bubbles. They had slipped off and embarked on what the scientists call a consort, a kind of honeymoon away from the group and the jealous gaze of the dominant male. They would be beaten if they were caught; hence perhaps Leona’s anxiety and Lanjo’s cunning decision to come near the human settlement, where the group rarely ventures.

  Alone at last, Lanjo and Leona shared a moment of chimpanzee tenderness: they gently touched rumps. With Lily clinging to her back, Leona bent over and allowed Lanjo to examine her vulva with his finger which he then held to his nose and sniffed. But it was not just for the six-second copulation that they were together. Through violating the will of the supreme ruler and risking punishment, they had become a couple. They looked around the clearing and glanced quickly at us. Then, set on continuing their consort, they plunged together into the dense thicket where, set on continuing our spying, we struggled to follow. The world was all before them.