Harriet Ritvo brings up studies that I find troubling to believe for example the statement that mermaids actually exist or existed. According to Ritvo’s example of Frank Buckland, he in 1858 analyzed a mermaid who he described as “part monkey and part hake”. This example and the one about a Laotian girl “exhibited in 1883 as Darwin’s missing link” because she was “unusually hairy” and “had prehensile feet and could pout like a chimpanzee” seems like something you’d watch in a 50’s sci-fi/ horror movie, and is therefore why I find it hard to believe. Furthermore, believing in humans being so closely related to animals goes against every Christian thought that has been brainwashed into me as a kid. But then again these Christian teachings are exactly what I have resisted and questioned since learning about evolution. Ritvo has definitely posited interesting theories that I now wish to research. Never the less, I do believe that the scientific facts pertaining to humans relation to chimpanzees is accurate. Darwin said it brilliantly when he stated that he would rather say he descended from a “heroic little monkey, than from a “savage who delights to torture his enemies” (Ritvo, Border Trouble).
