This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Language of the Genes given by Steve Jones was originally broadcast in 1991.

1906 was a successful year for the Bronx Zoo.

A new exhibit was pulling in the crowds.

An African pygmy, Oter Benga, my name, was in the same cage as a chimpanzee.

The exhibit caused an uproar, not because it was a degrading spectacle,

but because it promoted the idea of evolution, that apes and humans were related.

After a time, Oter Benga was released, partly because of his habit of shooting

arrows at those who mocked him. He moved to Virginia, where he committed suicide a few years later.

The Bronx Zoo view of human evolution was once widespread. It descends from an older idea,

the great chain of being, which sees evolution

as a kind of smooth progress, a seamless transition from the primeval slime to the John

Major government. The different groups of humanity were at different stages. Africans at the bottom,

close to the apes, Asian somewhere in between, and white Europeans, of course, at the bottom, close to the apes, Asian, somewhere in between, and white

Europeans, of course, at the top. This view reached into medicine. Most people have seen

children with Downs syndrome, which is due to an error in their chromosomes. This was called

by its Victorian discoverer, Langdon Down, Mongolism, for what

seemed to him a good scientific reason. These children had slipped a couple of rungs down

the evolutionary ladder to resemble a lower form of human life, the Mongols. Oddly enough, a

Japanese friend once told me that in his country the same condition is called Englishism.

The idea now seems ridiculous, but the theory that races are biologically different has a long and ignoble history

which has brought misery and death in its wake.

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