Are we descended from monkeys or from the sea? – Symbolic parallels between two theories of 18th-century evolutionary thought

Abstract

In this analysis, we set out to examine the question that preoccupied 18th-century man: did man come from the ape or from the sea? To address this question, which allows for a parallel examination of evolutionary theories, we wish to touch only remotely on a strictly religious approach, but rather to use the literary imprints and evolutionary theories of the Age of Enlightenment as a basis for our reflections, such as the birth of terrestrial animals in seawater or the thought processes of naturalists who, on the basis of similar physiognomic characteristics, proposed that apes were the ancestors of man. Our work relies mainly on the co-presence of the seawater and the ape motif in the texts of 18th-century authors, through examples borrowed from Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, and Buffon to Fabricius' hydro-technological approach. In doing so, we will attempt to explore whether the references to the motifs of the monkey and the sea reveal a link between the two evolutionary schools of thought of the Enlightenment.